Using StumbleUpon to Find the Best Content and Promote Your Website

StumbleUpon is a popular social bookmarking website which allows you to highlight specific websites and web pages that you enjoyed. You can install the StumbleUpon tool into your web browser and when you find a page you like click the thumbs up icon to add it. You can tag each page you add and write a short review and you can also give a thumbs down to pages you don’t like. The idea is that over time StumbleUpon will build a picture of the kind of web pages that you enjoy and so when you hit the Stumble button on your browser it will return a page that you are likely to want to see. StumbleUpon can also be a terrific source of viral traffic and so it is an invaluable tool in promoting your own content.

The company was founded by a group of friends in Canada and proved to be an instant hit which led to investment and a move to San Francisco. As StumbleUpon continued to grow, pulling in millions of users, it attracted the interest of eBay and they acquired the company in 2007 for a massive $75 million. The service is very easy to use and with so many people engaged in voting on content it provides a useful guide to websites that are worth checking out in specific categories. The service links to websites and individual pieces of content such as articles and videos, the more popular something is the more often it will be returned to users looking for content in that category and so it is capable of sending high volume targeted traffic to websites.

StumbleUpon is a completely free service and the sign up process is easy. The best way to use it is to install the toolbar for your internet browser and the official toolbar is available for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Mozilla. Once installed you surf to websites that you enjoy and click the thumbs up to add them. If they are already in the system you can just vote and adding a review is optional, if the resource is being added for the first time a pop up box will prompt you to add a brief description, review and relevant tags to help others find it. You can also choose specific topics which interest you in general and the tags you want to search for can be refined for individual sessions. The more information you add the better StumbleUpon gets at suggesting content you will like and hitting the Stumble button on the toolbar will throw up a random page which fits your profile. If you give a page the thumbs down it won’t be suggested again.