Value of a Stumbleupon button on a largely commercial site?

[dickbaker]

In the never-ending quest for more links, I was mulling the idea of adding Stumbleupon buttons to my site, but I can't decide if it's a good idea or not.

My site is largely commercial, offering advertising for retail stores within my niche. I also have a small online store. Additionally, I have a ton of pages of photos and descriptions of my niche's widgets.

I'm trying to figure out how adding a button could be harmful, but I'm not familiar enough with all of this to know if it's a good idea. I've looked at some reviews of sites within my niche and, because the products in my niche can be controversial, there's a lot of reviewers chiming in about how bad widgets are.

At any rate, has anyone else used Stumbleupon to get additional traffic and rankings for your commercial site?

[seoexperts]

well as of now i can't clearly suggest whether or not you should use StumbleUpon button on your commercial website, but yeah in my opinion it is not going to harm you anyways,, infact it can be helpful for you to generate more traffic from stumblers, once someone stumbles your particular page in his list.

Well i do not know about the commercial as i already told, but yeah i love to use stumble upon as well as digg buttons on my personal pages.

[QualityNonsense]

I'm a huge fan of tools to prompt users to vote on StumbleUpon, Delicious etc. Every site I've tried them on, they have got the sites bookmarked.

But the only way to be sure it to test it for your site. But I don't see what you have to lose? All publicity is good publicity. If it gets SU users visiting, you're good to go. The controversy for the products might be a good thing...

[pageoneresults]

At any rate, has anyone else used Stumbleupon to get additional traffic and rankings for your commercial site?

Have you checked to see what others in your industry may be doing? Have you read the StumbleUpon guidelines? I think you'll find plenty of information in the public docs starting here...

Is StumbleUpon right for my business?
[stumbleupon.com...]

StumbleUpon works best for businesses with something valuable to offer, presented in an informative or entertaining way.

You can also create targeted advertising campaigns...

Create new campaign
[stumbleupon.com...]

^ Check out the category depths for each. StumbleUpon is growing every day. What used to be a passing fad appears to have sunk its teeth in. :)

From a commercial standpoint, you'll want to learn everything you can about the SU networks. You'll also want to dedicate a person to that aspect of your business which can be classifed under Social Media. You'll use other SM sites like Twitter, PLURK, etc. to power your commercial campaign. You'll drop 140 character messages asking your friends for a Stumble at which time if they like it, they'll trip over ya. ;)

It really does come down to quality. I've seen the high volume commodity Stumblers and I've seen the low volume quality ones. Quality Stumblers appear to do much better overall in promoting their products and/or services.

Don't take SU lightly and please don't abuse the system (not you directly). I've come to appreciate the value of SU and I've actually taken one or two sites down because of a Stumble. Those sites were in restricted hosting plans. :(

Before you can do all of the above, you'll need to establish a Social Media Network following. Some refer to them as a "Herd". I don't like that term.

[QualityNonsense]

BTW, let's not forget that SU is not the only game in town. Some of my sites do well on Delicious and Reddit, for example. All depends on the niche, obviously.

Same punchline: give people a reason to link to you. Might be buyer's guides, humour content etc etc.

[deliciousbass]

The newest game in town is Yahoo! Buzz, which has enormous potential given Yahoo's scale and ability to drive traffic. Seems similar to Digg in terms of audience and policies, maybe with more emphasis on political news and entertainment than some of the tech-related topics on Digg.