If you’re a search marketer and you dabble at all in social media, there is one program you’re probably already taking advantage of: StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon gives some great returns with a relatively small time investment. I’ve discussed StumbleUpon before, in the context of an interview with social media guru Neil Patel, but let’s take a closer look at how it works…

With the StumbleUpon browser extension installed, with the click of a button you get sent to a random page. Once there, you can give the page a thumbs up or thumbs down and then move on to “stumble upon” the next random page. Think of it as channel surfing, but on the Web. You can select your categories of interest so that the random pages are more targeted to your tastes. You can leave a comment about what you like/dislike about any page.

It doesn’t take very many thumbs-up votes to send hundreds if not thousands of visitors to your site – even if your site is brand new. It sounds easy, just start voting for your content.

But there’s more to it than that… there are some important social media “tricks of the trade” that will help maximize the opportunity.

The most important thing is to have mutual friends. As you follow people on StumbleUpon, you will see more pages that they like. The idea is to follow people with similar interests.

The trick comes in when you begin to use the “Send To” option within the browser extension / toolbar. This option sends a site, along with a personalized message to your friend. The friend is forced to view this site before they can continue with their random stumbling. Do you see where I’m going with this? In the message you can ask them to thumbs up your page — the more thumbs up a page has, the more traffic it will get from StumbleUpon. Your friends will probably ask for you to do the same for their sites in return. One hand washes the other…

What are your favorite tactics for maximizing your StumbleUpon traffic?