Stumbleupon explained for lensmasters

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A how to... stumble

Stumbleupon is great fun, and a tool for self-promotion, but for lensmasters there are also a few drawbacks. There are limits to the amount of self-promotion you can do.

Stumbleupon explained 

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.

What's stumbleupon for? 

The new websurfing

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...

FAQ - any questions about Stumbleupon? 

(general comments in the guestbook below please)

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  • Reply
    spirituality spirituality Nov 8, 2009 @ 1:19 am | in reply to spunkyduckling
    The only way to make sure people thumb things up is to make sure you have quality or fun content. Even if you do, it can take while for people to notice and thumb it up.

    But thumbs down can simply mean 'I'm not interested in this topic, send me something else'. One of he ways to help make sure the right people see your stuff is to tag it correctly.
  • Reply
    spunkyduckling spunkyduckling Nov 1, 2009 @ 9:45 pm
    Not one person has seen my site that someone stumbled. I like the idea of stumble upon it's fun but I wonder why my page hasn't been stumbled. And the thumbs down when people thumbs down it means that they don't want to see this page again and also what else I wonder? Does a thumb down mean a drop in stumbling?
    Great topic though thanks!
  • Reply
    Jun 22, 2009 @ 11:25 am
    i have tried stumble upon but don't seem to get much traffic from them, i do keep going back to stumble every now and then. good lens 5*s
  • Reply
    AndyPo AndyPo Jun 15, 2009 @ 5:34 am
    Great lens. Very useful information.
  • Reply
    Tipi Tipi Jun 5, 2009 @ 10:59 pm
    I use to Stumble when I first started out on Squidoo. I guess I dropped the ball along the way. I know that it is a great site and I should reconsider!
  • Reply
    Jon_Lyles Jon_Lyles Jan 13, 2009 @ 8:25 pm
    I use StumbleUpon and other services such as Delicious with tags to get indexed in Google quickly and backlinks to the site or page to increase it's search engine rankings. It is most effectively done in groups that are supporting and rating each other's work. So to reply to Orhide if you do it right it will be worth the effort.
  • Reply
    mdvaldosta mdvaldosta Nov 4, 2008 @ 9:03 am
    Stumbleupon is great for driving traffic, however it's largely untargetted and visitors don't usually stay and engage in discussion, vote, or sign up to Squidoo. Kind of a waste of bandwidth if you ask me.
  • Reply
    spirituality spirituality Oct 20, 2008 @ 3:55 am
    I personally do spend time on it. It really depends on whether or not your lenses fall into their niches. Funny or informative stuff does.

    If you had to choose between blogging and networking with bloggers and stumble - I'd say do the blogging and networking with bloggers thing first.

    As stumbleupon is only going to work as a promotion method if you also thumb up other people's work, you have to be willing to do that. If you aren't, don't bother.

    Ultimately: stumbleupon is only one way to get traffic and each online publisher has to find their mix of traffic sources that fits their personality.
  • Reply
    Oct 20, 2008 @ 3:43 am
    Is it good way to promote squidoo lens or not? Do we need to spend our time for it? Thanks for help
  • Reply
    spirituality spirituality Sep 23, 2008 @ 2:49 am
    I have a feeling I know which online forum you're talking about :) it also has a thread where people can get ratings for their squidoo lenses.

    Stumble is actually better insulated from stuff like that than squidoo is. In squidoo any vote counts (as far as I can tell, though there has been talk about lowering the influence of gaming the system). In stumble if you vote for stuff that's low quality (shown by low votes from others), your profile will be trusted less.

    Or in other words: My stumble profile shows an interest in spirituality, art, online marketing, CSS etc. My vote for a page on s*x won't do anybody any good - because it's not in the neighborhood of other pages I've voted on. It makes my profile look spammy, it will probably get that page few actual visitors and a few of my fans get annoyed seeing a page they never bargained for. Which might make them unfriend me.

    Like any good social network there is an incentive to 'keeping it real'.
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Self-promotion: stumbleupon site promotion limits 

Stumbleupon is about sharing, not about merely promoting

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.

Tags on stumbleupon 

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.

How to find and change the category your page was put into in stumbleupon 

stumbleupon tip

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.

Don't just promote - be real

The main thing I hope you all take away from this is:

Don't use stumble to only promote squidoo pages. That will not work. What will work is to participate in the community, thumb up things you think is interesting. THEN every once in a while you can thumb up your own, or other peoples, squidoo pages.

In other words: don't be a promoter, be a human being.

What kind of content works on stumbleupon - and what doesn't 

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

What can you stumble? 

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

The beauty of stumbleupon 

General tips on social bookmarking and social marketing 

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 and lensrank 

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

My stumbleupon blog 

Kh7 aka Sprituality on stumbleupon. You can add your stumbleupon blog to your lensography (for instance) as an RSS-feed with the RSS module. Turn on HTML so the pictures show up.

Loading Fetching RSS feed... please stand by

Any use to stumbleupon visitors? 

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

Has stumbleupon worked for you in promoting squidoo lenses? 

Have you had squidoo lenses become hugely popular through stumbleupon?

Loading Fetching blurbs now... please stand by

Yes, stumbleupon is great for promotion

spirituality says:

Albertwolf: yes, there is definitely a 'friends' type filter. Not so much that the people you've friended will automatically have their vote counted less. However people who vote the same for many pages certainly have their votes not counted as much (or at all).

alberttwolf says:

It has worked indeed, however, not on all my lenses. Two of them got heaps of traffic, but the ones that I submitted later not so much. It seems that for some of them my vote and the votes of my friends didn't count at all. Which is probably due to getting stuck in their filters sort of. Now I didn't submit dozens of lens of course, less than ten actually, but seems like that was enough for filters to go up. In cases like these it seems that votes from non-friends are the ones that really count.

Tipi says:

You know what, I did get traffic from Stumble before. I relly should use it again! Hmmm!

OhMe says:

yes it has but I sure needed all this information, too. Thanks

dc64 says:

My foster child lens gets lots of visits from Stumbleupon.

No, I never got more than a few dozen visitors through stumbleupon.

spunkyduckling says:

I love the idea but it sucks! I don't get any visitors

BarbRad says:

I've not tried it yet enough to know.

SudokuNut says:

Erm, no. I get the occassional bit of traffic but not much and not often. Still, it's free so who's complaining. :P

Cajean says:

Not yet, but I admit I hadn't gotten the hang of using it well. I hope to invest some more time in working it, and then I'll see if it's worthwhile!

aj2008 says:

No, I have no lenses that have become popular through Stumbleupon, but that is because it is something I have not put enough time into. I am just about to start rectifying that!

 
view all 18 comments

Stumbleupon and SEO - search engine optimization 

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

Did this help you understand stumbleupon? 

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  • Reply
    spirituality spirituality Nov 11, 2009 @ 2:09 pm | in reply to TimArends
    Actually, the pages you stumble DO NOT have to all be in the same area of interest. After all: non PR focused people generally have several areas of interest too. I agree it's a matter of preference: we can't be active on all social networks after all - we have to pick and choose. Stumbleupon has the advantage over Digg that you can get a creditable profile with a decent amount of followers without giving it a lot of time and energy.

    To be an influential Digg user, you have to be 'digging' stuff almost full time. On stumble you can spend an hour a week and still drive decent traffic to your web properties. If your web properties fit the stumbleupon profile.

    However, these days, if I spend more than an hour a month on stumble it's a lot. This is partly due to the fact that at some point promoting your own stuff just doesn't work any more: you're maximum number of effective thumbs up for a domain is gone. These days my stumble traffic comes from from fans.
  • Reply
    TimArends TimArends Nov 11, 2009 @ 1:40 pm
    It seems like there are a lot of pitfalls and caveats to StumbleUpon. You need to spend a lot of time browsing and voting on a lot of sites, but not too many on the same domain (but what if you're a Squidoo fan?) yet the sites should be in the same general field of interest. As with all methods of online promotion, it's a tradeoff between the time it takes and the number of visits it gets you. I prefer other methods of promotion, someone else may favor SU. It's a matter of personal preference.
  • Reply
    spirituality spirituality Nov 8, 2009 @ 1:21 am | in reply to wbaker77
    You can, these days, but I'm not sure how it works.
  • Reply
    wbaker77 wbaker77 Nov 7, 2009 @ 4:54 pm
    Very helpful information. Can you use stumbleu0on without having to install their toolbar?
  • Reply
    paperfacets paperfacets Aug 15, 2009 @ 3:35 pm
    Thanks for this. Very good info and thorough. Thanks you for the blessing on Lorinda's eggs.
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