The more I look at social bookmarking, the more interesting it gets. But it’s also challenging. For example, think about driving StumbleUpon traffic to your blog.

There is an easy way to do this. You can buy traffic from StumbleUpon as low as $0.05 per visitor. You set your budget, they send the traffic.

I suppose this could be viable, although I’ve never tried it. Instead, I prefer to try to get natural StumbleUpon traffic.

This, however, is not all that easy. You can Stumble your own sites to an extent, but take it too far and they won’t let you submit links from that domain anymore. As with any other sort of social bookmarking you need to participate, make friends, Stumble other sites that might be of interest.

StumbleUpon visitors can be interesting creatures. My husband likes to use it, and I have fun watching him, as he is not involved in any sort of online marketing. He’s just Stumbling for the fun of it.

The only thing he does is hit the Stumble button on his toolbar. I don’t think he has particularly noticed the thumbs up or thumbs down button, learned about tagging or anything else. I don’t like to interfere with how he uses it because it’s a good insight into how a regular person might use it.

He does often go multiple pages into a site. Not very prone to clicking ads, but then he is probably more aware than average of what it means to click an ad. One of the few ways he’s not an average user.

He clicks the most on sites that entertain him in some way. This doesn’t mean it all has to be funny. Solid information on an interesting to him topic works quite well too.

If you want to get serious about StumbleUpon, you need to start adding friends to your account. The best ones will have similar interests to you and be active in their Stumbling. This relies, of course, on checking to see what your friends have Stumbled, and adding your own opinion of it.

Which brings me to a point. Anyone who wants to start Stumbling is welcome to add me to their friends list. I’ll do likewise. If we can get used to seeing what others are Stumbling we can make some progress with it. I won’t give a thumbs up if I don’t like it that well (maybe that’s just me), but if you’re adding interesting pages, why not?

Without other people helping, you aren’t going to get a lot of StumbleUpon traffic all that easily. If what you submit is really good you can get the traffic, but it won’t work every time, just as with any other kind of social website.

The more you Stumble and give thumbs up/down, the better you should do with this resource. I don’t mind admitting that I get a lot of inspiration for some of my sites from this. It’s amazing the sheer range of websites on there I would not have found otherwise.

I do not encourage you to submit just any page. Stumblers are picky, and if they don’t like what you’re sharing they aren’t going to want to read what you share. There’s no problem with promoting interesting things, but if you think you’re going to get AdSense or similar clicks you are probably marketing the wrong way. Getting constant thumbs down on your submissions is not going to build your reputation.

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