StumbleUpon Do’s and Dont’s

Social bookmarking sites have made a huge impact on the way people send traffic to their blogs.

It provides a way to let the user (member of social bookmarking site) vote up or down on a certain post submitted by someone, if they like it.

The more up votes a submission receives, the more it will be displayed throughout the site — or in some cases, be moved to the front page of the site.

Today, I want to focus on mine and everyone else’s favorite social bookmarking site, StumbleUpon. I don’t know about you, but I like SU. Not only can you find cool and friendly people, but you can leverage steady traffic from it as well.

We all know how StumbleUpon works; you write a post, someone likes it and clicks on the thumbs up button in their SU toolbar or the SU button in the post — if they really liked your post, people will usually give it a review as well.

The more thumbs up and reviews you get, the more traffic comes your way — or so we thought?

As of late, I’ve been hearing that the same way someone can thumb up your beloved post to bring nothing but juicy goodness to it, they can also bring nothing but sour pain as well. And no, it’s not by thumbing you down . . . something else affects it as well.

There seems to be a correct way to submit posts to SU — but nothing is 100%. From what I know, it’s all speculation, but seems to hold up as truth, since more than one person is talking about it — and I’ve experienced something like it as well.

So I’m going to cover some of the things you should and shouldn’t be doing when submitting a post you like to StumbleUpon.

If you discover, don’t back out

One of the main things being stressed is, if you’re the first to discover a page and you back out, because you’re either a.) lazy or b.) real lazy, you bring a burden to the post you liked enough to attempt to submit, but not enough to go through with the review.

What burden?

In a nutshell, somehow, someway it doesn’t send the traffic it would have, if the review was written without backing out.

I don’t know exactly why this happens, but it seems to happen to a lot of people — including myself.

So, the next time you are about to thumb a page up and come to find you’re the one who discovered it (first person to thumb it up), make sure you go through with it.

Submit into right category and use proper tags

Something else that I know for a fact affects the traffic you receive, or to be more accurate the interest the traffic you receive will have on your post, is what category your post is submitted to and the tags you add.

This is pretty much obvious, but I’ve noticed that as obvious as it is, people still overlook or don’t bother to submit to a proper category or add proper tags. These people go a bit further than our fellow SU members mentioned above, who back out when finding out they discovered the page. These people submit, but don’t bother to look through the categories in order to submit a post into its proper category.

Instead, the post is simply submitted into a random category and no tags are added either. If this post were to receive a lot of traffic, it wouldn’t be very targeted traffic. In fact, it wouldn’t be targeted at all. The traffic you receive will be from people whose interest are related to the category in which your post was submitted to at random.

Keywords: at random

Meaning since it was random, the category most likely has nothing to do with your post. In result, you receive meaningless and uninterested traffic. Even after someone reports that it is in the wrong category, the damage has been done, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Using the “Send to” feature in your toolbar

If you have some nice friends on SU that are nice enough to thumb up your pages when you ask, then this as well can affect the traffic you receive.

In what I believe is a way to keep the integrity of SU’s toolbar and the effectiveness around it, the review you receive from someone on your “send to” list won’t send as much traffic as a review from a complete stranger — someone not on your “send to” list.

I’ve experienced this first hand. This blog receives 200 to 500 visits daily from SU alone, but several times throughout the month I’ll receive +1,000 visits from SU in one day.

When I go to check the reviews, I come to find a complete stranger discovered my page, wrote a review, added some tags, and submitted it into its proper category.

My friends on SU do the same, but the difference in traffic is stupendous when you compare it to a stranger discovering it and doing the same thing your friends do. So, I believe it is SU’s way to prevent friends on SU from exchanging reviews. Otherwise, anyone would be able to leverage +1,000 visits to their site under daily basis.

One could try to email their friends personally instead of using the “sent to” feature, but I would think just the act of them being on your friends list affects it as well. There is probably a way around this, if you sit down and think about it — like erasing everyone and keeping contact via email only, but really, are we that desperate for traffic?

Didn’t think so.

Something you can do is whenever you have a new friend, or better yet before you add them, ask them to discover the given post, add tags, and submit it in its proper category, then let all your friends go at it.

Constant reviews from the same person

Although it’s never bad to have someone that always thumbs up your page and gives a review, eventually it can desensitize, if you will, the weight of their reviews on SU’s algorithm.

The first time someone ever reviews anything of yours, it’s the most effective in bringing traffic, or so we believe. If someone constantly is submitting a lot of your posts, they will eventually bring little to no traffic.

SU’s algorithm will begin to think you’re either doing favors or that you’re an owner or in someway part of the blog and are trying to leverage traffic to it. Which is why I say it eventually desensitizes the weight the person’s reviews have once they over do it.

I can definitely back this up, as it has happened to me before with one of my friends on SU, though it was not intentional.

Reviews from ghoulish friends

This is something I can also back up. My sister, who on SU is a ghoul, meaning she doesn’t have a picture so she has the ghost-like default picture, one day read a blog post of mine and thumbed it up and reviewed it.

Keep in mind she doesn’t have enough pages liked or reviews of any pages.

Afterwards, she came and told me and showed me on her computer what she had done — I said, “cool”. Then later on in the day, I went back to the same post to see how many reviews it had received and I noticed my sister’s review wasn’t there.

I doubled checked with her and everything was fine, it was in her pages liked and favorites as well. But on my screen, it was no where to be found; review nor the ghost-like picture. And to top it off, that post received little traffic, even though it received a lot of reviews.

I believe it’s the fact my sister hasn’t reached the amount of pages liked or reviews that SU wants you to achieve, that her reviews and thumbs up don’t appear on mine and anyone else who has surpassed the amount and do not bring any traffic whatsoever.

This also seems like insurance, courtesy of SU, to insure people don’t just make a ton of accounts and thumb themselves up a bunch of time.

Ask for reviews not just thumbs up

You may have noticed two things: in this entire post I mention “reviews” more than “thumbs up” and in the subtitle above it says, “Ask for reviews . . . ”

To start off, I say to ask because it’s OK to ask friends to review your posts and thumb them up — that’s the point of the toolbar, “send to” feature, and having friends on SU.

And most importantly, reviews send more traffic than a thumbs up. I don’t know how many times over has this proven itself to me on its own. Plain and simple, reviews get more traffic than thumbs up alone.

But of course you have to remember about what’s discussed in this post about discovering a page; add tags, write a review, and submit it in its proper category — these things should be done as well when you don’t discover a post but are writing a review for it.

If so, reviews bring more traffic than thumbs up alone. And you don’t need to ask for both a review and thumbs up, almost everyone who reviews will also thumb up — or so I would like to think so.

Are these things you’ve experienced using StumbleUpon? What have you learned from using StumbleUpon?

These are all the things that I’ve picked up from using StumbleUpon and from other people who use it as well. Have these things happened to you? Is what I and others experienced similar to your own? If so, how do you go about it?

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