I’ve read a lot recently about using social media sites (especially bookmarking sites) to build traffic. The site that seems most heavily recommended is StumbleUpon. Unfortunately most of the articles I read don’t really go into HOW to do it. We can all figure out the basics of how to submit a site to SU or any of the other bookmarking sites, but obviously there are ways to improve your chances of getting traffic from them. I’ll show you what I’ve done, and what I *think* I’ve learned. Obviously the proof is in the pudding, so I’ll cover my traffic numbers also.

As I said, I’ve read a lot recently on using social media & bookmarking to build traffic. To that end I had stumbled a number of posts on other sites I run. The posts I stumbled were unremarkable and had no characteristics of linkbait.

2 days ago I decided to take a slightly different approach. I had put up a number of iPod videos on justtechvideos.com so instead of stumbling to each one, I simply stumbled the category page (here) with the following (admittedly lame) description: A post of video reviews of the new selection of Apple iPods. That’s it. I figured iPods are always a popular subject, especially with the recent releases of the Touch and revised Nano.

A little to my surprise, there’s been traffic! Not much, but this was just a test with minimal effort. The day after the stumble, the site received 4 visits while the following day received an additional 7. Not setting the world on fire, but it’s a start.

So what have I learned? The content should be good. In the case of this site, just any old video post wouldn’t work. Instead I put some thought into my efforts and came up with something that would interest people. I read an article today about getting your blog bookmarked on delicious, one of the tips he gave said it very succinctly: “Write a post you’d bookmark”