Link Bait

When a stumbler presses the Stumble! button, they want to be impressed with the resulting webpage, but they are well aware that not all of the websites they will find will be interesting.

When observing others use StumbleUpon, you quickly begin to notice a particular use pattern. Stumblers will generally click through stumbles, spending as little as 5-10 seconds on a given stumble, until they find something that intrigues them, at which point they will spend an extended amount of time on that website, click Thumbs Up, and repeat the process.

While not all stumblers exhibit this behavior, it is important that the page users land on through StumbleUpon has enough wow-factor to keep them there. SEO experts call this link-baiting, as this phenomenon is not unique to StumbleUpon. Intenet users are notorious for making hasty decisions when judging websites. It is the reason Google Analytics publishes the Bounce Rate statistic.

Case-in-point: I have two websites regarding a similar subject, computer programming. The websites are Genetic Programming Source and jsAnim: JavaScript Animation Library. While the GP website is far more in-depth, the design is quite plain. jsAnim, on the other hand, has an impressive colorfully animated introduction. In terms of performance on StumbleUpon, GP Source occasionally gets some SU traffic, whereas jsAnim did excedingly well the very first day I submitted it, in the range of thousands of hits.

While both sites have the same general level of appeal in terms of content, jsAnim wins in the wow-factor category hands-down. As a result, stumblers are more likely to click Thumbs Up to jsAnim. Link-baiting is all about capturing attention in the first seconds of a user's stumble. If you can capture it, you can then proceed to provide them with whatever information you'd like.

Some tips to effective link baiting include,

• Lots of large, colorful images and pictures.
• Animation, video, or some other type of motion.
• Reduce ad-coverage, at least on landing pages.
• For services, big, bold words to describe website concisely.
• Stumble for yourself and see what kinds of websites come up most often!

Designing an impressive StumbleUpon landing is an important step to effective StumbleUpon marketing. Play around with some different techniques and find out what works for your. For experimental results, see our Tests page.