I am sure that you know the power that StumbleUpon has to drive traffic to your website, but are you using StumbleUpon wrong? I have had days when over 10,000 Stumblers stopped by my website, but like most people those days were hit and miss. Well I finally realized that it was because I was using it all wrong.

Follow along and I will show you what I did to increase my odds of hitting those 10,000 visitor days.

Making Friends

If you have your own website and want to drive traffic to it through StumbleUpon then you have to make friends. I understood this when I first started using Stumble, but to be honest I didn’t know what that meant.

My idea of making friends was to go on the Stumble website and stumble every user I could find and add as many of them to my friends list as I could. What I didn’t realize at the time was that this was pretty much a waste of time. Yeah, I now had several hundred friends, but what good was that? I didn’t interact with them at all, and when I finally did interact with them it was by sending them posts from my website that they were not interested in. To say the least I got some pretty colorful responses back.

So what was I to do? I knew the power that StumbleUpon had to drive traffic, I knew I needed friends, but I just couldn’t get my head around how to achieve my goals. This is where most people give up, and I almost did. The reason why I couldn’t achieve my goals was because they were the wrong goals. I just wanted to get on Stumble and drive traffic to my website (goal 1), and I thought I could do that if I made enough friends (goal 2) that I could send my websites to.

What my goals should have been was to first make friends with very targeted people that were looking to do the same thing that I was (drive traffic to their website), and then make friends with targeted people who I consider casual users of Stumble (people who stumble because it is fun).

So now that I know what my goals are what does that mean? Well lets look at each goal one at a time.

Goal 1: Targeted Friends

So what do I mean by Targeted Friends? What I mean is you need to go out and find targeted people who are using Stumble to promote their websites. These are the most important people that you can make friends with.

Word of caution though don’t go out there and make friends with just any body out there that is wanting to promote a website. Be picky, try and pick people who are promoting websites that have some interest to you. It will make it easier for you to engage with them when they ask you to Stumble their websites. Also if you are somewhat interested in their website you will be more likely to leave comments and reviews on their posts. Which increases the possibility that they will return the favor and promote your website in return.

So where do you find these targeted people? There are several ways of finding these people but I have found that using websites like BlogCatalog the easiest. If you don’t know what BlogCatalog is, it is a social networking community of webmasters that promote and share information between themselves. With a quick search of BlogCatalog you can find similar people with similar websites and in most cases they have posted in their profiles all the social networking groups (Stumble, Digg, etc..) that they are a member of.

Now that you have an idea of what targeted friends are and where to find them lets move on to our second goal of finding targeted casual users.

Goal 2: Targeted Casual Users

Targeted casual users are just people who don’t have their own website or anything to promote. They use Stumble because it is fun and it allows them to express themselves without having to put any effort into creating their own website.

So how out of the millions of people that use Stumble do you find the kind of Targeted Casual User that will benefit you the most? Probably the easiest way to find these people is to go back through all the websites that are in your favorites. Find the websites that relate the closest to the the one that you are trying to promote. If you look in the reviews section of these websites a lot of times you will see that it is a lot of the same people with similar interest stumbling the same things. These are the kind of people that you want to make friends with. They are more than likely to stumble the posts from your website when you send it to them because they have an interest in the subject to begin with.

Also there are a lot of people on Stumble that like to follow a theme in their favorites. If you can find a few of these people that match the topic if your website they can be golden because a lot of other stumblers like these kind of sites and check back often to see what is new on them.

You Have Completed your Goals Now What?

This is the most important part of driving large amounts of traffic to your website from Stumble.
Do Not Burn Your Friends Out!! No one wants to be bombarded every day by someone who is trying to promote their website. I try and keep the posts that I send the people in my friends list down to 1 post every week or two.

There are some exceptions to the rule though. I have a few friends that send me stuff several times a week. These people I have a long relationship with and always Stumble their stuff. In return they always Stumble mine. So it is OK to send these kind of people a little more stuff, but on average for most people in your list keep it to no more than 1 post per week preferably every other week. This way they will be more likely to check out your website and stumble it verses being annoyed because you have filled their in box with every post on your website.