I’ve written a lot about ways to use social media channels to improve your brand, focusing primarily on Facebook and Twitter. I’d like to begin to address some of the lesser known, but no less important, social media outlets, as many of them may provide significant opportunities for you to generate traffic to your website.

Today we’ll look at StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon is a social media bookmarking site that enables users to discover new sites that may be of interest to them. By setting up a profile and defining yourself according to categories that StumbleUpon allows you to “follow”, then subsequently “liking” sites that appeal to you (or “unliking” sites that don’t appeal to you), you are able to find new sites that meet your interests and tastes.

To get the most out of StumbleUpon, you need to be an active participant. You can’t just set up your account and profile, submit your site, and wait to be stumbled upon. Indeed, StumbleUpon has a set policy against using it as a free promotional service. If you want to use it strictly for promotional purposes, then you’ll have to sign on to their Paid Discovery program, through which StumbleUpon will place your site in front of users interested in discovering new sites in your category. You will be charged $0.10 per user click for the service.

If you’re will to put in some time and effort, however, StumbleUpon can be a very effective tool. Once you’ve sent up your account, personalize your page with a photo or logo, a description, and other requested information.

Then, you’ll want to submit your site to StumbleUpon, which you can do by going to the addition page here. You can submit more than one page from your site, but don’t submit too many or StumbleUpon will consider this spam, and you will be penalized. On the addition page, you will be asked for the URL, the category or “interest” of the page, a comment about the page, and tags for the page. You can include up to five tags for each submission.

The next step will be to add a StumbleUpon badge to the pages of your website next to the Facebook and Twitter badges that you have there already. Do this in lieu of submitting too many pages to StumbleUpon yourself. Letting others submit your site to StumbleUpon is much better than recommending them yourself. StumbleUpon is a meritocracy, and when others vouch for you, it carries a great amount of weight.

Now become active on StumbleUpon. Join the communities that relate to your business and “like” pages similar to yours. Build your reputation as a savvy “stumbler” and your recommendations will be highly regarded.

StumbleUpon is just one of the many social media channels we will be covering in the coming weeks. With it’s seemingly endless array of niche categories and communities, it might be just the thing you need to bring new visitors to your site. Give it a go and leave a comment below letting me and other readers know what you think.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image by Top Gold)