Stumbling

My aunt Chris, also an artist - oh yeah, check out her link on my links section - is really into blogging. She's very good at it and has lots of tips and tricks. Just a few days ago, she published the following post about using Stumble Upon to promote your blog. I thought about writing my own on the subject, but why fix something that's not broken? Her amazing advice is as follows:

How To Drive More Traffic To Your Blog By Using StumbleUpon

Hello Million Friends,

This is the first article in a series of blog traffic building tips.

Why do you want more traffic to your blog? If you're an artist or anyone who wants more blog traffic, you want to increase the people who come to your blog to see your art, which is hopefully at your blog or a link on your blog that take people to your art. The more people who come to your blog, the more exposure you have and potential of selling your art.

If you're not an artist and would like to become part of an online social community you can do this as well.

In this article I'll be talking about the Social Bookmarking site StumbleUpon. You can use StumbleUpon to drive more traffic to your blog.

StumbleUpon is a Social Bookmarking site that allows a person to surf the web randomly.

You create an account at StumbleUpon and use the StumbleUpon toolbar buttons to randomly surf the web. While you are surfing the web using the Stumble! button, you can bookmark websites or blog articles you like by clicking on a thumbs up button or what you dislike by clicking on a thumbs down button. See image below.


If you notice at the end of each article at my blog, I have some action items for readers to take that include "Stumble It!". If you like an article here at my blog, and you have a StumbleUpon account, you would then click on the "Stumble It!" link.

After you click on the "Stumble It!" link, you will be taken to the StumbleUpon webpage that allows you to bookmark the article and provide a bit of information about the article.

So how does this help build blog traffic? As everyone bookmarks their favorite blog articles at StumbleUpon, the more StumbleUpon community members will see the articles, and that will bring more traffic to your blog. Sometimes a lot of traffic can pass by in a short period of time depending on who's stumbling your blog articles.

Stumbling is an activity I'll remind people to do through out 2008. Email me at chris@chrisbolmeier.com and I'll put you on my mailing list so you can receive those reminders by email.

Also, there are more ways to use StumbleUpon that I'll talk about in future articles.

Here's what I'd like everyone to do now:

1. Open a StumbleUpon account.

2. Install the StumbleUpon buttons (optional).

3. Stumble one of my articles here at my blog.

4. Tell me an article from your blog you'd like me to Stumble and I will. Leave a link to the article here in the comments so everyone else can Stumble it as well.

5. Finally, leave your StumbleUpon profile like this - http://christerical.stumbleupon.com so I can add you as a friend at StumbleUpon. If or when you have a StumbleUpon account, you can click on my profile http://christerical.stumpleupon.com and add me as a friend. Then everyone reading this blog post should follow suit. When you arrive here at this article, stumble everyone's articles that are mentioned in this blog post's comments and add them as a friend at StumbleUpon. We're Building a Community Folks!! :)

There are other social bookmarking sites I'll share with you in future posts where we can do the same kind of activity to drive more traffic to our blogs.

So come on!! Let's start stumbling. :)

Thanks,
Chris

This blog post was inspired by Danial Scocco's blog DailyBlogTips and Yaro Starak's blog Entrepreneurs-Journey. Check 'em out.