6-Step Guide to Getting the Most out of StumbleUpon

July 4, 2011 by Daniel Sharkov|

StumbleUpon is a great place to go when you are sitting and doing nothing. Just a click on the ‘Stumble’ button and you get to discover some great stuff. Everything from interesting articles to useful apps and funny videos is somewhere in StumbleUpon’s vast world. Apart from that and what is actually more important to us is of course the site’s potential to get us some new visitors and fans.

I recently received a lot of requests from folks, asking me to write an article that covers tips and tricks on using StumbleUpon effectively. And that’s namely what today’s article will cover, but before we start you might want to take a look at. It’s a few simple design tips, that’ll help you get the most out of the traffic you’ll receive.

Anyway here it goes – if you are one of those folks who want to get maximum results from StumbleUpon with the least amount of efforts, definitely take a look at the next paragraphs:

Add a Real Photo

I really find it strange when people register for sites like Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon and they don’t care to add a photo. Those kinds of sites are all about being real. And what better way to prove you are real than adding a photo of yourself!

That seemingly worthless task can do miracles. Many people are not going to follow you, just because you are not revealing your face.

The process of adding a photo is straightforward, but anyway: On the top right bar click ‘Settings’ and on the page that loads, click the ‘Profile Picture’ tab.

Write a Catching Intro

Intro i.e. the spot right next to your photo is yet another crucial component. That is pretty much the first thing a visitor will see after landing on your public profile. Think of it as the ‘About’ page of your blog. No one takes bloggers without one seriously. The ‘About’ page builds up your credibility and proves that you have a blog, not an autoblog.

The main difference between the ‘About’ page and the StumbleUpon intro is the length. Everything from 200 to over 1000 words will work fine for the former. However it’s a different story with the intro. I can safely assume that no one is going to read anything above 200 words. Even that is quite a lot though. Just for the record mine consists of exactly three sentences or 32 words in total.

One great thing about the intro is that you can include links and apply HTML. For instance you can use the
tag to separate all links from the actual bio. That way you make them more visible and you add a neat look to the whole intro.

As for links, there is no problem with including one to your blog. Keep in mind that using keywords as your anchor text won’t work , so just go with your blog name. You can also add links to your profiles on other social networks.

Kristi Hines‘ intro is a great example for what I mentioned above

Start Using the su.pr URL Shortener

Pretty much every blog nowadays has a retweet button. I believe that there is really no need in explaining what that is and how it works. There are currently two types of retweet buttons. The first one being the TweetMeme and the second one – Twitter’s own retweet button. Unfortunately the second button does not include an option for changing the URL shortener and you’ll need to use TweetMeme for the strategy to work.

Changing the URL service is an easy task. For WordPress users all you need to do (assuming you have the button already installed) is to go to the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress, then Settings/tweetmeme, find ‘URL Shortener’ tab and chose ‘su.pr’ from the dropdown menu.

The process isn’t as straightforward for Blogspot users but you’ll still get it done in no time. You will need to open the HTML tab on the Blogger dashboard and find the retweet button’s code. After the “tweetmeme_url = ‘http://yoururl.com’;” line add “tweetmeme_service = ‘su.pr;” (without the quotes) and save the template.

So now that you have followed the steps, you are probably wondering where the point is. Quite frankly, I’m yet to figure out how the whole thing works. Fact is that when a visitor discovers your content via a su.pr link, you get a certain priority and thus more visitors through StumbleUpon.

Take Advantage of the Share Feature

Although it might not bring much direct visitors, the share feature is a good way to get more likes on your content. Likes, similarly to using the URL shortener I talked about above, give your content higher priority.

“Sharing” can be done in two ways – via the StumbleUpon toolbar , by clicking “Share” and choosing the stumblers you want to share your content with or through the “Your favorites” page. Either way you will notice that the list of people you can share with does not reflect your number of followers.

After having someone followed on StumbleUpon a check-box “accept shares to my toolbar” below the “Follow” button appears. Sharing works reciprocally only. Even if you have checked the box, you won’t be able to see the other person’s shares unless he also accepts your shares and vice versa.

Just because someone accepted your shares though, doesn’t mean he is willing to be bombarded with articles (incl. videos, apps, etc.) every single day. Use is one thing, abuse is something totally different – keep that in mind. I’m using the feature once a week at most, but twice won’t be a problem as well.

Get People to Follow You

Finally, the part you’ve all been waiting for. Compared to Twitter, getting more followers on StumbleUpon isn’t as easy. I’m certain some will say that liking and sharing great stuff is a good enough method. However that is only partially true. Quality content is the single most important reason why people follow you. Problem is that in order to click the “Follow” button, people first need to find you. That can hardly happen simply by making a few stumbles.

First place to focus your efforts is your blog and more specifically the “About” page. Yes, the same I discussed a few hundred words back. After writing your bio, it is always a good idea to give people a way to connect with you other than the comment section. In my caseI have included a link to the contact form page, one to my Twitter, BlogEngage and… you guessed it – a link to my StumbleUpon profile. Believe it or not, the “About” page is one of the most visited places in a blog, so you’ll get plenty of visibility.

My second approach is Twitter. Every now and then I’m posting a tweet along the lines of “Are you a StumbleUpon user? Check out my favorites!” plus link to my StumbleUpon profile. Don’t worry about scaring away your followers. That won’t happen, unless you are posting the message a few dozen times per day. Once every two days won’t cause any problems.

Following others and getting them to follow back is another powerful technique. Unlike Twitter, StumbleUpon isn’t really about building relationships and engaging with others, so I don’t see a problem with the strategy. In order to make it effective, there are some factors to consider though:

First one is relevancy. There is no use in following people whose interests are cooking and traveling when your field is marketing. Even if you get a follow back, chances are that you won’t get likes or shares from that person. That is what the Similarity Meter is designed for. It is located on the right-hand sidebar and gives you an approximate measurement of how similar you are to a stumbler based on common interests and favorites. I am only following stumblers with similarity higher than 35%. It isn’t worth going any lower. Second one is activity. Finding active stumblers is a rather daunting task. Less than half of the profiles I’m coming across have been active in the last 3-4 days. By ‘active’ I’m not referring to being online though. There are folks who are online every single day and yet haven’t stumbled since 2009. You don’t need that. Follow people only if they have stumbled in the last couple of days. The chance to get a follow back and further likes and shares is the highest that way. Third thing to consider are the number of favorites. In the last couple of months I did a lot of testing on that aspect and it turned out that most of the follows I got were from stumblers with less than 1K favorites. From the 20-30 stumblers with 10-20K favorites I’m following, only two or three are following back. So in brief – don’t follow stumblers with more than 3-4K favorites.

The easiest way for meeting the above criteria is to first find one of the “big players” in your niche and then start following the stumblers that the user is following . Why not follow his followers instead you’d ask? It’s because of how the two pages are ordered. Followers are ordered by the date of following, from newest to oldest. Might seem kinda weird, but finding active people to follow is an almost impossible task that way. On the other hand one’s following is ordered by recent activity, which makes finding the stumblers you are looking for far easier.

Keep a Good Following/Followers Ratio

There is one catch with following on StumbleUpon I didn’t mention. There is a limit of how many people you can follow. Unlike Twitter, that limit is fixed, currently at 500 followers. So in order to apply the ‘follow-back’ strategy, you will need to know who to stop following. The criteria here are actually the same as when following.

I first unfollow the least active users. Everyone who hasn’t stumbled (again don’t confuse ‘stumbled’ with hasn’t been online) since more than five days is being unfollowed. After I’ve done that, I go through every page and open all profiles to find stumblers with similarity meter, showing less than 20%. They get unfollowed as well. Then I start unfollowing, folks who aren’t following back.

Finding whether you are followed back is easy. Open the user’s following and keep browsing until you stop seeing green dots on the right of people’s photos. Green dot indicates that the person is currently online. When doing that you are obviously online, so if you don’t see yourself within the green dots area, then the person isn’t following you.

Conclusion

That has definitely got to be the longest and most comprehensive article I’ve ever written. All in all getting traffic from StumbleUpon requires some time and efforts, but it definitely isn’t as hard as you might think. Hope you actually found some of the tips and tricks useful. If you have any questions or thoughts you want to share, feel free to do so in the comment section!

Post Written by Daniel Sharkov

I’m Daniel, an 18 year old student and the author of this blog. My articles cover a variety of topics, including blogging and writing tips, social media, traffic generation and more. Connect with me on Twitter, Facebookand Google+.

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