Webby freebies - Web designers paradise

StumbleUpon and its incredible power

There are a lot of different social networks out there, and some of them have a huge impact on blogs and their traffic. Some of these are Delicious, Twitter, Digg and StumbleUpon. But this article will only be about StumbleUpon and its great power. These listed items describes what will be discussed in the article.

• How StumbleUpon works
• How to get huge traffic
• Graphics and icons
• Further reading

Let us begin to describe how StumbleUpon works and why you should use this social network if you blog. But do not forget to subscribe to me and I will subscribe to you too.

How StumbleUpon works

StumbleUpon is like many other similar social networking, a place to meet other like-minded people, people with same interests as you. What is special about StumbleUpon, and why I named the title as I did, is that this social networking lets you meet people who have the exact interest as you, and it’s pretty easy to get people to visit your blog / website.

StumbleUpon allows each member to choose one or more categories that he / she is interested in. In my case, I only chose Graphic Design. That way I can use my “Stumble!”-Button to see blogs, blog articles, images, movies and so on which I am interested in.

Once you become a member of StumbleUpon, you can download a toolbar, which you use when you surf the Internet. It looks like this:

If I press the “Stumble!” button I will be redirected to a website that someone else has thumbed up and which is in my category, Graphic Design. In this way, I will come to a web site that someone else surely want me to visit. This gives the publisher more traffic to their website / blog, and I get something interesting to read.

The more people that thumbs up your item, the more Stumblers will see your article. If you press the “I like it!” button, you will save the page you thumbed up on your StumbleUpon profile. If you press the “I like it!” button on your own article and have no friends in your network, no one will probably stumble your article, because no one will notice that you have made a discovery.

My profile

When I started Webby freebies I made a new profile on StumbleUpon, just to have friends who have exactly the same interests as me. So I show you, therefore, how a relatively new profile looks like. Please subscribe to me and I’ll subscribe to you too, and we can share our favorites to each other. In this way, both you and I will grow our social networks on StumbleUpon.

How to get huge traffic

As promised I will now give you my top 10 list on how to do to get extremely high traffic to your blog. Here I list my own experiences from my blog that I run alongside, and other bloggers tips.

1. Start by using StumbleUpon’s service to search through your IM buddies to see if any of them are using StumbleUpon. That way you get easy a lot friends who are probably happy to help you thumb up your articles.
2. Try to find people who like your articles, or perhaps have discovered them. Try then to find profiles that have the same interests as you. Subscribe to them and send a private message to them which tells them that you like their favorites and that you would like to be friends with them. By the way, you are now “friend” with a person on StumbleUpon that you subscribe to and which also subscribes to you.
3. Make sure that the articles you publish has an interesting title. As “The Secret of How to get huge traffic.”
4. Also, make sure you have a button on your blog that remind people that press the “I like it!” button.
5. Thumb up your friends’ items so they do not believe you just use them. Finally, they will only thumb down your articles.
6. Reduce the time it takes to load your blog. Otherwise, users will simply press the “Stumble!” button again.
7. Tag your articles right. Make sure that your articles do not fall under the category of books, if it belongs in Graphic Design.
8. Be an active stumbler. Make sure that no man ever miss you. Stumble as much as possible and as soon as you have time.
9. Use the share function, and the most active stumblers will see that you want your articles stumbled.
10. Use services such as StumbleXchange to get your articles thumbed up.

Graphics and icons

It is important that you also optimize your blog using nice buttons or other graphics so that people can more easily share your articles. And since this is a blog for freebies, this part is one of the most important parts of this article.

I do not know if you have seen it but I did an article a while ago that is totally focused on icons for social networking. That post includes those really cool icon sets and many other:

Socialize Icons

You can download this icon set over here.

Icons Cloud

You can download this icon set over here.

Set of social icons

You can download this icon set over here.

Ultimate collection of social networking icons

These three icon sets are just a few of the many listed in this article I did a while ago. Check out the article so that you have a lot of icon sets to choose from.

When I wrote this “utlimate” article, I was quite happy with it, but now so here a little later I noticed that I’ve missed a lot of social network icon sets. So I thought, why not add some new icon sets from 2010 and a lot I missed before.

Social media icons

You can download this icon set over here.

Blue Jelly Social Media Icons

You can download this icon set over here.

Function App free social media icons

You can download this icon set over here.

Glossy Waxed Wood Social Networking Icons

You can download this icon set over here.

webtoolkit4.me’s first icon set

You can download this icon set over here.

Further reading

Here are some helpful articles that I think you should read to know absolutely everything about how StumbleUpon works. This way you also learn to start with your networking and then get a lot of traffic to your blog.

StumbleUpon FAQ, Guides, Tools, Addons And Scripts

I read 1stwebdesigner daily and for a while ago I met this incredibly useful article written by Dainix. I myself have had very great use of this and recommend you to read it.

A Comprehensive Guide to StumbleUpon: How to Build Massive Traffic to Your Website

This is a similar article written by DoshDosh, but is still very worth reading. There are a lot of tips and tricks not mentioned in the article by 1stwebdesigner.

Why StumbleUpon Sends More Traffic Than Digg

This article is perhaps a bit too old but still contains a lot of useful tips and hints. The article will also, as you can read in the title, a comparison between StumbleUpon and Digg.