You’ve heard their names: Stumble Upon, Digg, Technorati, Propeller and so on and so forth… but can they actually bring reliable traffic to your website as they claim they can? I have been a skeptic for some time, but I am just now starting to realize the power behind these programs as theNetFool.com continues to grow.

After having my “Top Five WordPress Plugins” post stumbled, I saw the true benefits of these online communities. In about a 30 minute time frame, I had a massive jump in traffic under my belt that more than doubled what I had expected to reach that day in unique visitors. You will see on the traffic log pictured below, that the views from Stumble Upon literally lit up my blog for that day (Thursday). Despite the fact that most of these viewers were not the most loyal, I am a believer that the sheer number of readers will be a cause for increased readership and exposure.

So what exactly is Stumble Upon anyway? I like to think of it as the world’s premier free internet-traffic machine :D . Essentially, it involves people viewing your site with the installed Stumble Upon toolbar and then using its features to recommend your website. This recommendation oftentimes is picked up by other viewers and basically spammed across the net for a brief period of time. Sounds like a terrible way to increase your readers, eh? Actually, most of the hits are from a targeted audience who are interested in reading up on the topic area, so you can count on a good amount of people to stick around. After all, you are bound to stir up some interest eventually.

Okay, so here’s the kicker, the more websites you “stumble,” the more your rating increases on the Stumble Upon database. With this in mind, the greater your rating is, the higher-up your stumbled-websites will appear in search rankings. This is totally fair and a win-win situation in my mind, making this service a marketing powerhouse. If you want to find targeted traffic from a reliable source without paying a dime… I strongly suggest downloading the Stumble Upon toolbar to start to rocking the blogosphere and increasing your rating!

Social bookmarking is one of the “hot topics” in the internet today without a doubt. While I understand that Stumble Upon is fantastic, and drives insane amounts of traffic to the targeted websites, there are many other great ways to do this. My other favorite would have to be Digg, but there are about a dozen services that will do the same thing for you for free. So get your blog on steroids, and try one out today ;)

-The Net Fool

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