photo credit: nDevilTV

I’m back from a short, unplanned, break from blogging. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say I might have been another victim of the Swine Flu. I suppose that will teach me not to joke about it ever again.

While I was gone, however, the blog had a nice little spike in traffic. Most of it coming from a single post, my review of FirePow, that was loved on StumbleUpon. That simple review managed to get almost 1000 hits in a single day, which is fairly impressive for this small blog. From that spike I doubled my subscribers, made about $3 in Adsense from 12 clicks on ads, and even made a couple Amazon sales. All in all a pitiful performance, but if that happened on a more frequent basis…

I’ve read a few scathing posts about StumbleUpon on other blogs, pointing out the obvious negative parts. A high bounce rate, a low conversion rate, and generally fickle “stumblers” who can pass on or, worse, give you the thumbs down. However the random search toolbar does have some benefits. For one the long tail of traffic, I received a small handful of hits days after the initial spike. And unlike sites such as Digg, that tail can continue long afterwards as there is no real front page to fall off of.

With a little work you can make your blog work well on StumbleUpon.

Firstly you need to remember that stumblers are notoriously fickle, they will flip to the next site within a few seconds if you don’t tempt them to stay. You need to make sure your blog loads fast. ProBlogger has a short list of a few great plugins you can use to speed up your loading time. Not only do you need to load fast, but you also need to catch their eye. A boring, bland theme can turn off the average stumbler before they even get to your words. Make it look sharp, and keep it interesting above the fold. A big, beautiful image words great to catch their attention, and having at least one advertising unit high up will leverage your bets at making a little money from clicks.

I’ve found a greeting to people also helps. I added the Referrer Detector to this blog and saw a fairly decent increase in subscribers soon after wards. This type of plugin detects where readers are from and encourages them with a little message. So all the people coming to my post from StumbleUpon saw this little message at the very top of the post.

You can edit the message to say whatever you want, make it more personal or tie into your blog, and give a little encouragement at the same time.

These are just a few of the basic things you can do to make your blog get more love from StumbleUpon users. What tips would you suggest a blogger do?

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