9 Tips For Using StumbleUpon With Your Blog

Our host today is Eric Bannatyne. If you're interested in getting in front of the readers of Site Sketch 101, check out our guest posting invitation here.

With over 8 million members, StumbleUpon is one of the most popular internet communities for sharing interesting web sites.

If, for some reason, you don’t know how to use StumbleUpon: you click on the “Stumble!” button on a toolbar, which takes you to a random website, based on your interests, that some others have discovered and submitted.

Unfortunately, many people decide to use StumbleUpon to promote their blog simply by giving their posts a Thumbs-Up once in a while, not even bothering to categorize it, write a short review, and to check out others’ sites. If you’re going to promote your blog with StumbleUpon, you should do it right.

9 Tips For Using StumbleUpon For Your Blog

• A lot of stumblers will only spend a few seconds at your site. So do your best to make a great first impression. Make sure your design looks nice, make sure that any ads don’t get in the way, add links to some of your other content, and clearly display your subscription methods.
• Make sure your site is memorable. Visitors who find your site might never remember it again, so make it different from all of the other sites. Use a custom design, write your content with a different style, and do plenty of other things to stand out.
• When deciding on tags for your post, think of what keywords people might use when searching StumbleUpon for content like yours.
• Don’t just Thumb-Up your own posts. Be sure to Thumb-Up interesting things that you discover that others might like.
• Many Stumblers are bored when they hit the “Stumble!” button, looking for an interesting site. This means that you should stumble all of your most interesting posts.
• Use StumbleUpon to find ideas for your blog. Don’t just steal ideas from others, though. Find a blog post that you like, and try to think of an idea based on a similar subject. A helpful strategy is to use idea mapping.
• If you don’t seem to be getting very many thumbs up, you can consider exchanging stumbles, so that you get a Thumbs-Up in exchange for giving someone else’s blog post a Thumbs-Up.
• If you want, I guess you could also do some paid advertising with StumbleUpon.
• Do not Thumb-Up every single one of your posts. If there are too many stumbles from a Stumbler on the same domain, the domain may be banned from StumbleUpon. I may actually be guilty of this. So far, I’ve stumbled almost all of my posts, and now I recieve barely any traffic from StumbleUpon.

Do you use StumbleUpon? If you do, I would be interested to see what kinds of things you are interested in.