I do a lot of experimenting with ways to increase website traffic through some of the social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, reddit and the like. I’ve “stumbled upon” one that so far is giving me much more traffic than all the rest combined: StumbleUpon.

One of the main advantages of the social bookmarking model has been that sites are reviewed and submitted by real human beings who value the content. Any link submitted to the community is available for any and all members to bookmark it. Multiple bookmarks equates to multiple “votes” in the world of social bookmarking.

For example, I recently submitted a blog post to del.icio.us, and that link in turn was bookmarked by 60 Del.icio.us users. The post eventually found its way onto Digg and drove quite a bit of traffic our way. That’s the way these things work in a perfect world (usually easier said than done).

StumbleUpon has an interesting twist that adds an extra element of addictiveness to its approach. The “Stumble!” button in their provided toolbar delivers targeted website recommendations from other StumbleUpon users with interests similar to yours. One click of the button whisks you away to a quality site that you likely haven’t ever seen before.

I’ve heard a story or two about people who had to remove the Stumble toolbar because they couldn’t stop “Stumbling.”

What’s interesting to note about the following web traffic stats for greatbigpodcast.com is the fact that I’ve only submitted two or three blog posts to StumbleUpon almost as an afterthought. Here at Promethius, both for our own blog and for our business blog clients, we try to make sure that nearly every post is submitted to del.icio.us, reddit and a few others.

But with only minimal focus, StumbleUpon is currently beating basically all other social bookmarking services outright. This of course is just one snapshot of a week in the life of one blog, but it’s interesting to note.

If you want to try it out for yourself, follow these easy steps:

1. Go to the StumbleUpon site and sign up for their free account.
2. Download and install their toolbar.
3. Visit your favorite web pages or blog posts and tag them!

Here’s how it works in a nutshell:

When you click the “I like it” button, you will be prompted to fill out some information about your link:

That’s all there is to it. Now the rest of the StumbleUpon community can find your recommended links and enjoy. Neil Patel has a good study of traffic comparisons between StumbleUpon, digg and del.icio.us. It’s definitely worth a look.