1. Organic Stumble
- this is the process of clicking the stumble button on your toolbar and coming across articles. When you come across a page this way and thumb it up or down your vote is given more weight because you came across the site randomly and therefore voted based on content you had never seen before.
Tip – this is the best way to drive traffic to your site however its hard to control who comes across your site. Key is to build a core group of friends, people who are truly interested in what your doing. Then when your site is in the system theres a higher chance that your friends will come across it and therefore thumb it up because they like the same stuff.
2. Send To
- this is a handy toolbar function that allows you to easily send a site to any of your friends. However it may cause a decrease in the weight of a thumbs up if you received the site via the “send to” button. This makes sense because it tries to eliminate the ability to mass send a particular site and abuse the system if you happen to have a ton of friends.
Tip – it takes more time and is not as convenient but if you want to get your site out there use the message function on your stumble homepage and directly message each of your friends asking them to look at the site. Maybe even ask them to find the site via Google to help your search engine status out as well. If you’ve developed a core group of friends with similar interests you should get a decent response from most of them and hopefully a handful of reviews and thumb-ups. I think this method works best for launching a new site or if you just have an amazing post, not something to do everyday.
3. Your Domain
- Don’t submit the same domain over and over again as your thumbs up will have less weight over time. Example – submitting every blog post you make. Also this helps to limit the ability for good friends on the site to continuously stumble each others work.
Tip – Try and submit only your best work, the stuff you think will generate a bunch of thumb-ups. Also if you are just starting a blog, DO submit all of your work. Point being your work probably isn’t going to be seen at all if you don’t submit it. Even if your decreasing your stumble weight by doing so hopefully you’ll attract a handful of readers to your blog and over time you can slowly decrease how much work you submit. Goal being you don’t submit anything but your readers end up submitting all your work. I’ve done this and even as my submissions for my own blog lost value they were still generating 100-150 views from stumble, not so shabby.
I must stress that none of this is proven but from my experience with stumbleupon these are the biggest trends that I have noticed and I think they are true to some extent.
Also remember to just use the site all the time. The more you give back to the community the more it will give to you.
