I have experimented with several social networking sites over the past few months and I've come to the conclusion that StumbleUpon is the best service to drive traffic to your blog.

This doesn't mean you should ignore the rest, but it does mean that you should make using StumbleUpon a priority. Here are some tips to using it:

  • Always ask someone else to stumble a particular article and write a review of the post. Some stumblers will flag it as spam if you "thumbs up" your own post and write your own review first. They'll even go so far as to notify their friends to do the same, including a "thumbs down".
  • The StumbleUpon toolbar has a feature called "Send to". I just recently figured out what it was for (silly me). Make sure you have the actual article showing in your browser and then send the page to one of your StumbleUpon friends for a thumbs up/review. In fact, I'll soon be removing the "Comment for a Stumble" link from my sidebar (along with the others in that box) because this is much quicker and just as effective (unless someone tells me otherwise).
  • You want to stumble the pages your friends have stumbled as much as possible. This drives traffic to those stumbled pages. If you run out of pages, pick another category. Friends should make sure they "thumbs up" their own pages (not as the first one) so those pages are included in your friends' "queue".
  • Never give a thumbs up or a review to a sponsored post. It will end up getting flagged as spam and this has a negative effect on your traffic. Miracles do happen and some sponsored posts will make it through. But why take the chance?
  • When doing a review in conjunction with a stumble, add as many relevant tags as possible. This will put it in the queues for stumblers that have set it for those categories.

Are any of the tips unclear? I'll happily fix them if they are. These can't possibly be the only tips for good stumbling and good traffic results, so feel free to chime in with your own. I'll add them to the post if they're not duplicates.