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5 Things You Must Know About StumbleUpon
By Mark | August 29, 2008
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Image via Wikipedia If you’re into Social Bookmarking you’ll know about StumbleUpon. But there are some important things you should avoid or you could be putting not only your own site but those of others at risk.
No. 1 – The Thumbs Up Stumble, Stumble
If you click on the Stumble “thumbs up” button and that page has not already been submitted a pop-up screen appears that requires some more detail.
DO NOT CANCEL. If you do the page is only partially submitted. The page is registered but as the submission was canceled no one is associated with it and the page usually suffers as a result.
Any visitor to your blog can just hit thumbs up and then cancel because they don’t want to fill in the details. Bang – your page is consigned to graveyard. Please don’t do this to my pages 
No. 2 – The Self Stumble
There is nothing wrong in Stumbling your own posts and StumbleUpon expects you to do so from time to time, BUT, you may get your account terminated if you abuse the Terms of Service. They state that accounts created for the primary purpose of promoting a product or service will be considered spam.
To avoid this you should be Stumbling many other sites to dilute the impact of your own submissions. You should also avoid submitting every one of your posts as you run the risk of a Thumbs Down on any that are not considered good – unless you are superhuman there will be a few dogs from time to time!
No. 3 – The Stumble Mate
Similarly, you should not be limiting your Stumbles to a few of your favourite blogs. This too will start to look like a spamming technique and may lead to your “mates” sites getting penalised. Be careful too of submitting several pages from the same site at the same time.
No. 4 – The Wrong Category Stumble
The first time a page is submitted the submitter has to choose a category. THIS IS A VITAL STEP because only the original submitter can change the category later – and that’s not very likely!
The category selected for the page will be used to determine who sees that page when they use StumbleUpon.
If you set up StumbleUpon to show you pages about, say photography and you get shown pages clearly about politics (because someone has wrongly selected the photography category for a photographic site) you are not likely to approve!
It is vital, therefore, that a page is allocated to an appropriate category otherwise members who are shown pages that they are not interested in may give those pages a “thumbs down”.
No. 5 – Not Using StumbleUpon Correctly
The concept of Stumble is to identify categories of sites you are interested in (when you sign up), and then to Thumbs Up those you particularly like as you are served up pages from the Stumble toolbar. This helps the system serve up better sites to you in the future – more relevant to your tastes. Sites you don’t like, sales pages, too many Adwords, slow loading, irrelevant etc may be given a Thumbs Down.
This helps the system serve up more appropriate content to every user.
If all you are using Stumble for is to submit your own and a few favourite sites – you and your friends sites will suffer from being downgraded and ultimately not served up on the network.
So please, download the toolbar and spend a few minutes each day Stumbling through the sites served up and giving them some Thumbs.
For more detailed information and full training on the correct way to use StumbleUpon I recommend Caroline Middleton’s excellent free course.
Hope to Stumble into you soon.
Mark
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Topics: General Guru Fodder, Marketing, Social Bookmarking | 3 Comments »
August 29th, 2008 at 5:56 am
Hey Mark,
Your blog seems to have the hiccups or your enter key is stuck I am seeing the last two post numerous times.
I have no idea what could cause this other then multiple submissions.
August 29th, 2008 at 6:40 am
Hi Randy – eating too much spam yesterday no doubt! Took a glass of water while standing on my head and the extra posts seem to have disappeared. I have no idea what happened – I saw multiple posts but after checking in admin. and revisiting seems OK now.
September 22nd, 2008 at 12:41 pm
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