A few months back I outlined a way to use Twitter and Stumbleupon together to try and further increase the potential combined visitors above what you’d get just using each network on its own.

The idea was really very simple. Submit a page to the Stumbleupon network and then use the toolbar to create a Stumbleupon shortended url. Use this url when sending links to Twitter followers, and every time they open the link the Stumbleupon bar appears at the top of the page, offering another opportunity for the page to be passed to others.

And this worked quite well. Each tweet posted out would bring back a flurry of traffic from both the t.co Twitter url and a similar amount from the su.pr Stumbleupon’s shortened url.

But then something rather interesting seemed to happen. Trying to drive website traffic from Twitter has one consistent factor: once you stop tweeting the traffic stops as well. And for a while this applied to the Stumbleupon traffic as well.

But after a few weeks the Stumbleupon traffic has taken on a life of its own, growing steadily until it’s only just behind Google in terms of volume. Stumbleupon has effectively become self sustaining, as a valuable source of website traffic.

In some ways this is not such a great suprise, as after all, Stumbleupon is a recommendation engine that has become a social network with 20 million users and 1 billion stumbles (opportunity for people to find you pages) every month.

So how can you go about benefiting from the traffic Stumbleupon could bring to your website? The answer is simple. Start using Stumbleupon yourself and make use of it to like and distribute your own website pages using the Stumbleupon toolbar and shortened url.

I’m working on further tips to drive website traffic. Enter your email below in the Free SEO Tips Newsletter so you’ll be the first to know when they are published.

Related Guides:

How to use Twitter to drive website traffic from StumbleUpon SEO Tips: Driving website traffic from Google with shortened URLs SEO Tips: Driving Website Traffic with Hootsuite SEO Tips: Driving website traffic with Feedburner (RSS). Not as hard as you might think.