Content Marketing Today

How I Stumbled upon The Cheapest Way to Drive Traffic to Your Website

Forget Google.  Count on StumbleUpon instead.

Let’s assume there are plenty of reasons for people to go to your website.  You have great content.  Your visitors will learn something important.  You have developed thought leadership in an area that’s critical to your best prospects. 

All that is essential but not enough to make sure that you get a consistent level of traffic to your website, particularly when you’re just starting out.

There is a great social media marketing tool, StumbleUpon, that will drive traffic to any page on your website either free–or for a predictable five cents per visit. In my experience over the past two months, it has served as a reliable source of traffic both to my homepage and to specific articles. 

Thanks to Harry Hoover of My Creative Team whose recent blog inspired me to share my experience with this terrific tool.  If you need web traffic, here’s how to get it.

Unlike Google, where you do your best and hope that you get traffic, StumbleUpon is much more than hit or miss.  You can’t ignore Google as the 8,000,000 pound gorilla but, even if you pay to advertise there, you may not be able to drive traffic affordably to your website.  Even worse, you are unlikely to do well in organic Google search results until you have a lot of traffic.  The question then becomes: how can you drive traffic to your site of affordably before Google recognizes you as a player in your niche?  That’s where StumbleUpon comes in.

How StumbleUpon works for users

The idea is pretty simple.  You sign up for the free service and describe what you are most interested in.  Let’s suppose it’ s content marketing.  You then ’stumble’ using this tool. It attempts to present you with websites that match your interest in content marketing.  You then give each website a thumbs up or thumbs down or no rating at all.  StumbleUpon learns more about what you like the more you use it. You’ll find great sites that might never have come up in a Google search.  I believe it is particularly valuable in areas of interest where you have lots of enthusiasts, such as how to turn raw organic food into something edible. (I know that sounds crazy!)

You can be pretty confident that StumbleUpon is doing a good job because almost 4 1/2 million stumblers are currently subscribed.

How StumbleUpon works for marketers

You have a free choice which you mustn’t overuse and a paid choice that you can use as much as you want. 

The Free Stuff

To get the free benefit, you StumbleUpon your own website or perhaps one or more articles on your website, giving them a thumbs up. You should do this in addition to stumbling upon lots of other people’s websites.  In addition, you are likely to accumulate friends and fans of you and of your content.

This is likely to get you fifty to a hundred visitors from each thumbs up. You can invite friends and colleagues to participate with you and ask them to provide a thumbs up as well.  You can also write brief reviews of why your site or your articles merit a visit. But, if you over promote your own site, you’re likely to be penalized for self-promotion.

The Paid Stuff

Although paid traffic may never be as valuable as organic Google search traffic, the paid visitors you will receive from StumbleUpon are probably as valuable as you would get from Google ad words.  But, here’s the best part.  You pay only five cents per visitor.  Just like Google, you can limit the amount of money you put in the account in the amount of money that you will pay each day. In addition you can limit the number of visits that you want per page. 

Your first step is to select an area of interest to target.  It could be anything from ancient history to industrial design.  You can also limit the age range or the geographic location of Stumblers.  If you have solid content that creates real thought leadership within a special niche, StumbleUpon may well provide an abbondanza of enthusiastic visitors.

As an example, I recently selected my article about Hank the Budweiser Clydesdale Super Bowl ad to promote. In four days, I have received 320 visitors from StumbleUpon. Because visitors can give a thumbs up or thumbs down or no answer, I know that the article got a 90% positive rating.  Even though most Stumblers look only at the page you’re promoting without digging deeper, some will like what they see and do some serious exploration within your website. 

I much prefer paid StumbleUpon traffic to paid Google traffic. It’s both cheaper and more reliable. Perhaps, I wasn’t very good at creating effective advertising on content marketing topics.  But I have never been able to generate much traffic let alone much affordable traffic from Google.  Conversely, I know that I can count on a steady flow of traffic from StumbleUpon.

Give it a try.