Creating a Highly Effective Stumpleupon User Profile
The strength of your profile plays a key role in how effective your efforts will be.
As will if you can consistently submit material that other Stumblers rate positively.
If lots of people like the pages you submit, StumbleUpon is naturally going to want to show those pages to more people.
The stronger your track record, the more people will be exposed to what you have to offer.
So the best way to succeed on StumbleUpon is to submit lots of good stuff, to stand apart from the pack.
Create Great Content
#1—See what’s doing well on the other social media sites. Improve on it.
#2—Closely track the blogs in your niche. Become aware of what is popular – now
You can also follow blogs you know are popular on StumbleUpon – ask yourself what is it about them that makes them so popular
Hot Tip: Use a feedreader like Google Reader or Bloglines and check it a few times a day to see if our favourite blogs have updated.
Getting the MOST out of your Submissions
Label with the proper keyword tags. Some tags have a lot of Stumblers following them. Of course, the page needs to be relevant to the tag or the page will be shown to people who aren’t interested in it, which could backfire and result in a lot of thumbs down.
You can take a look at the Popular Tags page to see what the most popular tags are. This page is set up as a tag cloud, meaning the bigger the tag’s font, the more traffic it will send.
You can also review the most popular StumbleUpon searches. The StumbleUpon search engine sends some pretty decent traffic itself and seeing what other Stumblers are searching for can give you a good idea of what keywords to tag your page submissions with.
Finally, to see which tags are most popular today, check out the StumbleUpon Buzz page. That will show you the pages with the most thumbs up for that day and how long their reviews are.
To get on this page generally takes about 300+ thumbs up and getting your page listed there can send a massive amount of traffic.
Overall, the rule is: if you want your pages to get a lot of traffic, make sure you label them with tags that are popular (while still being relevant).
Note you only get a maximum of 5 tags for each page, so use them wisely.
In general, broad tags are better for driving traffic than highly specific tags which may only reach a narrow audience.
————————————————————————————————————————-
Hot Tip: You can boost your StumbleUpon traffic indirectly by submitting pages that link to you. If someone writes a good blog post that links to your site, be sure to submit it to StumbleUpon with a short review.
____________________________________________________________________________
The Importance of Friends
Like most social media sites, StumbleUpon has a built in Friends feature where you can connect with other users and share pages you’ve found.
Besides helping you reach more people, having Friends makes your profile look more natural.
Connect with friends
You can import your address books from Gmail, Hotmail or your other email providers. Often the easiest way to add new friends is just to connect with the people you already know.
Use a simple and easily recognizable profile name. Avoid profile names that are similar to your personal, business or domain name. You will be submitting articles from your own site from time to time, and you don’t want to appear overly self-promotional.
Use a recognizable avatar. Make it easy for people to recognize your profile online (how do you want to be identified)
Add people with similar interests as you to your friends list. Keep in mind you can have a maximum of 200 friends. Define who you are and how you want to position yourself to attract the right people.
Join groups related to your interests (you can join up to 63) That way, when you Stumble you’ll be more likely to be served pages submitted by people in those groups, and they’ll be more likely to see the pages you’ve submitted (so long as you’ve tagged the page with keywords relevant to the group).
Keep in mind that having a large friend network does also appear to increase the power of your Stumbles. So build your friend network, but don’t forget you need to submit good stuff as well.
Factors That Increase the Power of Your Stumbles
- The number of people who give your submissions thumbs up.
- The number of friends you have.
- The number of reviews and thumbs up your profile has.
- The number of pages you’ve rated (this helps to demonstrate an active profile).
Of course, reaching such a status requires a significant investment of time and effort.
A quicker way to get a boost for your pages is to have Top Stumblers thumb up your pages, which they’re much more likely to do if they’re in your friend network. StumbleUpon keeps a list of the Top Stumblers, so it’s easy to see who these most influential people are.
You might try contacting or courting favor with top Stumblers, but most get so many requests they’re unlikely to notice you. Still, it can’t hurt to add them to your friend network and see if they friend you back.
Overall StumbleUpon can be a great traffic-driving resource in your arsenal, but like all social media you’ve got to stay involved!
Related posts:
- How to Drive Traffic To Your Website With StumbleUpon StumbleUpon is an extremely popular social bookmarking service. StumbleUpon users...
