Make Your Site Stumbler Friendly
StumbleUpon has become a fantastic resource for sharing and promoting websites and blogs. One of the best things you can do to make your website friendly for Stumblers to encourage them to give it the thumbs up.
The best way to make your website Stumbler friendly is to create great content. Stumblers love content. This is true of all the social media websites, and StumbleUpon is no different. Eye catching titles, images, and videos can help to encourage Stumblers to submit and thumbs up your page.
Add “Stumble this” buttons to your website or blog. There are many ways to include a “Stumble this” button. If you are using WordPress you can add the Share This plugin that allows people to submit the content to multiple social media websites, including StumbleUpon. You can use the AddThis button like I have on this blog, which offers similar service to the Share This plugin. You can use the AddThis button on more than just blogs so it is easy to add to regular websites as well. If you are using Blogger or another blogging platform you can add a Stumble this button provided by StumbleUpon. They even provide you with instructions for each platform.
Welcome StumbleUpon visitors to your WordPress blog by using the Hello Stumbler - Wordpress plugin. This offers StumbleUpon visitors a nice welcome message and encourages them to thumbs up your page. You can edit the message to say what ever you want. If you are not using WordPress, but you can run PHP consider adding a similar PHP script to welcome Stumblers.
Again if you are using WordPress, offer readers a place to go when they are done reading the post. Using a related posts plugin will offer readers similar posts. If you are not using WordPress you can offer readers a manual selected list of your top posts or posts you know are related. This is great to encourage Stumblers to move deeper into your website and possibly give a thumbs up to another page.
By making a few small changes to your website and blog you can make it more Stumbler friendly and before you know it you will be getting some great traffic from StumbleUpon.
Comments
Aaron Stroud
Thanks for pointing out the Hello Stumbler plug-in. I'll definitely have to install this later tonight. Is there a way to monitor who is thumbing my articles? I'd really like to be able to keep track of the people giving me a thumbs up. I like to send them a SU message thanking them for the positive feedback. It becomes a little difficult over time as older posts continue to receive new visitors and the occasional thumb up.
LGR
The only way I know of checking to see who thumbed up articles is to look at the review page it usually lists the Stumblers. I tend to shy away from sending people thank you messages though. Check out my post today - <a href="http://www.blog.lgr.ca/2007/12/how-to-thank-stumblers.html">How to Thank Stumblers?</a>. I personally dislike getting a bunch of thank you messages from SU users, although I am not as extreme as some people.