Stumbleupon explained for lensmasters

Stumbleupon is a toolbar you can add to your browser. Once installed you can use it to find sites on your interests from all over the internet. It is also, for webmasters, a way to promote your own material.

More votes for pages, means that more people will see them.

The limits to that, and there ARE limits, will be explained further on.

With each page you see, you can say you like it (thumbs up) or you don't like it (thumbs down).

If a lot of people give a page thumbs up, it will be sent to more people through the stumbleupon network.

How to give the thumbs up



See the circled thumbs there? Thumbs up is done by clicking the thumb that points upwards. Thumb down (if you don't like something a stumbler sent you) is clicking on the thumb that points down.

So simple once you know how.

Stumbleupon is meant to be a sort of channelsurfing for the web. It is an easy way to find interesting or funny stuff online.

This fits the mood of squidoo perfectly. Squidoo at its best is also about having fun and informative content.

But as I said: that doesn't mean you can just thumb up only squidoo pages. That will not work...

Because stumbleupon can bring huge amounts of traffic to websites (I've had a few thousand come to one page in 24 hours), it has become a way for webmasters to promote their own stuff.

But since that is an obvious incentive for misuse and spam, there are limits. These are some of the rules that apply:

Don't Thumb up too many pages from the same domain (say squidoo) - the votes will NOT count.
I estimate that you can not thumb up more than 10% from the same website without tripping their filter. But I've seen the effect faster. The first squidoo page I thumbed up (one of my own) got a few hunderd visitors from that one thumb up. The second only a few dozen.

After a few the votes will not even be counted. That's when it is time to go stumble something else. After a while (and 10 other pages is an optimistic estimate) your votes WILL count again.

If you and your friends consistently thumb up the same sites/pages (for instane squidoo-pages), the votes will also be ignored. Stumbleupon will see it as an attempt at manipulation of their results.

The way around this issue is to thumb up online pages that link to your lens. This will still only work when those pages aren't all on the same domain (like your blog). But if your lens is so good it gets links from outside squidoo, give that page the thumbs up, instead of your lens itself.

On squidoo you can add tags to pages and there's room for a lot of tags. You can go up to 40.

In stumbleupon you can only add about 5 tags, and most people only add one. Because of that it only works to have very broad tags.

Tags like 'politics', or 'squidoo' will work, whereas a tag like 'Purple squid' will be way to specific. Think broad match.

If a page of yours is being stumbled, go check if it's been 'categorised' correctly. You can go change it, and it can make a lot of difference. Squidoo pages for instance will usually be indexed as 'internet'... And since many pages are about other things, that is often not the best place for them to be.

People get shown pages based on the categories they chose and the tags they use - so you don't want your page in the wrong category.

So - you know you want your page in the right category... But how do you know which category it's in?

1) Go to that page in your browser
2) look at your stumbleupon toolbar, it will look something like this:



3) click on the button I highlighted above
4) Go to the bottom of that page, where you will see (on the right) something like this:



5) You can probably guess the rest: click on 'report this' and change the category into one that fits your topic.

What is NOT going to work (so don't even try):

• selling things

What IS going to work:

• Unique, inspiring content


• Funny stuff


• Beautiful stuff


• Very informative stuff

You can stumble basicly two things:

1. webpages - any webpage, including squidoo-pages


2. pictures - this is what makes it so nice to have a stumbleupon blog: you can show off some of the great pictures that can be found online. And through the rss module you can show those off on your lenses

Get to know the culture of the space you are getting into first.
Market second.

The thing about social bookmarking and social marketing is that it really is social.

Every group has its culture. Every company has its culture. Every country has its culture. Get to know the culture before sticking your neck out.

Within Stumbleupon that means:

• check out what kind of blogs people are making.


• Stumble a lot.


• Check out the comments people are making on the sites you are stumbling


• Check out the comments people make about sites you know well


• Comment on sites you know well (I didn't mean your own sites)

Stumbleupon can bring hundreds of visitors to your page. That is good: more visitors means higher lensrank.

BUT stumbleupon visitors are not likely to:

1. click out of your lens.


2. buy things on your lens.


3. even do more than glance

Stumbleupon visitors have a very easy way to find something new: they click on the stumble button. This means that following the links you painstakingly put on your page is not high on their priority list.

And lensrank depends on everything I just mentioned:

1. visitors


2. followed links


3. sales


4. + votes: stumblers are just like ordinary visitors from google: not likely to vote for your lens

Sure:

Stumbleupon visitors are an interesting crowd:

• They are web savvy - and therefore more likely to link to your site than google-visitors


• They are potentially interested in your topic, so they may bookmark your lens

Stumbleupon will NOT help your lens rank any higher in google. Not directly anyhow. This is because links in squidoo are no-followed. It's a measure they took to avoid people spamming the system.

Indirectly however stumbleupon CAN lead to links.

• It can help you find related sites that just might give you a link if you ask them nicely


• People on stumbleupon just might have websites related to yours and might just link to your lens without you even noticing

More about SEO for Squidoo