Optimising your StumbleUpon Account

StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking tool which is integrated into a toolbar compatible with FireFox and IE. The main focus of the tool is to allow you to view websites that other people have submitted just by clicking on the “Stumble!” button. The good thing about StumbleUpon is that it can drive traffic to your own site by submitting your site. Other users are shown the site when they click the button. The amount of traffic that a site gets from StumbleUpon depends on how many “thumbs up” the site gets after it is submitted. The trick is to get as many people as possible to give your stumble a “thumbs up” so that you will get more traffic. All new stumbles will start with just one rating, which might be yours.

When you sign up for a StumbleUpon account you get given a webpage that belongs to your profile. So if I set up a profile called “dangeresque”, I would therefore get a page called “dangeresque.stumbleupon.com”. Any site that you review yourself will be linked to here, as well as other bits and pieces that I will cover later. In order to get people to view the sites that you have stumbled you can either wait until it comes up in their Stumbling or you can drive traffic to your StumbleUpon account and let people visit the links on your page. It appears that the more popular a Stumbler is the greater weight is given to their reviews. Not only that, but other Stumblers who like that popular Stumbler will also review any pages that they review, so being popular on StumbleUpon has it’s benefits. But did you know that you can actually use some techniques of search engine optimisation and internet marketing on your profile?

So here are a few tips on getting traffic through to your StumbleUpon profile page.

1. The first rule is to click on the Stumble! button and either click on the “thumbs up” button or complete a full review of the site. Some of the most popular stumblers have many hundreds of reviews and this is an indication as to why they are popular. These reviews will be kept in the Pages section of your profile.
2. Make friends and influence people. No, really. Part of your StumbleUpon profile page will be a page called Network. This will give you a list of:
   • The 10 latest visitors to view your profile page.
   • Friends of friends.
   • Similar Stumblers.

   You can use this page to get in contact with other similar minded stumblers and, with luck, they will give your profile a good rating. You can email other members in much the same way as you would email members of other social sites, so this makes getting in contact with other people a little easier. One thing to note though, don’t spam. This is against the rules that StumbleUpon have set and will only result in getting your site banned. Every stumbler has a fan rating. This is the number of people who have given your profile a good rating. The more fans you have the stonger your profile will be. While you are on another persons profile you can make them a friend. You can have up to 200 friends, but the most popular stumblers usually have this value maxed out.

3. Don’t just look at other peoples profiles, review them! If you give someone else a good review then the chances are they will give you a review.
4. Look out on the Internet for new and interesting sites that have not been reviewed by anyone else. Posting these sites on your profile will increase your profile status. You can find new sites by subscribing to news feeds and the like. When you notice a new post being added you can submit it, just make sure you read it first so that it matches some of the topics your like. If you submit a page that no one else has submitted your profile will appear next to that site for all time. Great!
5. This might seem a bit odd, but in order to get yourself a start on the site you can actually review yourself. I’m not sure if this is a bug, or exactly how it should work but it will get you started. Beware that although it is perfectly OK to submit your own site and profile to StumbleUpon, just don’t over do it and add every single page on your site at once.
6. A good way of making friends is to join several groups. Once you do this your profile page will display a Forums section. This will show you some of the latest discussions going on. Join some groups and start discussing things, people will wonder who you are and visit your profile page.
7. Get an image! You can customise your StumbleUpon account with personalised colours and a picture. To give some credibility to your account you should put a picture on the front page. This will be iconised and provide a link back to your page every time you do anything on StumbleUpon. The more interesting the picture the more people will click on it to see what it is.
8. Your main profile page can be seen by clicking on your profile name on the menu bar at the top of your profile home. To use the dangeresque example again, you could just go to dangeresque.stumbleupon.com/about/. This page allows you to select some of the things, movies, books and music that you like. Every item you select will have a little number next to it. This number represents the number of user who have selected the same tag as you. Clicking on the tag will show you a list of people who have selected the same tag as you. This is a good way of getting people onto your profile page and also making like minded friends.
9. When you sign up for a StumbleUpon account you select a few topics that you can receive sites from. Every time you add a page you will be asked to select what tags you will associate with this page. Users who have those topics installed will then be able to stumble your submission. As far as I can tell the list of tags you can assign is connected to what sort of topics you select at the start, but you can just type in your own. This is obviously best if you add appropriate tags. If a person who is into chocolate and stumbles onto one your submissions about Ajax search controls they will more than likely give it a “thumbs down” and stumble again. If more people “thumbs down” your site than “thumbs up” then it will not be displayed to anyone. So make sure the page you submit has something going for it.
10. You can add multiple tags to each submission, so do it! If the site has a video of a monkey snowboarding then select tags like funny, animals, video or snowboarding.
11. If you want to make users stop and stare at your content, and therefore make them click on that important “thumbs up” button then create an attention grabbing page and submit it. Accoring to StumbleUpon’s about section:
    “Entertaining and informative content works best. Our members will go out of their way to give you valuable feedback if you provide them with an entertaining, enlightening, or informative experience.”
12. Don’t get yourself an R-rating. Because I use StumbleUpon while I am at work I do not want to see adult content on the screen. I therefore have the adult filters that StumbleUpon has turned on. This means that I can’t view some peoples profiles as they have adult material on them. You can avoid getting your own profile flagged as adult by not submitting any adult sites and not having adult topics as part of your stumbling profile. Other users can flag your profile as adult, but you can get this removed again by StumbleUpon.

That should give you a good start in optimising your profile page and therefore driving traffic to your sites. However, I can’t leave this topic without mentioning one thing. There is a site called stumbleXchage, which has recently been set up. The idea behind this site is that you exchange links with other people which you then stumble and review. The other person will also stumble and review your site. I purposely haven’t included this in my list as it seems to be very unpopular in the stumbler community so use it at your own risk. However, the idea is sound, and the site has a points system so that you need to give and take at the same time, not just take.

The bottom line? Make StumbleUpon a part of your internet marketing campaign and you will see the benefits by an increase in the amount of people viewing your pages.

Phil
SEO Programmer