RSS Feeds: StumbleUpon – A Blog Author's Best Friend (For Now)
I have experimented with several social networking sites over the past few months and I've come to the conclusion that StumbleUpon is the best service to drive traffic to your blog.
This doesn't mean you should ignore the rest, but it does mean that you should make using StumbleUpon a priority. Here are some tips to using it:
- Always ask someone else to stumble a particular article and write a review of the post. Some stumblers will flag it as spam if you "thumbs up" your own post and write your own review first. They'll even go so far as to notify their friends to do the same, including a "thumbs down".
- The StumbleUpon toolbar has a feature called "Send to". I just recently figured out what it was for (silly me). Make sure you have the actual article showing in your browser and then send the page to one of your StumbleUpon friends for a thumbs up/review. In fact, I'll soon be removing the "Comment for a Stumble" link from my sidebar (along with the others in that box) because this is much quicker and just as effective (unless someone tells me otherwise).
- You want to stumble the pages your friends have stumbled as much as possible. This drives traffic to those stumbled pages. If you run out of pages, pick another category. Friends should make sure they "thumbs up" their own pages (not as the first one) so those pages are included in your friends' "queue".
- Never give a thumbs up or a review to a sponsored post. It will end up getting flagged as spam and this has a negative effect on your traffic. Miracles do happen and some sponsored posts will make it through. But why take the chance?
- When doing a review in conjunction with a stumble, add as many relevant tags as possible. This will put it in the queues for stumblers that have set it for those categories.
Are any of the tips unclear? I'll happily fix them if they are. These can't possibly be the only tips for good stumbling and good traffic results, so feel free to chime in with your own. I'll add them to the post if they're not duplicates.
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I have been Stumbling for a while now (and not just after the cocktail flag has been raised) and I've found some material that I've incorporated into posts (w/ due attribution, etc.).
But putting a "thumbs up" on a blog post seems to involve an extra step, right? Don't you have to separately open the entry to which you wish to give the "thumbs up"? Otherwise, aren't you giving a "thumbs up" to the blog front page generally — which may be worthy… but your review won't be very helpful will it?
Well, I'm not sure exactly what you mean. If you don't use the toolbar, it's a little different than when you do, but I'm going to assume that you do.
If you do a review, it's automatically a thumbs up. If you do a thumbs up and you're the first one, it automatically brings up the review box. If it has already been stumbled and you do the thumbs up, that's all you have to do. A lot of stumblers just click on the stumble button to get to the next site. That doesn't provide a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
Reviews are always helpful, if you tag them properly.
I didn't realise that was what the "Send To" feature was for either :oops:
I started seeing numbers just to the right of the first Stumble on the toolbar and clicked on it. That's how I found out someone was using that. I then checked all the buttons to see what did what before I found the "send to" worked that way.
Good tips, RT.How do I find your reviews to 'thumbs up' again?
Ummm… try going to http://rtcunningham.stumbleupon.com/ and then click on one of the pages that was reviewed and then check if there isn't already a thumbs up on the toolbar. If not, do it then.
Of course another method of getting some traffic is to Stumble a post on someone else site which contains a direct link to you. That way you're not seen as bucking the system and Stumbling your own posts. I've done it quite a few times and it definitely works :wink:
Nice tips!
Now if someone here want to be my friend I'll start to use my "friends button" more.
ma0.stumbleupon.com
I can't use the word n i c e ..lol
Richard you should check your antispam policy
Yes, you can. All you have to do is click the button.
[...] RT Cunningham mentions some testing that he has done to prove this point in this blog post http://www.untwistedvortex.com/2007/07/10/stumbleupon-a-blog-authors-best-friend-for-now/. Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger.net even goes as far as to publish a how-to on using StumbleUpon [...]