November 10th, 2008 
This is a guest post written by Mike. Mike Smith is a regular guy who designs blogs for a living at Blog Theme Machine and is currently trying to shift into a full time social media marketing career through his website iamMikeSmith where he blogs about social media, marketing and blogging.
Stumble Upon can be a beautiful thing, especially when used by the right affiliate marketers, for the right reasons. Some people over-do it and abuse the system, but when it’s done right, its a piece of artwork. For those of you reading this blog right now that want to diversify your income streams and learn how to leverage social media websites like Stumble Upon for your affiliate marketing needs, this post is going to cover it all for you.
I’ve compiled 7 must read reasons why you, as an affiliate marketer should use stumble upon. In the end, it’s up to you to follow the road to added exposure and profits, but if you do read the reasons below and put them into practice, you’ll be improving your affiliate marketing profits in no time.
For those of you who already leverage social media websites for your affiliate marketing, drop a comment below and let us know. And for those of you reading this who think that mass spam to 1,000+ people is the right way, please leave now and never come back 
- Networking - Affiliate marketers tend to stick to themselves or a real close knit group of people and like to keep their secret niches to themselves. But by leveraging your network on stumble upon, you can gain some added thumbs up to your articles (tip - don’t network with other affiliate marketers or else they might steal your ideas haha).
- Watching trends - Always wanting to stay ahead of the curve is a great way to run your affiliate marketing business and stumble upon is great for that. Check out the stumble upon tag page and see recently hot tags as well as the all time hot tags. Click the tag and see what websites and topics are hot in that area and start an affiliate campaign on the ones you think would be profitable.
- Targeted (FREE) traffic - You use PPC because it’s targeted traffic. If you’re a blogger, you buy ads on other peoples websites because they’re in the same niche as yours and the traffic is targeted. Why wouldn’t you want the free, targeted traffic that stumble upon can send you? One article I wrote on my blog has received over 100,000 unique visitors in the past month, all because the post went popular.
- Watching competitors - Keep your friends close and your enemies closer right? Well, with social media sites like Stumble upon, you can see what your competitors are doing. When you’re logged into your account, you can search a specific topic and find sites related to them. You’ll stumble across some genuine sites that are built by passionate people in that niche, but a lot of them are definitely affiliate marketers websites. Find out what they’re doing, see how many reviews they’re articles got on stumble upon and build your site 10X better
- Increase influence - Do you run a lot of campaigns in the same niche? Stumble them all and increase your influence over what the people searching for your niche find when they click the search button. Instead of only having 1 page for them to see, try getting 10 in there. If you’re a blogger as well, you could also get more reach by getting popular on stumble upon and gain the exposure and traffic benefits like I mentioned above.
- Quickly test niches - Got a niche you’d like to test out but not sure if dumping 200-300 dollars into it is worth it? Stumble your page and shoot a message to some of your network in stumble upon asking them to review it. If they like it, you get two positive results; you get their thumbs up vote which helps get it exposed to more visitors and you also get the possible sale from the original network people you sent it to.
- SEO benefits - I am not sure I’ve seen other people mention this before, but I know for the few posts on my blogs I’ve had hit the popular page on stumble upon, it’s also done crazy things for my rankings in google. All for the low, low price of ZERO and usually in far less time then it would normally take to rank for the keywords I’m #2 and #6 for
Still wondering if stumble upon is worth your time? Well, go sign up, put these things into practice and if it doesn’t work well over the next week or two, come back here, cuss me out and let me know how much of an idiot I am. But I doubt that will happen, because I, as well as many others have seen the benefits that stumble upon and other social media websites can bring.
If you liked this article, would you like me to run through other social media websites like Twitter, Delicious, Reddit, ect? Drop a comment and let me know and if Derek approves of it, I’ll write up some follow up articles for you.
Popularity: 42% [?]
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Great article! I never considered using SU as an affiliate marketing tool. I have 1 question though. What makes a stumble “go popular”? I’m assuming it’s thumbs up’s, but how many?
A specific amount of thumbs up and also reviews. The exact amount, I’m not sure to be honest. I haven’t found a specific answer. But by building a network of 50-100 people, you can use the SEND TO button in your stumble upon tool bar to send the page to each person in your network with a quick message like “I thought you’d like this. If you have a second, could you give it a thumbs up if you like it? Thank you” and you’ll get a good amount of people that will.
I love this post, thinking about using SU to promote my blog, any more resource that will help me jump start?
How about advertising on SU, will that help bring more traffic and sales?
Glad you liked this post. Advertising on SU has done well for a few people I’ve talked to. It’s worth a shot. the pricing per visitor is pretty good.
It can work and I’ve done similar things, like setting up groups on FB with a website and getting hundreds of thousands of free visitors but the ratio of conversions for visitors like this is usually not that great. It’s well more worth my time to set up a proper advertising campaign and make a ton more bank that way…but that’s not to say it can’t work for some people.
The quality of the traffic can be good for specific niches. Stumble upon is really good for some niches, while others (like affiliate marketing, social media, blogging, ect) are filled with the “click and go” crowd. Finding the smaller niches is where it’s at. a LOT of people use stumble upon to actually find good information, so if your site has it, it’ll work.
Plus, the SEO benefits of a page hitting popular can get your page ranked well in search engines, and we all know how good search traffic is
Yes stumbleupon is great , I also enjoy leveraging places like myspace and facebook
The seo benefits is that your stumpleupon link will show up high, but not your actual blog link. Stumbleupon still takes the share
-Mike
not totally true
I had a post on blogthememachine.com/blog (the pumpkin one) that had my actual post #1 for “3d Pumpkin Carvings” within the first 20-30 minutes of it being online. the stumble link was never there. Same with a few other posts of mine.
The point about targeted free traffic in connection with what individuals may already be spending money for is quite valid. It is hard to turn down something that is normally paid for with an item that doesn’t take much effort to make use of. The return ratio makes StumbleUpon a suitable choice for spreading a site or its articles.
I think that SU is perfect to get targeted traffic for free, as you mentioned in this post. The feature of search for a particular topic on stumbleupon is may be the most valuable on its toolbar. The problem starts when an url is in the wrong category… Getting thumbs down is not a good idea on SU.
Yeah, definitely take the time to put your post in the right categories. Banking site shouldn’t be submitted into the game category
I’m not sure SU is for me, at least not yet.
Yeah, I have an account there, but not have a proper strategy to
integrate my projects into this and actively use it.
It’s better not use it at all if I don’t fully understand how it works and what needs to be done to properly use a service.
What I am find is there are things you do when your start out in MMO, and things when you do when you have experience, steady traffic, and cash flow. Leveraging social media is one for beginning with because it is free and one needs traffic. After your been around awhile and got some saltiness, you can launch a new site in day with proper traffic and conversions. But those tactics (adwords campaign comes to mind) would just a kill a beginning affiliate marketer.