This website is different than other bookmarking sites because users cannot see what website they will stumble upon next. They simply hit the stumble button, and StumbleUpon takes them to the next website.
If you have a commercial website you cannot add it to StumbleUpon unless you become an advertiser. But if you have a personal website where you are sharing your information freely with the audience you can submit as many sites as you like, as long as you don't submit too many URLs from one domain at once, or, without adding URLs from other domains.
Once you have signed up and downloaded the free toolbar, which is compatible only with Firefox and Internet Explorer, you are ready to fill out your profile. Here you can manage your interests which will help StumbleUpon to allow you to stumble upon similar sites.
To add your content simply click on the "Add A Site" tab and it will take you through the steps. When you are adding your own content always leave a review. But before you add any of your content you want to stumble upon other people's websites first. Subscribe to a few people, make some friends, and leave reviews for other websites. If you take the time to do this, you will get more page views once you do submit.
There seem to be several factors which determine how many stumbles you will get on a page and they are:
Thumbs up. This is one of the most important factors which will determine how many more stumbles it will receive. StumbleUpon wants to show off the best websites, so the more people like your content, the better you will do.
Reviews. Reviews are also important. People may give a thumbs up, but if they really like your content, they will leave a review. So the more of these you get the better.
Subscribers. This is another way StumbleUpon figures out whether you have great content or not. People normally do not subscribe to the content of someone they do not like, so the more subscribers you have the more page views you will get.
Friends. Friends are different than subscribers because they are only your friends, and the content they have may not be what you are interested in. Therefore you won't stumble through their content unless it is related to yours.
Profile Views. This is the number of visitors you get coming to your profile. They may have stumbled upon one of your webpages and came to get more information on you. So it is important that you have a good profile page to entice these visitors to subscribe or become your friend.
To sum it up, you basically need to provide good content so that you will get lots of thumbs up, reviews and subscribers. Once you have a good network going you can get anywhere from 100 to 10,000 hits on the first day of submitting your content to StumbleUpon. The traffic tapers down after the first day, but for the most part you will continue to get traffic, provided people continue to give you the thumbs up and leave reviews.
Click here to get started with StumbleUpon.
