I’ve asked Terence Chang from http://terencechang.com to do a guest post about the benefits of building short term traffic using Stumble Upon. Terence is somewhat of a master at manipulating Stumble Upon into giving him massive amounts of short term traffic. I would definitely recommend checking out his blog.

Take it away Terence -

If you are interested in getting “SHORT TERM” traffic from StumbleUpOn, please continue reading…
First of all, I must insist that good and quality content is the only solution for long term traffic.
Secondly, I don’t call myself a StumbleUpOn expert. I just follow the rules and play safe.
I only recommend StumbleUpOn as a way to bring people to your site, the rest is up to you.
There are some facts about StumbleUpOn, which I did not include in this post, read them here StumbleUpOn - The No-Magic facts of building traffic.
These are the facts about StumbleUpon that you might not know.

1. Not all 2+ million stumblers are doing the stumbler’s job to discover pages. Many of them are just there for social purpose and to meet friends (much like myspace). There are also many dummy members, which were created as a secondary account for whatever purposes.
2. StumbleUpOn sells traffic to sponsor web site. Click here to find out more about their StumbleUpon Advertising . It costs the sponsor $0.05 per member visit. StumbleUpOn claims that the member will only see the sponsor page once. I am not 100% sure about this.
3. StumbleUpOn is watching you. In order to know what page you have stumbled. It remembers what pages you visited as well. They will use this information to arrange the proper advertisement sites for you. What else do they know? How fast you are navigating the sites. In other words, how long do you stay on the site? They also know what page you are on in other browser windows with the toolbar installed. So they know every page your see in your browser, including your own web sites. That sounds scary. I just don’t know if they will ever use this information against their members for statistic purpose. It does similar things as Google ToolBar!

Again. I keep saying that a good stumbler will get good stumbled traffic (like StumbleUpon karma if you will). To make yourself into a better stumbler, and to start getting better traffic in return check out Terence’s post StumbleUpOn - How to make yourself a good stumbler.
Some people may not understand what I mean by “Good Stumbler”. In order words, if you are good stumbler, your traffic will come. The people that don’t agree with my statement are those who don’t have a good enough web site to send traffic to or are too lazy to put forth a lot of effort.
These are the guidelines that I put together.

1. Stumble (thumb up+review+tag) as many page as you can. Thumb down doesn’t count.
2. Join communities and help others.
3. Find as many friends as you can.
4. Thumb up and write reviews about other stumblers.
5. Invite friends to join your communities
6. Link to your StumbleUpOn profile pages from other web site. Ex. MySpace.com, blogger, facebook, etc.
7. Promote StumbleUpOn in any way possible.

There are also some extra facts that a stumbler should know on StumbleUpOn - How to make yourself a good stumbler.
Remember, the traffic you will generate is based on the category, and tag that people provide when they stumble your page. So if the page falls under those less popular categories, the traffic is smaller. Also, you only get a portion of the traffic that you supposed to get from StumbleUpOn, because a lot of the members are not active members. They don’t come to your site at all.
The bottom line is not to stumble upon your own page, because it will miss the whole point of “Discovering a new site” Once or twice is fine, but don’t over use it.
So how does your page get stumbled at first place? There is a gray area between share your page and invite people to stumble your pages. Some people call “Invitation” a way of manipulation. If you are good stumbler, you have a better chance to get a thumbs up by your friends. There is nothing wrong with using friends to get a thumbs up!
The point is that you DO NOT force them anyone to thumb up your site by offering thumbs up in return, exchanging a link, etc. You share your pages with them. It’s up to the stumbler to stumble your page. How you want to make it happen is not my business. You get the point!
Back to the topic, let’s assume that you are a good stumbler, and you would like to stumble a page you really like. You also, understand the benefits that the owner of the page will get when you stumble their page. You know you will bring them loads of sweet traffic.
So how do you stumble to make this more beneficial?

1. Proper Topic/Category and Tag - If you are the first person who discovers the page, you need to pick the correct and proper Topic for the page. If you don’t pick any topic, StumbleUpOn will pick it out from 500+ topics for you. In some case, it will pick the irrelevant one, which will put the page into a sort of StumbleUpon Purgatory. So use your own judgement to give it a proper topic (category) as a good stumbler.
2. Thumb Up+Review - Don’t be afraid to give a page the “thumbs down”. It doesn’t make you a bad person, not all sites are good enough to earn a “thumbs up”. However, the more thumbs up you give out, the higher score you will get. The higher score will make your stumble more important. I believe that the score is combined and analyzed by number of thumbs up + reviews + friends you gave out. Your stumble will be worth more than those that aren’t good stumblers. Similar to a Google Pagerank
3. Timing - If only one person stumbles the page and his score is low, if won’t bring much traffic at all. If the second person with a higher score thumbs up the page and reviews it, this will bring you much more traffic. The time in between these two thumbs up is important. The shorter, the better.
4. The first few thumbs up are what matters - The first person who stumble the page is less important than the subsequent stumblers. The stumblers with higher rank are what truly affects your traffic.
5. Send a message to other stumblers or your friends to take a look at your page - Tell them you like it, just don’t force them to “Thumb Up” that page. I don’t know why people are arguing about this as “EXCHANGE” link for traffic. This is one of the StumbleUpOn Toolbar functions.
6. The more thumbs up, the more traffic you will gain - The more thumbs up a page gets in a short time period, the faster the traffic will appear. If the page has 20 thumbs up in 1 hour (and then none for the rest of the day), it will generate more traffic than 100 thumbs up in one day does! This is why #2 and #3 are important. If the first few stumblers have higher scores,you have a better chance to get other stumblers with the same interest to view the page. So the page will get stumbled faster than random viewers.

All of these are just my observations. It’s not magic, it’s not even science. Some of these are even written on the StumbleUpon Website. Do your dilligence and the traffic will follow!

Popularity: 4% [?]