Stumble upon is one of the great social media sharing sites available today. While it’s true that proper use of stumble upon can bring you great traffic, it can also be a huge time sink and provide little results or even get you banned if you don’t use it properly. In this article we will attempt to help you maximize your use of Stumble Upon so that you can get great traffic to your site with the least amount of effort.

The first thing you should evaluate when considering if Stumble Upon will be right for your needs is your goals. If you are looking to get lots of new business and convert visitors into qualified sales opportunities then chances are that Stumble Upon may not meet those needs directly.

I say directly because INDIRECTLY, Stumble Upon is able to provide valuable links to your business when used properly which can help with link popularity for your site and ultimately assist in your search engine optimization ranking results.

Stumble Upon is great at bringing lots of traffic to your site. Many of those users will find your content useful and will therefore link back to it. This is where Stumble Upon shines above many of the other social media sites available today in our opinion.

GETTING STARTED

Stumble Upon is very simple to use. When you sign up as a member we highly recommend downloading the SU toolbar as this will make it much easier for you to network and share content through SU in the future. In a moment we will get into how to properly utilize the toolbar. Before you can get into those specifics however, it is important to understand how to gain a large network in SU, which will provide a solid foundation for pushing your content amongst the SU Universe.

GROW YOUR NETWORK

As with any social media site, networking and connecting with friends that share similar interest is key to your success. SU makes it fairly easy to build a large community of friends that share similar interest to you. Before adding friends you should personalize your profile. When you are logged into your profile click on home and you will see the “preferences” link on the far right of your toolbar. Use this link to put your personal details, links to your other social media profiles, and most importantly your interest. It’s important to update your interests as they change since this will help other SU users that share your interest connect with you, in turn growing your community.

As you can see, when you view another users profile SU is kind enough to tell you very quickly how compatible you are likely to be for each other based upon your interests and stumbling history. This saves you the time of having to look through each users entire portfolio of stumbles. Once you find someone that is close enough to your interest for your satisfaction, adding them as a friend is also very simple. Simply use the “Send friend request” found at the bottom of the users info on the right hand side of the screen. This will send an email request to the user who will in turn review you and either accept or deny you as a friend. Once they accept you as a friend you are both connected and can easily share content with one another.

Building up a large network of friends is a must for maximizing SU’s potential. It is recommended that you make a habit of adding new friends as often as possible. Each friend that you are viewing will also have a list of their friends. It’s likely that someone that is compatible with you will also have somewhat compatible friends in their network. SU shows you a list of their friends making it easy for you to sift through their networking and sending friends request to as many of their connected friends as you like. SU does have a daily limit and if you add too many friends in one day you will get a lovely message from SU telling you to take it easy and that you are adding too many friends at one time.

USING STUMBLE UPON

Now that you understand what SU is great for and how to build up your network, lets take a look at how to easily add content and share it properly.

As we mentioned earlier in the article, we highly recommend the use of the SU toolbar for your everyday stumbling/sharing/commenting.

The Toolbar makes it simple for you to use SU in your everyday web surfing. When your browser is open you will be able to see how many shares your friends have sent to you easily. Simply press the button next to the numbers to view the pages that your friends have shared with you. While viewing the page you can choose to “like”, “dislike”, or do nothing with the shared page. Use the thumbs up or thumbs down button if you like the content. We recommend not using the dislike button if you want to stay on good terms with your friends. If someone sends you something offensive (which can be weeded out through the parental control in your preferences) or that you otherwise don’t like it’s much easier to remove the friend from your list then to start a negative chain by down voting their content.

If you have time it’s always nice if you can leave a comment on the pages your friends refer to you using the comment button on the toolbar. This will take you to a page where you can see all the other comments on this page as well as leave your own comment.

These simple actions of up-voting and commenting your friends shares will help you become recognized by your friends. Leave them a note to let them know that you up-voted and shared their stumble so that when you share your content with them they will be more likely to return the favor.

Sharing a new blog post or web page is very simple. All you have to do is click the up-vote button while viewing a web page and you will be able to add the details of the page to your Stumbles where you can share it with your network of friends. Be sure to use proper tags and descriptions when adding your pages for maximum effectiveness.

SHARING YOUR STUMBLES BRINGS TRAFFIC!

Once you Stumble your new content, log into your Stumble Upon account and go to your home. From here you can see all your recent shares and liked pages. Find the content you want to share with your friends in the list. It will take SU a few minutes to capture your image and display it here so don’t be worries if you have the blank image for your share right now, it will populate shortly automatically.

When you hover your mouse over the page you want to share, you will get a small popup in the lower right hand corner that says “share”. Clicking this button will open up the sharing pop-up on the right hand side of your page.

You can choose to share this Stumble with select friends or click the “all” box to send it to all of your friends at once. Below the friends list you can type a custom message that will display to your friends in their SU toolbar when they view your shared Stumble on their browser. Here you can type a brief message they can view to peak their interest. It is recommended you utilize this space for maximum effectiveness of your shared Stumbles. If your friends like it they will share it with their network and so on bringing you vast amounts of traffic to your site!

It’s important to note that you should not spam your friends with every single post you make on all of your blogs. There are several reasons for this. The most important reason is that SU gives a ranking formula for each users importance. If you Stumble Content from the same site only you will be flagged as a spammer and your shares will have little weight or even worse you can be banned. Don’t let this happen to you.

Share a variety of content in your particular areas of interest to help yourself build up a reputation as an authority on the topic in your network.

BECOME AN AUTHORITY STUMBLER

There are a few tips you can use to help your shares have more weight. SU has implemented a five star system and it’s thought that the more starts your shares have, the more likely they are to pop up when people Stumble something in it’s category.

In order to be a power SU users try to follow these pointers:

• Share and Stumble a variety of good content
• Give Testimonials to other users
• Try to get as many reviews/testimonials from your friends as possible

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 11:52 AM and is filed under SEO, tips and tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.