Using Stumbleupon to Promote Your Work on Associated Content

I've noticed of late on the Associated Content forums that there's a lot of threads about Stumbleupon. Some people seem to be having a lot of success promoting their articles there, and a lot more people are interested in finding out how they're managing this. I've been lucky enough to be one of the former of late; my monthly traffic has gone from about 1,500 pagehits to over 50,000 hits this month, and there's still a week to go till payout. Not all of this is due to Stumbleupon, but I'd have to say the majority is.

A caveat: What follows are suggestions based on my personal experience. They are not guarantees. I can't promise you that doing what I did will bring you any success. I'd hope it would, and I think taking away some of the advice on here may help you bring more traffic to your articles, but there are no promises. If you want promises, visit one of the highly dodgy marketing websites out there, and keep your firewall up.

Before we get too into things as well, a moment for the potential reader who ended up reading this article and has no idea what Stumbleupon is. To summarise briefly, Stumbleupon is a social bookmarking network. You download their toolbar from , select a few topics which interest you, and then do one of two things: You can, if you have nothing better to do, hit the 'stumble!' button, and it'll take you to a page it thinks you might find interesting. Once you're done doing whatever you do at that site, you can hit a 'thumbs up' or 'thumbs down' button, depending on whether you found the site suggested useful or interesting. This has the added effect of helping Stumbleupon know what you do and don't like, and adjust future suggestions.accordingly. The more you 'stumble' like this, the more tailored the suggested sites become to your interests.

Or, you can carry on browsing as normal, and if you come across a site you feel like sharing with others, you hit the thumbs up button on your new toolbar. If you're the first person to do this, you can fill in the little 'discovery' popup tab with a few keywords, an optional review, and hit send. From there, the procedure is much as above, though you've now added the site in question for anyone looking for similar things. Which,of course, is the part you're interested in.

I'll say up front that if this is your sole intended purpose for Stumbleupon, to thumbs up your own articles and nothing else, you're going to most likely be wasting your time. But then, I think that applies to any social tool or site; If you barge onto Twitter or Digg and just start posting links to article after article, the best you can hope for is being ignored by the whole community. Which really is at it should be. If you have set up one of these sites, and you saw a brand new account posting nothing but links to pages on a single DNS, you'd suspect it of being some kind of marketing bot.

Personally, I'd been using Stumbleupon for some considerable years; I've almost certainly had an account with them since before Associated Content existed. I had easily over a thousand 'thumbsed up' pages on file before I noticed any productive hits gathering from Stumbleupon. I'm not saying you necessarily need to have an account of that size before you get any results from them, but you might want to try also using the toolbar as intended. If you're bored, go click it a few times and see what comes up. Thumbs up or down a few pages in between favoriting your own articles.

A minor warning - you might clicking the stumble button horribly addictive; it's very 'Oh, just one more and then I'm going to bed', then suddenly you find it's 8am. The good news, your potential audience will have the same problem, increasing the chances of you getting read.

The social aspect of Stumbleupon is also useful for making connections with other users. I tend to hit the 'favorites' button regularly, to keep an eye on the items I submitted. As well as showing pageviews on your favourites, Stumbleupon also shows who gave your submissions a thumbs up. I tend to subscribe to these people, in other words add them to my friends list.If Stumbleupon shows we have a lot in common, generally if we like at least 60-70% of the same kind of stumbles, I'll also hit the tickbox below subscription, so that anything they like will come up when I hit stumble button.

The reason for thi? Firstly,it helps me track who's liking what I write. Secondly, if they end up reciprocating and subscribing to me as well, they become part of a network you can directly send links to to view. And I suspect like Facebook or Twitter, having an active network of regular followers is a pretty good guarantee for consistent pageviews on your articles.

Above all else, the usual cardinal rules seem to apply. Write well, write often. If you're submitting quality content, stumblers are far more likely to give it a thumbs up. And the more thumbs up a piece gets, the more likely it is to get seen by others networks. A stumbler with a huge following who likes something you wrote is worth a thousand random clicks.

And if you're still not having much luck using Stumbleupon, all I'd suggest is have fun with it bringing pages you might find interesting to you, that you might never have seen before. The more you use it, the more success you're likely to have with it.