Stumbleupon has become one of the most popular sites on the web. Its basic premise is the idea that you simply say you like a site or don’t like a site. By doing this the system will try to match you up with more sites that you like and eliminate the sites similar to the ones you don’t like. The great thing about StumbleUpon is when you stumble the sites that come up, while being related to your likes, are completely random and allow any site no matter how popular to have a chance at popping up. StumbleUpon doesn’t reveal how they determine what pages come up for people but there a few things that can be assumed weigh heavily in the formula.
1. Submit every page on your site to stumble, every individual blog post or every individual product page. You don’t have to write a review for all of them, I would suggest just reviewing the main pages.
2. Use StumbleUpon A LOT! A big factor is your presence in the community. Use the service and build up your profile rate pages, review pages, discover pages….you don’t want the community to see that everything you’ve done is only about your site, you will look like a spammer.
3. Friend other people that have the same interests as you, developing a network is key. If you friend people who are active in the community and they see you are active they will be more inclined to give your pages positive reviews. One trick is when you find someone who you really like look at who they are friends with, there’s a good chance most of those people are going to have similar interests.
4. You can also send people messages and ask them to look at your site and give it a thumbs up if they like it. Tons of people on the network have things in their profile about how they love to hear about new sites so don’t be afraid to let them know!
5. You can also join groups and take part in discussions. This only furthers your reach in the community because the more places your profile pops up there more likely someone will click it and look at your stuff.
Submitting your site to the network is just the start…getting positive reviews is what will generate traffic and it generally takes a little work to get those reviews.
