StumbleUpon Optimization: Leveraging Photo Stumbles for More Web Traffic
In my recent article on traffic building using Flickr, I’ve mentioned that StumbleUpon users love to stumble images as it allows them to adorn their StumbleUpon blog with all their favorite pictures.
Some StumbleUpon users have made photo stumbling into an art form and their blogs feature fantastic collections of meticulously selected pictures, placed alongside poetry and commentary.
This article on photo stumbling will offer some detailed tips on how you can use and optimize your images in order to increase the potential of receiving more stumbles and hence, visitors to your website.
For those of you who are new to StumbleUpon, you can start by reading my extensive guide to StumbleUpon, which outlines how you can use StumbleUpon as a means to drive massive traffic to your website.
Using Images to Increase Your StumbleUpon Traffic
I use StumbleUpon daily because its a nifty and out-of-the-box way to find interesting websites, concepts or art forms not available in most other social media or internet channels.
While I am hardly an ideal-type or model for all other stumblers, I do think most users view StumbleUpon as a platform which allows them to randomly explore the internet and share relevant content with other like-minded individuals.
I’ve mentioned before that the use of images is one of the best ways to immediately capture the attention of StumbleUpon users. The strategic use of pictures are by far the most effective method to organically increase your StumbleUpon traffic.
Learning how to use and optimize images on your website will easily increase your potential for receiving more StumbleUpon visitors, which is a powerful way to expand your site audience or reach.
An Introduction to Photo Stumbling
Photo Stumbling is a feature that is built into StumbleUpon, which allows users to post pictures on the web into their StumbleUpon blog. Not all StumbleUpon users are familiar with this feature, so this little introduction might be also useful for some of you who are new to StumbleUpon.
To stumble a photo you like, you’ll simply need to right click and choose the Stumble Photo Blog It! function, which will then allow you to submit the picture as if you were submitting any other webpage. Take a look at the screenshot below for an example:
If the picture is already submitted, you’ll been taken to the discussion page whereby you can add more tags or leave a comment. After doing so, click on the green ‘Save changes‘ button and you’re done.
Examples of Photo Stumblers
Active StumbleUpon users are very likely to be active photo stumblers as well. A brief review of the stumblers listed on the Top Stumblers List will show that most of them practice photo stumbling regularly. Thousands of other StumbleUpon users do so as well, although some use the feature less frequently than others.
To better understand what type of images are likely to be heavily stumbled you’ll need to first appreciate the different types of StumbleUpon users around. Here are three prototypical examples of StumbleUpon users who practice photo stumbling.
1. The Artistic Stumbler
CherishMe is a classic StumbleUpon user who combines stylistic imagery with unique commentary, which in her case is poetry. Her StumbleUpon blog is a work of art and is immensely popular with many StumbleUpon users. I myself am a fan of her work and there aren’t many like her.
2. The Humor Stumbler
AutoRave is my StumbleUpon username and my SU blog is similar to those of other stumblers, who generally use random pictures from a wide variety of sources. These photo stumbles are usually interspersed with text-only stumbles and they do not generally follow a pattern or theme. Pictures stumbled cover a range of topics from photography, art and web comics to funny pictures.
3. The Photography Stumbler
Mortal-Light is an example of a photography-oriented StumbleUpon user who focuses on stumbling images alone, very rarely including any text. The pictures stumbled are usually themed and in the case of Mortal-Light, her focus is on nature and urban landscapes.
Some of these photo stumblers are purists in the sense that they may not stumble your web page if there isn’t a picture they can incorporate into their blog.
Take a look at each of these StumbleUpon profiles and check out the profiles of other stumblers as well, so you’ll get a rough idea of how stumblers interact with images on webpages.
How to Use and Optimize Pictures for Stumble Upon
The process of optimizing your images and making them stumble-friendly isn’t difficult at all. Here are six steps you can take to prepare your images for StumbleUpon.
1. Allow Hotlinking Access to StumbleUpon
Yes, Photo stumblers are hotlinking your pictures. And yes, it does consume your bandwidth whenever someone photoblogs your image. I personally don’t mind being hotlinked by StumbleUpon users because the benefits outweigh the costs particularly so, when the bandwidth leeched is rather minimal.
The StumbleUpon user blogs/profiles do not see much traffic and only a small amount of bandwidth is used through photoblogging. This differs from traditional high traffic blogs, websites or forums which can steal a lot of bandwidth through the direct use of hotlinked images.
It is important to note that some StumbleUpon users do not practice photoblogging because they believe that hotlinking is in bad form and unfairly affects the website in question. I would recommend reading this detailed discussion on Photo blogging and hotlinking in the StumbleUpon forum as there’s a good deal of balanced information available on this topic.
I’m aware that some of you might run websites with low bandwidth limits or dislike hotlinking in general. Just be aware that if you disable hotlinking completely for your website, StumbleUpon users will not be able to stumble your images.
While this might be so, some StumbleUpon users will still thumbs up and stumble your webpage if they find it interesting enough.
2. Make Your Pictures the Right Size
This is the the most fundamental part of stumble image optimization. If your images are too big, Stumble Upon users will not be able to submit or photo stumble it, which defeats the purpose of using an image to attract stumble traffic.
Here’s an example of what happens when a particular image is too big to be stumbled (An error box will show up saying that the image is too large):
The key point here is to make sure that your images are not wider than 715 pixels.
3. Use Intriguing and Unique Images
Try to use an image that is not only relevant to your content but highly attractive. Flickr is a good place to look for images, as they have a large collection of pictures and also because you can easily embed the image into your webpage. Do remember to credit the image owner if necessary.
Alternatively, you can create your own unique pictures and graphics or make stylistic edits to specific pictures you have. These types of images are usually very well received by StumbleUpon audiences. Webcomics are a good example.
4. Leverage Another Platform: Use Flickr to Host Your Pictures
When your Flickr-hosted images are stumbled, StumbleUpon traffic isn’t directed to Flickr but to your specific webpage, even though your image is hosted on Flickr.
As the image source doesn’t affect the traffic flow, I highly recommend creating a Flickr account to host your images. As I’ve mentioned earlier in my article on using Flickr for marketing, creating and uploading pictures into your own Flickr account makes them a potential referral traffic source.
StumbleUpon has a feature called StumbleThru, which allows you to stumble within specific websites, Flickr being one of them. By uploading your images on Flickr and inserting a link back to your website, you are essentially creating another channel which will give your website more exposure to StumbleUpon users.
5. Create a List of Images Around a Theme
This method operates through a simple principle: The more images you have, the more likely you are to be stumbled.
A webpage with a collection of pictures is very likely to receive a lot more potential stumbles because users are able to selectively stumble the images they fancy.
Dismal World has a great example of a webpage that is perfect Stumble bait. Their list of unforgettable world photos has a coherent theme while featuring commentary which explains each picture.
This article was extremely well received by the StumbleUpon audience and received 148 reviews since it was first submitted on Jun 24th.
If you take a look at all the recent stumblers, you would have noticed that most of them stumbled different pictures within the list, once again supporting our theory that picture differentiation and themed images help to encourage more stumbles.
Oddee is another website that has a wildly popular collection of pictures. Titled 15 Unfortunately placed ads, this list of pictures feature a collection of images around the theme of misplaced advertisements.
Only submitted yesterday, it has already received 50+ reviews and reached the Digg frontpage as well. Creating a list of pictures will not only allow you to receive many stumbles; they can easily be cross-promoted on other social websites as well.
6. Add Commentary to Your Pictures
Adding comments on each specific image introduces the value of the images to visitors and personalizes it by making it conceptually unique. This has the possible benefit of encouraging more photo stumbles.
Commentary also has the additional benefit of helping your site to rank for several long tail keywords, therefore allowing you to get more organic search traffic as well.
Photo Stumble Optimization Helps Your Website
As most of you will probably know, StumbleUpon can send a tremendous amount of traffic to your website and the consistent use of images fit well with the StumbleUpon audience, particularly because of the built-in photo blogging option.
These optimization methods are nothing devious because there’s really no way to trick a StumbleUpon user into thumbing your website. You can expand your network of StumbleUpon friends as much as you want but you can’t completely game StumbleUpon into giving you more traffic.
You can however, encourage a greater amount of organic, natural stumbles by simply making your website irresistible through optimized usage of attractive images.
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I seem to have a problem with my stumble account, i am unable to add photos nor articles, anything wrong, cause i tried going to the setting but nothing seems to change the current outlook.
Thanks Maki. Very creative idea. I think its a good idea to expand your SU network and have more fans. But not sure if it’ll boost the click through rate to your blog by a wide margin…
Have you ever had a chance to track the number of visitors a SU picture blog generates on average in a month?
Ankesh,
I’m not quite sure what you’re referring to when you talk about the ‘click through rate’. The article was primarily about the use of optimized images to encourage people to photo stumble your blog, thereby increasing StumbleUpon traffic. It’s not about people clicking through to your blog through the specific SU user blog or profile pages.
Yes I have, I do happen to own a blog that’s very SU-friendly. The traffic numbers are almost Digg-like for very popular posts. I’m talking about 10k+ unique visitors in a day for a single article with a consistent average of 2 to 5K uniques for several weeks after a major stumble. And that’s just for one picture-intensive article.
Interesting write-up. I had never given any thought to using pictures as a way to drive traffic to a blog. I’m new to the whole blogging thing so there’s lots of things I’ve not heard of or tried.
I’ve had 20,000 pagveviews (12,000+ unique visitors) from StumbleUpon in the last few days just on weburbanist.com … a total of over 70,000 between 3 sites I work on in the last week. You’ll see there is a balance between image and text, as well as critical bookmarking tools and catchy images above the fold.
what an effective stumbling technique..thanks for sharing Maki..
Great write up Maki. Once again you’ve opened my eyes to yet another SEO effort I need to catch up with. I’ll add it to the list.
Maki -
When you host the pictures on Flickr that become photo stumbled, does this still really drive traffic to your blog? In my experience, stumblers rarely follow links on the pages they stumble upon, but instead stumble again. How much traffic total do your blogs get from Flickr via Stumbleupon?
Get more traffic using photos or images is very Interesting. I just starting to do it, and now I get more idea by reading this post.
Thanks Maki!.
Jason,
Maybe I’m not being clear enough in the article. Imagine this scenario: Someone arrives at your site and clicks on your Flickr-hosted picture to photo stumble it. All future visitors that will come once the picture is photo stumbled will arrive directly to the page where the image is placed and NOT Flickr.
They don’t have to follow any link on any page. They see a picture they like on your site, they photo stumble it, you get the traffic.They don’t need to click through to Flickr to stumble the picture.
The amount of traffic you get from Flickr depends on how you promote the picture, the type of picture and the amount of pictures you have on Flickr. This could range from 30 to perhaps over 500+ visitors a month.
Not related to photos but a quick word about Stumble Upon. If you want to increase traffic you must be using Stumble Upon. After each post I go to the perm. page of that post then Stumble it. That day I will see close to 200 stumblers. Not sure how this number relates to other blogs but I think it’s a great start.
Bruce: you really need to start networking. I need to write an article about this, but I’ll give the Clif’s Notes here:
1) Find similar Stumblers and add them as a friend - use tags to locate them, or find out who has Stumbled pages relevant/similar to your interests/blog
2) On specific posts, find people (on StumbleUpon) you think will be interested. Send them a message. Some will write you back with thanks, some will say they won’t look at links blind - but if even a few look and Stumble you that will boost your traffic - and a little more exposure might start escalating things into a landslide of hits.
3) Make sure that traffic is worth your while. You could get thousands of hits a day, but if that isn’t converting into RSS readership or otherwise long-term traffic it is effort down the drain. DoshDosh has other articles on keeping Stumble visitors you should look at.
This might sound like a ‘lot of work’ but honestly, if you’re spending a few minute each post to Stumble, but only getting 200 visitors out of it, you might as well spend a few more minutes and multiple that significantly
Urbanist,
Your dead on - Networking is a must. My Blog is about book selling and I’m sure 99.99 Stumblers aren’t in the book business. I was just mentioning how it can add a little extra exposure. I spend quite a bit of time reading and writing on specific book selling related blogs and web sites. My Networking time is spent pinpointed on my business.
If you do write something about the ins and outs of Stumble upon I’d love to post it on my blog (and read it myself), thanks.
Bruce,
My opinion differs from Urbanist. I actually don’t think networking within Stumble helps you to get a lot more Stumbles. I do have a lot of Stumble fans but I feel that what’s most important is the content on your site and how its structured. I’ve already mentioned in my post that photos work. Networking is a very minor part about getting stumbles.
I am an active Stumbler and I don’t just use stumble to build traffic. It’s irritating to receive messages about links and I know a lot of other active stumblers who dislike them as well. Still, you can try it for yourself if you do have the time or inclination to do so.
Do check out this article that I’ve wrote about how to increase your network of StumbleUpon friends.
I would suggest contacting Urbanist in private through his site if you want more of his take on this topic.
Thanks for that Maki.
This is a very helpful guide… nice job! It was a lot of work, and worth it IMO
Very well done!
I could not write it better. So I will have to read your post.
Thanks!
The tip on stumblethru with flikr, was new to me, thanxs for the info. (and all your other great tips)
There was a discussion on Blog Catalog not too long ago, on the photoblog feature on SU, and i was told i was leeching and hotlinking, and so i stopped using the feature. What do you recommend one look for, when trying to decide whether the site one is gonna photoblog, is not going to mind one photoblogging them?
Thanxs, Missy.
Maki,
I am running SU experiment now with 10 stumblers. To see if the traffic just with 10 su’s will increase.
Thanks for the links to those image stumblers!
Hi, Does anyone know if Stumbleupon has limited the number of reviews to your own site you can do, for example they don’t seem to allow you to favorite more than one post to your site per day.