15 Actionable Ideas for Achieving StumbleUpon Happiness

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On February 13th I wrote 10 Simple Tips to StumbleUpon Success (That I Wish Someone Had Told Me About). At the end of that post I promised a follow up post around St. Patrick’s Day, well here it is!

This post won’t be quite as altruistic as the last. Some of the points I’m about to make might be categorized as tips; others would be categorized as observations or actionable ideas. Extrapolate what you will, and I hope you can use some of these to your advantage.

Also, this will be the last post I write in regards to (SU) StumbleUpon. Going forward, I will concentrate on writing financial planning and wealth building articles, as I want to stay true to the mission of my blog. Without further ado…

15 brand spanking new tips and observations about StumbleUpon:

To experience long term success on SU, I’d recommend less than 2 hours a day on the site. I’d also recommend maintaining (at a minimum) a 30/70 - thumb ups/review ratio. In the past, I reviewed too many articles each day, I experienced some burnout and have begun to make the necessary changes.

Use SU to bookmark things for yourself, not just for your SU friends. Not only do I tag things in broad based categories, but I also use quirky tags so I can go back and reference these posts for myself later on.

Here are some examples of tags I’ve used recently to easily find things for myself:
income tax deductions
square foot garden
time banking
angel investor talk

Don’t make quirky tags (above) more than 3 words, SU will disallow it.

When you write a SU review, be aware that SU will only show your friends and fans the first 2 lines of this review. Sometimes I tend to write long reviews (which for me act as a surrogate for comments I otherwise may have left on the bloggers site) and wasn’t mindful of this early on.

Make sure the first two lines of your review convey (to your audience) what you want it to convey. View it as an exercise in writing accurate and appealing descriptions. The better you are (and become) at this, the more traffic that post will see. Writing SU reviews is a good way of practicing how to write effective SEO descriptions for your SERP listings.

Give your reviews some time to marinate and resonate within your SU community. If you write a review, it’s broad-casted out to all your SU friends and fans; it pops up in their ‘What’s New’ page.

If you write rapid fire reviews, one after the other, each new review replaces the previous review on their ‘What’s New’ page, so you dampen the chances of your friends seeing all the pages you liked, other than the very last one.

To combat #6 from happening, I tend to starr (in my Google reader) posts that I really really like. I then try and spread them out on SU throughout the day, stumbling one post every couple hours, so as to give each some time to breathe and potentially ‘go viral’ within my group of friends and fans.

If you’re a blogger and have written a post that you think can be a hit on search engines and StumbleUpon (which is generally hard to pull off) - it’s best to first write a catchy title tag (purely for SU success) and once someone stumbles it (which captures that title for all SU eternity) go back in to your post and re-optimize the permalink, most importantly the title tag, for the search engine keywords you’re targeting. This way you get the best of both worlds.

For example, the original post I wrote on how to achieve SU success (back on Feb 13th) probably would have gotten 10x the traffic on SU, if I hadn’t mistakenly used the title tag “My StumbleUpon”, which is non-descriptive. If I had used the real title of the article (10 Simple Tips to StumbleUpon Success…) it would have caught on far faster.

IMPORTANT: I have not seen this tip anywhere and I think if used properly it can be extremely valuable. If you take one thing from this entire post, understand this!

Although I advocate SEO and writing appealing titles (as stated in point #8), I don’t advocate spamming search engines or SU. If you’re proud of a post you’ve written and you want to get the word out (within reason) - #8 illustrates good ways to accomplish that.

Don’t be scared to self stumble from time to time. I’ve seen a few bloggers use this very successfully in the last few months. I wouldn’t make a habit of it, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

Generally, just BECOME MORE AWARE. Always know who discovered or stumbled your post. I would think about sending a thank you (via SU) to the person that stumbled your page. I’m sure that would help your chances of being stumbled by this person again.

I rarely get stumbled outside of a hardcore group of readers. It’s sad actually, but many people are blissfully unaware of what I’m (or any Stumbler) doing for them, or their traffic. BECOME MORE AWARE and you can turn Stumble Upon into a powerful tool.

And funny enough, on the rare occasion I do receive a thank you for stumbling an article, I can tell you I’m far likelier to stumble that person again, because I know they’re SU AWARE and may return the favor.

Visit the pages of other SU members - who you like most - and peruse their favorites regularly. For me, this is a far better source of useful websites and information then clicking on that silly SU button. It also lets the person know you are interested in their selections, which is a form of networking.

As I stated before, I get around 25 visits a day (although this has slowed a bit) to my StumbleUpon page. If you want to grow your friends and (or) fan base, especially those who share similar interests, this is a great way to start networking.

I visit the page of every person that visits my page and sometimes I drop a comment or find a valuable friend to add to my SU network. If you’d like - make a habit of thanking them for visiting your SU page.

If you’re a blogger SU can be used super effectively to gather interesting links and commentary for your roundups.

Although I wouldn’t have written this a few month ago, use the “Share this page with” icon (on your SU tool bar) selectively, to alert your friends to a post you genuinely think they might enjoy. This point is a bit tricky. It can really work for you or against you.

In fact, I’ve removed SU friends that spammed me too often through my tool bar. But I actually can appreciate it now, from those that send me decent stuff (once a week is a comfortable frequency). For me, clicking on what they “share” ends up being a better alternative then randomly clicking that SU button.

This becomes a good way for you to send them your best stuff too. Over time you can build a small army and work out a schedule of sending a few requests here and there; if you’re writing good posts regularly then it shouldn’t be a problem for you to incorporate the SU “share this” feature into your networking routines.

If you want a boost in popularity or traffic to your SU page, think about switching to a picture of a beautiful woman;) I hesitated to throw this in here, but what the heck, this is all in good fun. Can you guess which of my SU friends has used this tactic very successfully?

Wrapping up

I still love using SU but I have curbed my usage pretty dramatically (down from 5 hrs+ to -2hrs), as there is not enough time in each day for everything I’m involved in.

I’m sure many people that use SU are like me and come out guns blazing. That approach will burn you out and much like blogging itself - people tend to quit. It’s a simple case of the turtle vs. the hare - become the turtle.

Here’s how it works for me these days

Whether I post to SU or not is usually predicated on one thing - me getting to my RSS reader (which I still do most days). The majority of what I post to SU comes straight from my feed reader. I subscribe to about 60 blogs and use them as the fodder for most of my StumbleUpon favorites.

I tend to take an additional 20 minutes each day to just check in on ‘my favorites’ page, refresh it, and see if anything catches my eye, for which to StumbleUpon…

Tags: My StumbleUpon