Blog for a living

A few days ago I had a conversation with a fellow blogger. He wanted to stumble one of my posts, but he couldn’t do it for some reason, and he asked me how can he solve the problem. I told: “simple, just give a thumbs up in the toolbar!” and a few minutes later came the reply:”what toolbar?!”.

This one shocked me a little, but this little example illustrated well how the majority of bloggers approach Stumbleupon. As I see it, Stumbleupon for most beginner bloggers is just a place to submit their post to gain some traffic. They may not even know how it works.

But the saddest thing about it that without understanding this wonderful website, they have no chance to increase the traffic they get, nor can they fully enjoy the benefits of it.

I hope this short article will help you to exploit the possibilities of SU.

What is Stumbleupon?

If you’re searching for something very specific on the internet, then search engines are your best possible choice. Although you might spend a great amount of time searching for different keywords, and browsing the results until you get what you want. But eventually you’ll find that particular thing.

Now, what if you’re searching for something that’s not so specific? Let’s say for example, you’re interested in song-writing, motorcycle racing, or you’re curious about alternative medicine?
Of course you can go to Google and search for the term, but it’s very likely that it won’t show the sites you’re looking for. Because search engines’ job is to give you the most relevant information. So you’ll more likely to see a Wikipedia page, and some overlinked business sites within your search results. These things makes it hard to find what you’re looking for.

And this is where Stumbleupon comes in. Stumbleupon is basically a huge website directory maintained by its more than 6 million users. Search engines are great for sure, but they can’t compete with 6 million people who’re constantly evaluating and rating online content.

So if you’re looking for something not too specific, but a certain category you’re interested in, you simply go to these social media or social bookmarking sites, and browse the directories.
What makes Stumbleupon special is they do it in a very unique way.

The toolbar 

Remember the dialogue at the beginning of this post? The reason I was stunned that the guy didn’t even know about it, because the toolbar is the heart of Stumbleupon.

After creating an SU account you must download the toolbar. The most important buttons on it are the big “Stumble” button on the left and the two little “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” icons. What you basically do while “stumbling”, you click on this big button, and it gives you a nice site randomly selected by an agorithm. Then you can explore the site and give it a thumbs up or thumbs down depending on your opinion about the page. And then you hit the big “Stumble” button again to take you to another site.

This method has proven to be a very efficient one. The more positive rating a site has, the more likely it’ll appear to others, the less it has, the less likely it’ll come up while you stumble. This way, users can separate ‘bad content” from “good content” and help each other to find only quality pages.

The toolbar has many other options of course that I won’t detail now, but here you can select the category you want to search in: writing, politics, animals, videos, pictures or whatever you want, and you can also read the reviews for a certain page, or you can send it to a friend, and many other functions.
You should try it out and see it for yourself!

The community 

SU also has a wonderful community, some say that it’s the best of all social media sites. And this is where the fun begins for us bloggers. 
The users can stumble each other as well beside websites. Why is it good? Because your stumbles are visible to other members of the community, and if someone finds it interesting what you’re putting up there, he’ll become your fan, so he can check your latest stumbles any time.
If you have an interesting profile and quality stumbles, you can easily build a huge network of hundreds of friends and fans, and they’ll see your stumbles whenever you submit something.
Most bloggers fail here. They stumble 16 pages of their own blog, and they wonder why there aren’t any results. But if you have only 100 fans who’re really interested in the stuff you’re putting up there, they’ll stumble it too, their fans can see it also, and their friends’ friends and so on. You’ll get much more traffic than you can have by just leeching the community, and you can also meet lots of interesting people. I tell you: finding someone with quality stumbles is a real treasure. Stumble great content, write interesting reviews and people will notice and follow you.

My experiences

When I joined SU, the first thing I did was to find some great websites on writing. And I was amazed by the amount of quality content I found through stumbling for a 10 minutes. This is how I met Daily Writing Tips.

But I’ve made a big mistake. I wasn’t aware of the great community there, and I stumbled everything that got in my way. If I loved it: thumbs up, when I liked it: thumbs up, when I didn’t really liked it but I was in a good mood: thumbs up. So I created a messy stumble profile with lots of not-so-good stuff.

But new blog, new SU life, so I’ve scheduled my last account to deletion and created a new one, and this time I’ll try to be an active and useful member of the community. I hope it’ll work out well.

For you guys I hope I could give some insights, and I encourage everyone to open an account if you haven’t done so already, and use it to support other Stumbleupon users as much as you can. Those are very kind and helpful people. You’ll be rewarded if you help them for sure.

This post is already submitted, all that’s left for you is one click if you liked it:

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