Why StumbleUpon Is a Social Bookmarking On Steroids

Social bookmarking is the big buzz term among internet marketers these days, but up until now it has been fairly static. You could make recommendations to friends through places like Del.icio.us , Digg , Technorati , and you could search for sites in a particular topic area. But StumbleUpon  gives you all that and a little bit more; this site actually learns what you like and makes recommendations. What are the implications for web marketers? What do you have to do if you want StumbleUpon to recommend your site? Can this service generate free traffic to your site? All these questions and more will be covered in this Post.

Just like any social bookmarking site, visitors can connect with friends and share sites. They can meet people with similar interests and check out what other people are discovering. With StumbleUpon you can "channel surf" the best-reviewed sites on the internet. It is a "collaborative surfing tool for finding and sharing great sites." Just add a toolbar to your browser and you can give a review for any site you happen to land upon.

So this is where the internet marketer comes in. As you probably already guessed, it can be beneficial to the health and future of your web site if several people give it good reviews. If one of your visitors already has the StumbleUpon toolbar installed, and finds your site, they could get the ball rolling for you. But if you're like most marketers, you're not going to want to leave all that to chance. Just like what people have already been doing with sites like Digg and Technorati, there is no reason you can't review one of your own web sites. As a matter of fact, why not review them all?

Once your site has been reviewed, StumbleUpon will start to do a little of the work for you. Since the site actually makes recommendations to its members, telling them about sites they might be interested in, StumbleUpon just might recommend your site to a few people. The more popular your site becomes, which it looks like is determined by the number of positive reviews you receive, the more your site will be recommended to others. Before you know it, and with very little extra effort on your part, you could have gained a steady stream of free traffic.

What could be better than free traffic, coming from the recommendations of people you have never contacted in places you've never heard about? All this just because a few people voted for your site and said it was good. Of course, this isn't likely to happen if you don't run a strong web site with excellent content, but that's what you're already doing, isn't it?