This is my weekly post, every Saturday, on how to market, build traffic, and make money, off a sports blog. For more, check out the Sports Blogger Forums.

MITCHELL BLATT

What if you could simply submit your article to a website and know that you were going to get 300+ hits from that website just by submitting it? Well, you can email Deadspin, and that will get you 1,000 hits if they post it, but they don’t post a high percentage of their submissions. This site I’m talking about brings hits every time you submit things.

This site is Stumble Upon. Not only does it have the ability of sending you massive traffic, but the traffic is good traffic. They spend 54% more time on my site than the average visitor and view 37% more pages.

Find out how to dominate SU:

First, how to use Stumble Upon if you don’t know. You sign up, and you can download a toolbar that has buttons to vote sites up or down when you view them. If it gets voted up, it gets submitted into SU’s database. All votes are counted (continuously), and the sites with the most votes get more visitors sent to them.

How this works is there is a Stumble button that you can click to go to a site determined by your user preferences, what kinds of sites you like, and the more votes a site has, the higher chance it has of being selected. It also depends to a certain extent on what sites your friends like, because it will often send you to a site your friend has selected.

That’s why it’s key to build friends on Stumble Upon. The more friends you have, the more often your sites will received traffic, and thus, the more chance you have of getting votes, which will send more traffic, so it’s really based on an exponential curve when it comes to the relationship between traffic and friends. I have about 70 friends, and this is usually good for about 300 hits. If you’re just getting started, you can friend me at my SU homepage, and I will likely return the favor.

Here are some specific tips on adding friends.

When you submit a site, there is an option to add tags. By default, you pick a main tag, probably “sports” for most of your submissions, if you’re reading this. However, you can also add other tags, which increases the amount of people who might find your story in a search. For example, if you are submitting a story on the Knicks, you could do “sports,” “nba,” “new york,” “knicks,” “stephon marbury,” and whoever else is involved.

One thing to note is that Stumble Upon doesn’t necessarily like spam (who would have thought?), so you can’t submit from the same site too often. I think the algorithm is like 1 url from the same domain for every 8 submissions or something. At any rate, you should probably only Stumble yourself one, twice, maybe three times a week, if you have really kick ass posts. Only Stumble the best.

Stumble Upon is the highest quality social media site in terms of traffic quality and quantity, so make good use of it, and hopefully, it helps you.

For more tips and discussions about running a successful blog, read the Sports Blogger Forums.

Also, if you have any questions for future Money Sports Blogging posts, email them to me at mhblatt(at)gmail.com

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