I recently co-founded a company called wearabl, which sells awesome independent t-shirts from around the world. One of the things I do there is oversee the editorial calendar and traffic.
So the other day, I was researching a few social outposts I noticed some friends in the community using a few familiar services, including StumbleUpon, so I began investigating how we could use the service too.
What I found blew my mind.
Rewinding for a moment, remember a while back when everyone was crying about the death of Digg, Delicious, and maybe even social bookmarking as a whole? Well, the services themselves may have gone under the knife and switched hands, but they never really died. Stumble Upon is a service I’d like to look at in particular because of a unique solution they offer publishers.
The su.pr URL shortener by StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is in the business of sharing content and content discovery, so it’s in their best interest to incentive publishers to use their service when sharing content because then they have more content for their users to stumble.
What seems to unfold is simple.
You use their su.pr URL shortener to shorten the link you’d like to share around the web — they’ve even made it simple to share it with Facebook and Twitter right there under the text field.
The Stumble Frame
Once you post, the link is saved in their database and your new link not only directed people to your original URL using the nifty su.pr structure, but it also includes the Stumble frame, which enables people to give you a thumbs up and thus tell Stumble your content rocks.
Because you’ve selected the StumbleUpon su.pr URL service and allow Stumble to place their frame at the top of your content, they help push more traffic your direction when their users start Stumbling … a little kickback in a sense.
Give it a whirl!
To start getting more traffic to your blog posts, hop over to su.pr and sign up to use the service. Once you do, you’re free to start shortening and sharing content as much as you’d like. Watch your numbers grow and remember to use the shortnend link whenever sharing your content … it’ll help drive traffic from Stumble.
Su.pr seems like it has a lot of potential. I keep forgetting about it, however. I always make sure to stumble my own articles, but for whatever reason I can’t remember to use their url shortener.
Good reminder, and great article. Thanks!