In Part 1 we talked about Technorati Favorites in Part 2 I want to show you how to use the power of giving with StumbleUpon to boost site visitors.
What is StumbleUpon and what can it do for me?
First I want to explain to you what StumbleUpon is, however in this series we are not going to concentrate on what StumbleUpon can do for you, but how you can give using StumbleUpon. If you follow my advice the what StumbleUpon can do for you question will be answered in a few short weeks when you get a big boost of site traffic.
What StumbleUpon is.
From the StumbleUpon About Page:
StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click
Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 3,207,942 other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like (
) automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.
How Does it Work?
StumbleUpon uses
ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and like-minded stumblers (
) have recommended. This helps you discover great content you probably wouldn’t find using a search engine.
In my opinion StumbleUpon is one of the best ways you can…
find interesting sites
give a site traffic boost to outstanding webpages
and demonstrate the concept that the best way to receive is to give.
If you are not a member I’ll show you how to get started with StumbleUpon today!
Sign Up With StumbleUpon Today!
*Those of you that are already StumbleUpon members can scroll down to the next section
If you are not yet a member of StumbleUpon click this link to Sign Up for StumbleUpon.
Here is what you will see.
Simply enter your email address, select a user name, enter your birthday, choose your gender (sorry you have to pick male or female there are no other choices so androgynous people you have to choose one or the other), type the captcha, and click Join and Download Now >
I Highly Recommend The StumbleUpon Toolbar!
After you have entered your information you’ll be taken to a page where you can download and install the StumbleUpon Toolbar. I highly recommend installing this toolbar because it makes StumbleUpon so easy to use you’ll wonder why you never installed it before. If you have not installed the toolbar you can install it here.
Once you have the toolbar installed now it’s time to learn what everything on the toolbar does.
First I’ll show you the most used buttons you’ll see on the left side of the StumbleUpon Toolbar.
Most Commonly Used Buttons On The StumbleUpon Toolbar
The Stumble! button takes you to a random page on the internet. This is a great way to find sites you have never come across before.
The thumbup icon lets StumbleUpon know you like the page you are on. If you are reading a blog post and you enjoy the post, click the thumbup icon and give some StumbleUpon love to the site’s author.
The thumbdown icon let’s StumbleUpon know that you did not care for the page you are on. Use this sparingly, this tells StumbleUpon that you do not want to view pages like this so only give a thumbsdown if you really do not like the page you are on. StumbleUpon learns what you like and don’t like the more you use StumbleUpon.
The Send to button lets you recommend the page you are on to your StumbleUpon friends. I’ll talk more about adding people as your friends later in this article.
I call this button the Who Stumbled button. Clicking this button lets you see who has stumbled and reviewed the page you are on. If you click on this button and no one has stumbled the page why not be the first to submit the page to StumbleUpon so that other stumblers can find it.
Advanced Features On The StumbleUpon Toolbar
Now we are to talk about the more advanced buttons to the right of the basic buttons on the StumbleUpon Toolbar pictured below.
When you click a channel button StumbleUpon will send you to a page relating to the channel button you select. Here are a few of the channel buttons.
Shows a page from any of your selected topics.
Show a video.
Shows a page one of your StumbleUpon friends has given a thumbup.
Shows a news item.
Shows an image.
Shows a random blog using WordPress.
Shows a YouTube Video.
The favorites button take you to your StumbleUpon pages and shows you the pages you have stumbled.
And finally the My Friends button takes you to your StumbleUpon page and shows you a list of your friends.
Become A Top StumbleUpon User
To become one of the Top Stumblers is going to take a lot of hard work and lots of stumbling, but you can do it! Make sure you customize your StumbleUpon page, add all your friends (you can add me as a friend here), browse for some new friends, and start finding blogs and sites that you like and give them a thumbup by clicking on the thumbup button on your StumbleUpon Toolbar.
Don’t worry I didn’t forget what the Give And Receive Series is all about, here we go…
Give People the StumbleUpon Thumbup
As you give out more and more thumbups before you know it people will find your blog and you might find yourself the recipient of many thumbups. Below is proof of the give and receive effect in action. Here is a screenshot of the last 20 visitors (at the time I was writing this) here at Passionate Blogger.
Notice how 17 of the 20 visitors shown are from StumbleUpon? Want more proof that giving stumbles helps you receive stumbles, here is a screenshot from Google Analytics of my referring sites.
My top refer with 400 visitors is StumbleUpon! All this because I love to give. I hope you can see why giving is such a great idea.
In Part 3 of the Give And Receive Series we’ll explore Alexa Rank and how to apply the technique of giving to skyrocket your Alexa Traffic Rank.
Give And Receive Series
- Part 1 — Technorati Favorites
- Part 2 — StumbleUpon
- Part 3 — Alexa Rank
Popularity: 35% [?]
Digg it! 
Stumble it! 
Fav it! 
Print it!
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Bill, after you stumbled one of my articles I have had over 11,003 unique visitors simply from StumbleUpon. It is simply amazing and I’m still feeling the effects of it now at about 1,000 unique visitors per day.
Wild Bill, thanks for explaining this. I printed it out so that I can use it to go through the process of adding it to my blog. I have several online friends who use the StumbleUpon button but I didn’t know why or how to use it. Now, I will go and read your article on Technarati Favorites and learn what it is for. Thanks.
You have been stubbled.
Jerad the reason my Stumbles bring that much traffic is because I love to give. If I read something that I think is great I stumble it. Your posts are great, very well researched, an original. I’m glad I can help.
Patricia, I see you have a StumbleUpon page now. I have added you as a friend. I’m glad my post was helpful to you. Thanks so much for the Stumble.
Thank you for this post. Such perfect timing. I have just started using StumbleUpon, having had someone Stumble one of my posts and being floored at the hundreds of hits I received. I’ve been hesitant to Stumble my own posts, but had an idea that Stumbling others would help.
Fabulous series. Thank you.
Megan raised a question for me. Do you stumble your own posts. I thought others had to do it, not you???? Confusion reigns now.
Wild Bill,
Thanks for another helpful and informative post! Once again…You’ve been Stumbled!
Regards,
Jeanne
at N.A.D.S. we are all about building others up. Ok, thats a lie, we are about Savin’ Frickin’ Lives! So, to thank everyone here I stumbled all your comment providers, except for Patricia. Her stumble button didn’t work (wrong Url) and her comments froze up (way to go Blogger.com) but if she fixes those I will Stumble her too. Now Wild Bill you have to put out the article on how to install a Stumble button on my blog so that people can come Stumble me! Big Mike! Now bigger than ever before!
Big Mike, thanks for letting me know my StubbleUpon button isn’t working. I spent an hour or more to get it on my site and hoped it worked. I will work on it again tomorrow and see if I can figure it out. I am a little slow on doing the technical stuff. Thanks for letting me know.
Big Mike, sorry about the comments not working earlier. I have added several in the last hour and they seem to be working now. This seems to be an occasional problem with Blogger.com.
I have always liked SU but have never really used it to it’s full advantage…thanks for the push I needed to update that profile page. And also to list you as a ‘friend’
Sorry I am a little behind on responding to all of your comments.
Megan and Patricia, I usually wait for a while (sometimes a week)and wait to see if someone else Stumbles my post. If someone does stumble my post then I’ll give it a thumbup and a review also. If I believe one of my posts is stumble worthy, but no one as stumbled it (after a week) then I will stumble it myself.
There are no real guidlines to stumbling your own posts. I checked the terms of service and FAQ at StupbleUpon and did not find any rules against stumbling your own posts. My personal rule is I only stumble my posts if think they are really good and people would like them.
Jeanne, thanks for the stumble!
For those of you that don’t know Big Mike is my BIG brother and the co-host of The Passionate America Show with me. I’ll look into the instructions on how to had StumbleUpon to a Blogger.com blog.
Danielle B. great I can always use another friend.I have also added you as a friend.
I was wondering if you knew what is most significant in raising your stumble rating. Is it the number of friends, # of discoveries, # stumbles in general, # of thumb up reviews to your profile?
I have no idea how it works in that regard.
It is a little bit of all of those things FIAR. I would say it has a lot to do with the number of high karma StumbleUpon users that stumble your posts also. The category your post is in makes a big difference also.
Tip - when you stumble a story make sure to review it also and add tags so that the post will show up in more than one category. This will allow many more StumbleUpon user the chance to come across the post when they click the stumble button.
Although I have subscribed to your feed for a while now, I am just now beginning to dig into your site. I have to reiterate how helpful this post has been and continues to be. I should say that your “generosity first” approach makes it stand out among so many muddled “tips” posts out there. I am absolutely still learning, but posts like this make it all the more enjoyable.
Please either make your instructions for Big Mike into an article on how to get the StubbleUpon button on your blog or email me privately how to do it. I tried 3 times to do what they said to do and it still doesn’t work. My technical skills are very low so I need step by step instructions that I can print out and then do step by step, in plain English please, no technical jargon. Thanks.
Wild Bill, is DiggIt similiar to Stumble? Does it do the same thing. I notice that some sites have buttons for both. Others have one but not the other.
I have been trying to figure out what the head with the star behind icon means next to my stumble it button on the tool bar? It just appeared. Can you tell me?
Good advice. I got a big boost of traffic from SU after I first started my blog. It lasted for two days, but now it’s gone.
I’m going to be working to bring it back!
I have tried to tell WildBill that we should do a ‘how to’ podcast/videocast where he teaches me how to do these things. It would not require any acting on my part, cause I don’t know how to do most of them!
I needed to put one more comment just to get up to the number two spot on the top commenter list! N.A.D.S. rules!
Big Mike, I always said you were number 2. Lol.
Competition between brothers or sisters is always fun to watch. Boys will be boys. Ha! Ha!
Alright I am on researching a solution for Blogger.com users so they can add Digg It! and Stumble It! to their blogs. I should have the post up sometime tomorrow.
Again you make excellent points. I have just stumbled this!
WildBill, would you please go to N.A.D.S. to see what your social experiment has accomplished, “Finding new friends…” and read the comments, I think this is a positive affirmation that your Give and Receive Series really works! Thanks to all my new friends! BigMike
Priscilla thank you. Give And You Shall Receive!
Big Mike looks like I need to spend a little more time over at N.A.D.S.
Thank you! I just started using StumbleUpon last night and didn’t really know how to use it. So the timing was just right for me.
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[…] As Wild Bill says, you need to learn how to give and receive with StumbleUpon […]
Jean Browman, glad I could help.
I got a link from ChrisG.com! http://www.chrisg.com/social-media-marketing-roundup/ yippy!
Brilliant article, Wild Bill! Has made the whole picture of StumbleUpon much clearer to me now! Thanks!
I found you through that ChrisG link you got (I was on the list too). Thanks for the info. I added you as a friend and stumbled this post.