Jason Unger

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One of my goals in my online content consulting is to help publications best use social networking and community-type sites to let users promote and spread content.

Most of the time, you hear about the effect of digg and del.icio.us on traffic, but lost in the shuffle of the various social sites is a tremendous traffic driver: StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon takes an old-school Web concept — "stumbling" onto pages recommended by other users — but manages to make it work.

I'm not a huge fan of having another toolbar to install, but the service not only gives you good suggestions when you need to kill some time, but also can be a tremendous traffic boost.

Take, for example, a recent massive surge of traffic to the OnlineSavingsBlog from StumbleUpon.

I obviously blurred out the exact numbers, but traffic to the site — which has only been live for the better part of a week — surged 580% from Saturday to Monday.

While increased traffic numbers is obviously great, the best part is that it's targeted traffic. Unlike digg or del.icio.us, the visitors coming to your site are there because they like similar content to what you offer.

With better qualified traffic, you're more likely to get repeat visitors, a passionate audience — and a better sales pitch to advertisers looking for a certain kind of customer.

The 580% traffic spike is obviously not going to last, but because the visitors were recommended my content based upon what else they like, they are more likely to subscribe to an RSS feed or sign up for email updates.

So what's the key point here? Web developers: don't just try and use digg and del.icio.us to promote your site. Give StumbleUpon a try and see how it works.