I knew I had this problem and I was just thinking what I had done wrong and what I have to do to make the things be all right again. The problem was that in the first 2-3 weeks of my blog, I often stumbled a few articles / week and received thousands of visitors without a problem. After a while, stumbleupon suddenly stopped sending me traffic even if my articles were rocking!

My plan was to do nothing for a few weeks, and that’s exactly what I did, I made a pause from stumbleupon with my auto blog. It was hard, but that was the best thing I could do. And in the meantime I tried to build my profile.

So, the thing I am trying to tell you is to stop stumbling your blog for a while ( you and your friends ) if stumbleupon stopped working for you, make a small pause.

Another tip is that you shouldn’t be the only one that submits the articles to stumbleupon. Try to gather some friends and please them to do that. I am not talking about stumble exchanges, no! That is forbidden and I don’t recommend it. Just ask your stumble friends something like “Hey .. what do you think about this article? Impressive, huh?”.

This method really works! As a result of it, today I submitted an article from my auto blog to stumbleupon and received 1500 visits so far. That’s pretty good I think, 1500 and counting!

Driving traffic to your blog is very important, I agree with that, but every new blogger should know that at the beginning, subscribers are more important than traffic. You know .. visitors come and leave, subscribers read you every day and it’s very important to build a community, and have strong connections with your readers. So how do you convert traffic to subscribers?

• Write great posts

Yes, this is a must. Nobody will ever come back on a blog that has poor content and nothing interesting. I know, you can’t have 100% original content, the blogosphere is immense and the internet too but you should say the things in a different way, be unique with something, come with something new! And don’t forget, many bloggers think that there’s a rule to write daily, like many posts per day. This is completely wrong. It’s better two write 3 awesome posts/week than 15 so and so posts/week.

• Make it easy to subscribe

So you have great content, and your readers want to subscribe at your blog, but it’s pretty difficult to find the subscriptions button or the box where they have to enter their e-mail. You should make this two things very visible. Look at my blog, the top part of my sidebar is reserved for these, but don’t believe me, take a look at other succesful blogs like problogger. Or at the end of your article you could write something like “If you liked this post, please subscribe” and include a link to your feed there.

• Offer something free for the ones who subscribe

We all like free stuff, don’t you? So this is a great tip to increase your subscribers number. You could offer an ebook written by you (a 50 pages one should be ok) or a free review on your blog. As I said, everyone loves free stuff! And if you have great content, that readers will remain subscribed.

• Teach your readers what’s rss and how to use it

You can never know. Maybe many readers of your blog don’t know what is RSS and how to use it so it should be a great idea to write a page where to tell them what’s a RSS and how to subscribe.

• Show the number of your subscribers

If you have something like 100 subscribers or even more, you should make that visible on your blog. New visitors will see that and will think that there must be something good at your blog if you have so many subscribers.

This is a pretty common question. There are many “big guys” (this is how I call them) that have some bucks and want to get some traffic instead of them. Maybe you are one of that “big guys” and that’s why I am writing this article.

Ok, so which is the best way to spend your money for getting some traffic? Actually, it depends very much on your niche. Most of you would tend to say “Adsense for the win!” but if you want to promote a great tech blog I would recommend you to use Chitika.

I think that that another great way to spend your money in order to get some traffic is by paying a seo master! Google has a great potential for sending thousands of targeted visitors to your site, and it’s kinda cheap to pay a seo master that will rank you high for some keywords that will send you traffic long time from now.

Or, you could be more creative and a little crazy. I live in Romania, and the elections are running. Many people want get popular, and one of them found a really crazy idea of promoting himself - eggvertising or advertising on eggs:

On that eggs is written in Romanian “Vote Matei” and the expiry date of the eggs.

Let’s be serious now. Another method ( I didn’t try it so I can’t say if it’s good or not ) it’s buying some text ad links. I have a feeling that this way of advertising is worth the money, but I can’t be sure.

All in all, it’s all on you! You have to decide how you want to spend the money. But my best recommendation is to hire a seo master!

As I said in the past, stumbleupon is a great way to receive traffic to your blog. I really love it, it’s good for bloggers and for surfers too, you can surf the internet in a very easy way and find only the things you are interested in. But be careful, stumbleupon is addicting :D.

photo by Dennis Goedegebuure

Ok, so you have a blog, and you stumble a great article of yours. People like it, and you receive traffic. Be intelligent, convert this traffic into money.

I think that most of you use adsense, it’s so popular. Well, adsense is good too, it can generate some money but stumblers usually don’t stay much on a page, they just read the article, see what’s the deal with it, rate it or not and then they hit the “Stumble!” button and go on another page. This is how stumbleupon works, and because of that you won’t receive so many clicks on your ads.

The best way to convert stumbleupon traffic into money is using a CPM ( cost per mile ). You just have to find a website that pays you for holding its banner on your blog (don’t worry, usually these kind of banners are small and they won’t disturb anyone). There are many websites that pay you a certain amount per 1000 views of their banner. The best one I know is http://tribalfusion.com/ but the problem with this one is that you get approved very hard. Anyway, google will always help you.

So now that you know, go and write a great article and submit it for stumbleupon!