StumbleUpon is a great source of traffic.  In fact, since this blog opened, it has been our number one referrer.  It is good for a couple of reasons - 1) It can send massive amounts of traffic to your site.  2) Links from StumbleUpon are highly valued in search engines as they are coming from a high PageRank site and they are “dofollow.”

So how do you make StumbleUpon work for you?  First of all, you should never try to spam or abuse the site.  StumbleUpon’s editors are pretty intelligent and they have some clever methods in effect to prevent this kind of behavior.  (I’ve had about 5 of my accounts deleted in the past…oops)  In order to make the most of StumbleUpon, you need to spend some time with it.

The first thing you should do is to spend some time finding friends in your niche and befriending them.  In the future they can help you out by stumbling pages you submit.  Next, you should stumble some pages that are not yours… search the net and find some valuable sites to submit (you gotta do this to make your account look legit).

Once you get your account “set up,” you can start submitting pages from your sites.  Remember, there is a limit to how many pages you can submit from from each domain (around 15 or so)… so don’t over do it.  Think about stumbling only the best or most informative pages on your site.  Try and figure out what StumbleUpon users will like best and submit those.  Once you reach the limit for your domain, you will see a blank white screen after submission… this is when you know it’s time to create a new account.

When stumbling your pages, try and send them around to your friends on AIM/MSN/Yahoo/ICQ and get them to stumble them as well.  The more stumbles you get in a short period of time, the more traffic StumbleUpon will send to you.