A StumbleUpon Tip That Will Make Your Blog Roundups a Breeze

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If you’re a blogger, then you know what a ’roundup’ post is.

If you’re not a blogger - a ’roundup’ post serves to highlight your favorite articles from around the web each week. I typically write my ’roundup’ post each Sunday and call it ‘Chance Flavors’ of the week.

The purpose of a roundup is to network with other bloggers in your niche. It’s kind of cool to be recognized by your peers for something you’ve written, it makes you feel good about all the time and hard work you’ve put in, and God knows all bloggers need a morale boast from time to time.

The intricacies of a ’roundup’ post

A link from a roundup (to another blog) tends to be reciprocated at some point, although there are no rules here. Some of the best bloggers I know are also the strongest networkers, and they do a great job of linking out to other blogs and developing tremendous goodwill within their niche community. A good example of bloggers who are excellent at this, who I’d recommend modeling yourself after, are Pinyo from Moolanomy and Ron from The Wisdom Journal.

Now the only problem, for many bloggers, is actually creating the roundup posts. These posts can be very time consuming, especially if you take care and put a lot of effort into them, which is very easy to spot. I know quite a few bloggers that dread their roundups. For me, here’s where StumbleUpon is priceless.

Addicted to SU

I’m an active user of (SU) StumbleUpon, sometimes too active for my own good. The biggest and best way I justify the time I spend on Stumble Upon is by using it (exactly what it is meant for) to bookmark all my favorite articles.

When it comes time to write my roundup all I do is go to my StumbleUpon page and click on my tags related to personal finance. I have a wealth of articles (from the past week) to cut and paste into my roundup… therefore making it a breeze. I usually spend about a 1/2 hour putting it together.

Please remember that’s only possible because I spend upwards of 2 hours (most days) on StumbleUpon, writing reviews about my favorite stuff… but it’s a great way to justify spending so much time reading and finding cool articles to Stumble.

Warning

None of the above is possible if you flippantly stumble articles and never write a review. I wrote a post called 10 Simple Steps to StumbleUpon success in early February detailing my approach to SU. One of the things I do is leave a real review for over 50% of the articles I like (as opposed to just a thumbs up). In essence, I’m actually leaving my commentary on that post, in the form of a StumbleUpon review.

I actually talked about this in one of my roundups - I decided for the most part, instead of leaving a comment on someone’s individual blog post, I write my comments in the form of a SU review (not all the time, but usually). That way my opinion is out there and there’s a good chance the stumbled site will get a nice burst in traffic too. What you’re doing is killing two birds with one stone, and there’s a much higher likelihood your comments won’t go unnoticed.

So for me using SU is a social exercise but it has some wonderful side effects that justify all the time spent there!

To recap:

• By writing an average of 30+ reviews a week on SU I have a healthy pool of posts to choose from for my weekly round up. I can tell you the quality of my roundups is pretty high, since I’m not flying by the seat of my pants… these are genuinely some of my favorite posts in waiting.
• I don’t spend much time commenting on individual blogs anymore, instead I use SU as a surrogate, to leave my comments in the form of a review. This way my comments don’t go unnoticed, since there’s a very good shot the blogger is going to have some traffic coming his way. If he (or she) is halfway cognizant, they will know where it’s coming from. So everybody is happy!
• In the above situation, leaving comments on SU is a great way to maximize one’s efficiencies, work smart, all while doing something you enjoy - Stumbling…

Oh by the way, I promised a follow up article to the wildly popular (tongue in cheek) StumbleUpon article (mentioned above) I wrote from February. That post is coming in the next day or two, this was the prelude…

Tags: StumbleUpon