Stumbleupon: You’ve heard of it before, right? It’s that social network that allows users to quickly find websites that they’ll like. But is that all it is? Most certainly not. To us bloggers, StumbleUpon is one of the best promotion techniques available. Here’s why:

1. It’s continuous. Unlike Digg or Delicious, StumbleUpon can send a steady river of traffic, not just one giant spike. This means that over time, StumbleUpon will deliver more visitors than Digg or similar social bookmarking sites. I received a giant wave of 5000+ stumblers on the 4th day of my blog’s opening, and two weeks later, I’m still getting 150+ uniques a day from that same wave!
2. It’s targeted. StumbleUpon will only show your site to users that will likely be interested in your content: that means that there’s a much higher chance that you will convert them to regular users.
3. It doesn’t matter how ‘big’ you are on the blogosphere. Unlike Digg, you can submit your own stories to StumbleUpon and still have a chance of gaining tons of traffic. You don’t already have to own a huge blog to get stumbled a bunch.

So, how do you utilize StumbleUpon’s great features and get tons of traffic? If you’re write great content, you’re already halfway there. However, there are a few extra steps you should take to make sure your posts are completely optimized for StumbleUpon:

1. Make your blog pretty. StumbleUpon users hate ugly websites and will skip over them like a fuzzy TV channel. Your site should be attractive to the eye, and your post should have interesting pictures and videos scattered throughout it and especially above the fold. The fold is the section of the post you can see before you scroll down at all.
2. Have tons of content. Unless you have piles of content, your visitor won’t have any reason to come back to your blog – They could read all your stuff in one go. Make sure you have enough good content that the reader won’t be able to read it all in one day, or even several days.
3. Don’t flood your site with ads. StumbleUpon users won’t read a site covered over with ads. Use only a few high-quality targeted ads and you will get much better sites. This applies for everything, not just StumbleUpon.
4. Show your subscription buttons in an obvious place. If you want to get return visits from the StumbleUpon users, this is a very important step. Prominently show a subscribe button for both email and RSS, and make it easy to subscribe – no unnecessary forms.

Using these four steps, you should soon be able to maximize the amount of traffic you can receive from StumbleUpon. I hope they provide useful for you. So what are you waiting for? Get stumbling!