© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 1 / 19

HOW TO USE STUMBLEUPON TO GET TRAFFIC AND GROW YOUR EMAIL LIST

by Gill Andrews

(read this post in a browser)

Table of Contents

How StumbleUpon works (and why should you care) .................................................................................. 3

How to use StumbleUpon to get traffic and new subscribers ...................................................................... 5

Step #1: Optimize your page for StumbleUpon users in advance. ........................................................... 5

Step #2: Create a StumbleUpon account (free) ........................................................................................ 6

Step #3: Prepare to record heatmaps and sessions ................................................................................. 6

Step #4: Submit your page to StumbleUpon. ........................................................................................... 7

How long will StumbleUpon keep showing your page to its users? ........................................................... 11

Step #5. Analyse how the users interact with the page to improve it and keep the momentum ......... 13

Optimizing your page based on user interactions: Example ...................................................................... 14

To recap ...................................................................................................................................................... 18

Summary: Do you blog for business and use lead magnets to grow

your email list? Follow these 5 steps to get lots of free traffic and new

subscribers from StumbleUpon (even you’ve never posted on

StumbleUpon before)

What you need:

• a landing page with a lead magnet

• a software that records heat maps and sessions (you can sign up

for a free trial just for this exercise)

• 1-3 hours of your time.

© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 2 / 19

What you don’t need:

to have posted on StumbleUpon before

to interact with others on StumbleUpon

to have a following.

What you get:

• lots of traffic and new subscribers from StumbleUpon

• a landing page that is better optimized for conversions and more

subscribers (in the long run)

***

Have you heard stories of people just “dumping” a link on

StumbleUpon and getting tons of traffic?

I didn’t believe them either.

Till that one day when I heard about it one time too often and

decided to finally try it out.

So, on a yet another Tuesday when I was about to call it a day, I

submitted a link to my website checklist to my newly created

StumbleUpon account, closed the lid of my laptop and went to bed.

6 hours later, I woke up to 200+ views on a page that would usually

get 10 views a day max.

I open my stats and discovered that all those views came from

StumbleUpon.

Long story short, I was able to keep the momentum for 3 weeks that

brought me 5K views and 80+ subscribers.

© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 3 / 19

Hello, free traffic and new subscribers!

In this article, I’ll share with you the 5 steps you can follow to replicate

this.

But before we start, we need to look into one more thing:

StumbleUpon users – your target audience in this case, and how they

view content.

How StumbleUpon works (and why

should you care)

StumbleUpon is a bookmarklet site. Meaning you won’t see any

personal thoughts or messages shared together with the submitted

articles. People are just publicly bookmarking the articles they

liked, and that’s the end of it.

The pages you’ll see there were once submitted by someone who:

• either literally stumbled over an online article they liked and

decided to submit (aka “stumble”) it

• or, like you and I, wanted to promote their own blog and

“stumbled” the article totally on purpose.

© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 4 / 19

The users of StumbleUpon can then discover those submitted articles

by … in a rather unusual way:

Every time they click a big red “Stumble” button, they get to see a

more or less random article based on the interests they specified in

their profile and:

• whether the article was newly submitted

• or whether a lot of people still keep “liking” this article.

If you think “What’s the fun in looking at random articles?” , it’s probably

the thrill and anticipation of the Unknown.

“Uuu, I wonder what article I get to see next time!”

And as you’ll also stumble upon great content that got thousands of

likes, it’s a fun activity if you have some free time.

But you and I don’t have free time, so let’s move on.

What it means for your efforts to get traffic and

subscribers

Two things:

1. As most of the people don’t actively choose to look at it, they

have zero motivation to stay on your page. Meaning your

headline and the opening paragraphs are crucial for convincing

the StumbleUpon user to give your content a chance.

2. For StumbleUpon to keep showing your page to its users (and

for you to keep the traffic to it), the StumbleUpon users need to

keep “liking” it.

© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 5 / 19

So your key to success is to have a page where it’s clear from the

first sentence that it’s ultra-helpful unique content. If your page

is meh or just “good”, this isn’t going to work.

A side note: Regardless of StumbleUpon, if you want your content or lead

magnet to get you leads, there is no way around it: It has to

be exceptional.

But ok, let’s say your lead magnets blows the socks off your website

visitors.

Here’s what you need to do next.

How to use StumbleUpon to get traffic

and new subscribers

Step #1: Optimize your page for StumbleUpon users in advance.

Because of this whole “I didn’t ask for this article” situation, your

visitors will be even less motivated to look at your content as usual.

That’s why every word and image count.

Look at your page and:

• Make sure your headline communicates the benefit of

reading your article clearly. Don’t be clever. Be clear.

• Tell people what to expect from your page right away and get

to the point early on the page (consider cutting the

storytelling).

© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 6 / 19

• Provide a clear, compelling and visually prominent call to

action as early as the benefit of your lead magnet becomes

obvious.

• Make your page scannable and easy to process by sticking to

the formatting best practices.

Do your best but don’t agonize over it. You’ll have a chance to

improve things after you submit your page to StumbleUpon and see

your visitors interact with the page.

Step #2: Create a StumbleUpon account (free)

If you don’t have a StumbleUpon account yet (I didn’t have one) sign

up.

You don’t have to interact with anyone or post anything, or have any

followers. It could be your first share on StumbleUpon ever (as it was

in my case).

Step #3: Prepare to record heatmaps and sessions

This is the key to your long-term success: You need to see how your

users interact with the page to be able to optimize it on the fly and to

win more subscribers and likes.

Heatmaps will show you how far your visitors scroll and where they

click.

Session recordings will show you a video of how a user interacted

with the page in that particular session as if you were looking over

their shoulder while they were browsing your website.

These tools are very easy to install. All you need to do is to copy-paste

a piece of code they give you into your website’s header.

© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 7 / 19

I used a free trial of HotJar, but you can take any other software that

provides the same info (LuckyOrange, Crazy Egg, etc.)

See if you need to tell your software to start recording a heatmap for

the page you are going to submit to StumbleUpon (it doesn’t always

do it automatically).

For example, in HotJar you need to go to Heatmaps -> New Heatmap:

Go to Heatmaps -> Create Heatmap to (you won’t believe it!) create a heatmap in HotJar.

Additional benefit:

While you are at it (and while your trial is active), also create a heat

map for other pages that get some traffic to optimize them (this has

nothing to do with StumbleUpon, but why not kill a couple of birds

with this one stone).

Step #4: Submit your page to StumbleUpon.

It’s show time. Let’s submit your page to StumbleUpon.

© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 8 / 19

Here’s me submitting my epic page to StumbleUpon

• Go to your profile and click “Add a Page”

• Paste your URL

• Select “Yes” to indicate it’s safe for work (Still not sure what it

means, though. Probably that it’s for the people to view it at

work. Which raises another question: How the hell does

StumbleUpon knows people are at work?!)

• Specify one interest under which you’d like to submit this

page. Start typing, and StumbleUpon will autosuggest stuff.

• Specify the tags.

Regarding the tags: Weird story. It’s unclear what’s the best way to do

it.

While submitting your post, you can specify as many tags as you like,

and call them whatever you like. But StumbleUpon neither

© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 9 / 19

autosuggests the tags nor displays them for the already submitted

articles. Totally weird.

Here’s an “unofficial snapshot” of all the interests and popular tags as

of March 2014 (I couldn’t find any fresh data, unfortunately).

List of StumbleUpon categores and tags (March 2014). Click here to view the full list

After you submit your page, StumbleUpon will show it to roughly 50

users whose interests match the interest (and I’m assuming the tags)

of the page you submitted.

© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 10 / 19

Important: Make sure your page hasn’t been

submitted to StumbleUpon before

To get the initial 50 views and a chance to build momentum it’s

important that your page has been never submitted to StumbleUpon

before under that particular URL.

To double-check, submit your page and immediately check the

number of likes on it. If it’s larger than 1, it means someone has

already “stumbled” it, and you are not going to get this initial boost of

50 views.

It’s fixable, though.

If your page has already been submitted to StumbleUpon:

• Duplicate the page under a different URL (for

example, yourwebsite.com/my-page-2) but set it to “noindex” to

tell Google not to index it (otherwise you’ll have a problem with

duplicate content).

For example, Yoast SEO plug-in under WordPress lets you do it

in the post editor in the section where you specify the meta title

and meta description for the post (under “Advanced” setting):

© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 11 / 19

If the URL to your epic page has been already submitted to

StumbleUpon, duplicate the page to get a fresh URL and set it to

“noindex”

• Submit the page under the new URL.

Depending on how many likes your page will get and from

whom (users with big following vs users with small following),

StumbleUpon will:

o stop showing your page after the initial 50 views because

not enough people “liked” it

o or keep showing it while people are still “liking” it.

How long will StumbleUpon keep

showing your page to its users?

Good question!

While I was getting the traffic from StumbleUpon to my page, I was

keeping an eye on the number of views from one side, and the

number of likes it got on StumbleUpon.

I noticed that it was still getting 100+ visits a day while the likes-to-

views ratio was around 10,5%. I stopped getting traffic from

StumbleUpon when the likes-to-views ratio dropped to 10,1% (yes, I

was literally measuring this a couple of times a day; and yes, I actually

have a life).

So my initial assumption was that StumbleUpon displays an article

while enough people are liking it.

To confirm this, I looked at 30 articles and noted down the number of

likes and visits they had at 9am vs 9pm. If I saw a substantial increase

© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 12 / 19

in the number of visits at 9pm, it meant that StumbleUpon is still

displaying the article to a lot of users.

I was hoping to see a correlation between the links-to-visits ratio and

whether an article was still getting traffic from StumbleUpon.

Unfortunately, StumbleUpon makes it impossible to gather enough

data, as it insists on displaying random stuff and I don’t have a whole

week to do this.

Among the 30 articles, I got only 3 articles with a likes-to-views ratio

over 10%. 2 out of 3 of them weren’t being displayed anymore.

Ok, this wasn’t very helpful

But fun fact: StumbleUpon stopped showing the viewers all of the

articles with the likes-to-views ratio below 10% (27 out of 30).

What does it mean for you?

It does look like that the articles that not many people like stop

getting traffic, we just don’t know the exact number.

So it’s important that your article gets an initial boost of likes and

keeps a high likes-to-views ratio.

© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 13 / 19

I was lucky enough for it to happen by itself but if I did it again I

would team up with a couple of friends and ask them to “like” it.

Is it 100% fair game?

Hm, I would say it’s a gray-ish area. But it’s also unfair that luck has a

say in whether your great content gets the exposure it deserves

(maybe all those stumblers who would have loved your article went to

bed when you submitted it and didn’t get a chance to “like” it). So it’s

just a small compensation for your bad luck

Step #5. Analyse how the users interact with the page to improve it and keep the momentum

It’s important that you keep a close look on things in the first couple

of hours.

Check your heatmap and session recordings.

How far do the users scroll? Where do they click? Are all images displayed

correctly?

If you see users leaving the page too soon or not clicking on your call -

to-action buttons, think about what could be the case and update the

page.

Make sure to delete the existing heatmap after you update the page

and create a new heatmap, as the design of your page has changed

and you won’t be able to see the correct data if you keep using the

old heatmap.

© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 14 / 19

Additional benefit:

Watching your users interact with the page will also help you discover

broken links and problems with your page on different devices and

browsers.

For example, I discovered that one of my call-to-action links was

broken (#facepalm) and that one image wasn’t properly rendering for

iPhones.

Optimizing your page based on user

interactions: Example

When I initially submitted my page to StumbleUpon, it looked like

this:

© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 15 / 19

My page with the lead magnet: Before

© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 16 / 19

Do you see a problem?

Well, I didn’t see the problem at that time, but I noticed that initially, I

was getting hundreds of views but only a few subscribers.

I looked at my heatmap and session recordings and saw that a lot of

people won’t scrolling far enough to see the infographic.

“OMG, where are you going?! You’ve missed the main thing!”

So I quickly did this:

• I cut out the long story in the beginning and told people what to

expect from the page with as few words as possible.

• I placed the infographic higher on the page making part of it

visible above the fold.

• I removed the “add this image to your website” code snippet I

had after the infographic and left only one call to action: The

“Download” button.

• I added a line that explained why the PDF you could download is

better than the infographic.

• I added a gray background to make call to action visually

prominent.

Here’s how my optimized page looked like:

© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 17 / 19

Original page vs optimized page. Click here to see it live on the blog.

It worked!

I started getting more subscribers and was able to keep the

momentum for 3 weeks.

© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 18 / 19

But most importantly, I now get more subscribers organically,

because this page ranks in search (which has nothing to do with

StumbleUpon) and is now better optimized for conversions (as the

result of this StumbleUpon exercise).

Not bad for a couple of hours of effort, I’d say.

To recap

Want to optimize a page with a lead magnet for conversions and get

more subscribers? Follow these 5 steps to get lots of traffic and new

subscribers from StumbleUpon:

1. Make sure your page delivers exceptional value and is optimized

for StumbleUpon users.

2. Create a StumbleUpon account

3. Install a heat map software on your website and get everything

in place to get the heat maps and the session recordings for

your page.

4. Submit the page to StumbleUpon. If it was already submitted

once, do that trick with a duplicated page under a different URL

marking it no-index no-follow.

5. Watch your stats and the session recordings closely. Notice how

far the users scroll and where they click. Make sure everything is

working as intended. If not, update the page and recreate the

heat maps.

© Gill Andrews, http://gillandrews.com 19 / 19

About the Author

Gill Andrews A versatile content creator and web consultant who turns

underperforming websites into slick lead generating machines. Read

more of Gill’s articles on gillandrews.com.