I signed up for Stumble Upon several years ago.  At the time, it was a convenient way for my teenagers to send me internet sites that they wanted to share with me.  Since we are all signed up, it’s like I had an inbox in my browser of web sites they liked.  If I wanted to  recommend a web site, Stumble Upon also allows me to email the URL to a friend directly from the site.  Most subscribers to Stumble Upon probably just use it to personalize their web-surfing.

For Bloggers

What I recommend for bloggers, though, is to use Stumble Upon to bring visitors to your site.  When I wrote a post for Easter on one of my blogs, I also gave it a “thumbs up” from my Stumble Upon toolbar and wrote a review.  You can see in the graph the spike of visitors I had on Easter.  I know that over 150 of those visitors (or better than 3/5 of my Easter visitors) came from Stumble Upon.

For Everyone

If you are part of Stumble Upon, your Google searches would look similar to this.  The smaller yellow stars show that the site has had positive reviews by stumblers.  Holding your mouse over the stars tells you how many “thumbs up” the site has received.  I also know that two stumblers in my network like the sites (the red person icon).  So, if you do Google searches regularly, Stumble Upon shows you recommended sites.

Wikipedia has a good explanation of Stumble Upon.  Maybe you have a creative idea for using Stumble Upon for ministry that you can share with us.

Help Campus Crusade Staff Bloggers

One way anyone can help, whether or not you are blogging, is to give your “thumbs up” to our CCC Staff bloggers (see left sidebar or our alphabetical list).  You can do a thumbs up for the home page and also for individual posts and photos.  A review is optional, but would also help bring visitors to these Campus Crusade staff blogs.

NOTE: I also knew that this past weekend was a good time to post because of popular searches on the internet.  According to Nibbo.com and Google Trends last Friday, keywords were “Good Friday,” Bible verses”, and I assumed, “Easter”.

I also used Brian Barela’s advice to increase the likelihood that my post would be more easily found.

Here’s the link to the post that got the spike in visitors… and to think I almost did not publish it!