subject: What Is StumbleUpon? [print this page] What Is StumbleUpon? What Is StumbleUpon?
StumbleUpon.com is a unique website that works as a discovery engine. It allows web browsers to discover some of the best web pages, photographs and videos that are of their interest and preference. Besides, this bookmarking site allows them to generate traffic to their website at extremely low prices.
How It Works
StumbleUpon uses a form of rating that gives collaborative opinions on the quality of a website. The moment you visit a website, you can rate it a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down and can also leave reviews. When doing this, you have the opportunity to meet more than a million web browsers or "stumblers" who share your interests and ultimately become your friends. Note that you will only be able to see those pages that your friends and like-minded "stumblers" have recommended. This gives you the opportunity to find good content. Not just that, this site allows you to gain free traffic and, thereafter, get subscribers to your site. The more subscriptions you have, the more stumbles will you receive to your site.
Getting Subscribers
Good content: In order to get more subscribers to visit your site, you need to ensure that the content in your site is good. You need not simply direct them to your URLs, but also submit several other websites or web pages where you think the content is good and want to share it with your fellow "stumblers." In doing so, you are not only increasing your subscriptions, but also ensuring that you are not spamming the system with only your websites. So, if more "stumblers" like your content, the more stumbles you will receive to your web pages. Number of visitors: The number of visitors who visit your website is also a determining factor for the stumbles that your pages receive. These visitors are those web browsers who have probably stumbled across one of your pages, liked the content and wanted to know more about you. They probably then decided to become a subscriber. Informing family, friends as well as network buddies to become subscribers is another way of increasing subscriptions.
Why Stumble?
Provides quality content: Using a search engine to find relevant information is not only time consuming, but also requires a web browser to hunt through content that may not be of good quality. With StumbleUpon, stumblers are directly taken to websites that match their interests and are of premium quality. Provides up-to-date information: Information on the Internet is ever- changing. What StumbleUpon does is filter through this information and directs stumblers to only good quality websites that are of their interest. So, members are assured of up-to-date, quality information. People-driven and community-based: The websites that feature here are a collective opinion of like-minded stumblers who share the same interests. Stumblers give ratings to websites and recommended good websites to fellow stumblers. So, not only is StumbleUpon driven by real people, but it is also community-based. Personalized browsing tool: If you want to use this website simply to browse through the web, you will need to download the free toolbar. This toolbar though is only compatible with Firefox and Internet Explorer. If you do not have either of these browsers, you can then use the virtual toolbar, which is visible during your stumbling session. A few independent Mozilla-based browsers also work for StumbleUpon.
