Everyone loves traffic.  It’s a huge, huge ego issue.  Hubris even.

I personally want as many people to enjoy and congratulate me on my pointed insights as possible.  The more influential people that do so, the more I can tell myself how great I am.

This is where people get into trouble with StumbleUpon.  People just want to see that traffic bump.  They know it won’t last long, but it’s so good when it’s there.  Don’t get me wrong, I love Stumble.  I’m approaching 8,000 thumbed up websites.  But I feel like there is an inherent misunderstanding going on when it is used for self promotion.

Stumble Upon users are notoriously fickle and immune to advertising.  They are in it for their quick fix.  If they run into something that is outside the purview of what they are looking for (which they have no idea what that is), they will Stumble away, or even more horrible, give the site a thumb down.

We have a couple articles that we’ve played around with for promotion on StumbleUpon, and it’s interesting to see their numbers.  Even pages that have StumbleUpon users going so far as voting on subjects will receive relatively low numbers in terms of ‘thumb ups’.

While it may be fun to self-promote with StumbleUpon, be wary.  It’s users do not care about you or your products unless they are highly eclectic.  Rarely, very rarely, even when I find a site I think is genuinely interesting, do I save it for return.  Your mind isn’t in it for the cool find, it’s more so in it for the quick fix of “cool, entertain me”.  While you may want a quick fix to lagging traffic, keep in mind that your StumbleUpon detour will likely end in unreturned feelings.  I would say that on the overall, maybe 5% of any one blog is actually going to appeal to Stumblers.

If you want to play around with StumbleUpon for pure link building strategy, you must create something worthy of linkage… linkbait if you will.  Make it quick and dirty fun.

StumbleUpon, for most, is that girl that you tried too hard with and ended up rejecting you.  Don’t be that guy, choose the stuff you promote carefully.

First off, what is StumbleUpon?

You can think of it as a very large boob tube of Web stuff from web pages to videos. The cool thing is it delivers Web sites to you based on your preferences (e.g. art, photography, search marketing, SEO, gadgets, real estate, etc.) You can change these preferences at will. The system learns what you like and brings you more. If only TV was this easy, right?

You can search sites from their Web site at www.stumbleupon.com or download the toolbar for Firefox IE (recommended).

While it may seem like mindless pleasure to spend hours on end stumbling just for instant satisfaction and entertainment – there really are other benefits to StumbleUpon and it can serve as an exceptional online marketing tool.

Here’s why you should use StumbleUpon:

1. Research and Discovery – you can change your interest preferences to your liking at any time.  For instance, if I am specifically looking for sites or related photos, videos on the topic of Internet marketing, SEO, SEM, etc. I can change my preference interests to show me sites related to this (Internet and Internet Tools). You can basically cut hours of research and discovery time down by stumbling instead of trying to come up with the right combination of keywords to type into search engines.

2. Surf the Web - literally and organically. We are all friends of the remote control and now you are always in control, your roommate or significant other can’t steal your Stumble toolbar from you.  For good entertainment I recommend Bizarre/Oddities, Beer, and Quizzes interests.  Sit back and channel surf – hours of pure entertainment.

3. Search – Dare I say that this may be the future of search? Well, it should be.  While the big 3 are honing their algorithms to show the most relevant results based on backlinks, content, history, etc.  StumbleUpon is backing into it by asking users to rate, review, and tag these sites.  You can actually use StumbleUpon as a search engine for immediate results (versus option 1 above).  Type in anything that you are looking for and a listing of results will show with thumbnails, number of reviews, tags and recent “thumbs up.”

4. Social Networking and Bookmarking - The community and tools on StumbleUpon (SU) are fierce. The major feature to SU is their expansive social bookmarking abilities. It’s not just one way there are multiple ways to interact and connect – you can view all your favorite sites, view sites that your friends like, that people with your interests like, blog it, talk about it, have folks review it, etc.

Maybe in a later post, I’ll touch on marketing and advertising opportunities through StumbleUpon and how they have impacted the SU community and results.

But for now, get out there and thumbs up someone today. Just don’t let the boss catch you after hours upon hours on StumbleUpon.