Here’s a quick tip if you’re looking to get on the radar of another blogger (big or small).
Bookmark their work using StumbleUpon.
Two quick stories:
Story 1
The other day I got an email from a blogger that I’d never had direct contact with before. The message was simply a thank you for submitting one of their posts to SU. To be honest I barely remember stumbling their post – but I was the first one to do it and so my profile photo was featured as the one who discovered it. The result was that when they went to see where traffic was coming from at StumbleUpon they saw my profile and tracked me down at my blog.
Their email was a thank you and to let me know that they’d just subscribed to my two blogs (which are listed on my SU profile).
Story 2
This morning I noticed some nice traffic coming into StumbleUpon from this post. When I went to its StumbleUpon page to see how it was going I noticed a familiar face as the person who discovered the page – TheNanny612.
The reason that her face is familiar is that TheNanny612 (Shana) has stumbled/discovered my posts before (on at least one occasion). Of course in seeing who was behind the profile I discovered her blogs including Social Desire (a blog about social media). Shana is now on my radar (and in my news aggregator as i just subscribed to her blog).
Now in both of these cases I and Shana only got ourselves one extra reader by being active on StumbleUpon – but you just never know whose ‘radar’ might might end up on and what might result in that.
For me it illustrates the power of being a good active citizen of online communities.
PS One More Example
As I’m about to his publish on this post I’m reminded of another illustration of this same principle – this time from Digg.
It must have been over a year back now but I still remember the day where a Digg User popped up on my radar – his name was Muhammad Saleem. These days he’s become something of a social media celebrity – but Muhammad has become quite well known (and known as a social media expert) over the last year or two. One of the reasons for his rise to social media stardom is that he has been a prolific user of social media sites – including Digg. He managed to become one of Digg’s top users and in doing so got on the radar of many bloggers.
SU is truly a great boon specially for those bloggers who get less traffic. Once I wrote a post as to how we should thank people who stumble our posts and man it received thousands of visits plus stumbles. Similarly another post of mine about jessica alba’s gaming habits was stumbled by someone and you wont believe it but up till now it is still the most visited post on my blog on daily basis. I am receiving many clicks on that post from Google too. Mainly from Google image search. It started with SU and Google carried that to give me the desired traffic.
I haven’t been regular on SU for last 1 month due to my exams else I just love it. So many cool people are part of it :)
Interesting idea. I’ve seen a little bit of that on SU myself, although not a very strong effect in my case as of yet. But it’s not a bad thing to try for.
Well… I stumbled this post (and did a short review), but wasn’t the first to notice it, though StumbleUpon only identifies that “someone” discovered this. A little strange.
I did a post about using StumbleUpon to help other bloggers and webmasters get a bit more exposure just recently:
“Just stumbling along…, er, upon”
Thanks Darren. This is the post I have been waiting for per our conversation during your live video chat a few weeks ago.
Great ideas, Darren, thanks for the stories!
Sounds a lot like Karma, you get back what you give (and sometimes even more…)
I just signup StumbleUpon last week but not really go in depth to use it.
Agreed!
I’m the top user over at DesignSnack – a great design showcase.
I’ve received a lot of traffic from them.
Very quick pick up, I had a friend Stumble a post on “Could you Survive a Digg Storm?” and I saw a 1000% increase in traffic from it for a short 2 day duration. Very impressive “Stumble upon!”
Networking with related topics and bloggers seems to help the most. . .
Thanks for sharing your experience with SU too.
Glenn
Never thought to use StumbleUpon until now. Never saw a need for it. Pretty naive, I guess.
a lot tha time i will say thank you to bloggers who stumble or Sphinn etc and it works wonders for me…
Woah, I just checked Google Analytics I’ve just gotten like 40 visitors from StumbleUpon! Considering my average is like 5 hits per day (huge numbers), that’s pretty awesome.
Now I have to promise myself I won’t stumble my own stuff anymore. Ha ha.
5 hits total per day from all sources that is. Sorry Darren for the double post.
I always write a thank you note to people who stumbled me. I also make it a point to go to their blog if they have one and leave a comment or if appropriate, find an article to stumble on as well.
Good karma.
Unfortunately with giant popularity – comes black hat and gray hat promotion tactics.
Digg was first, then StumbleUpon now YouTube.
Just look at these latest BOLD tactics….
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/119784.html :-o
This is a perfect example of the wonders of StumbleUpon. It is my absolute favorite Social Networking site. I have discovered sites, feeds and people that I probably never would have come across if it wasn’t for SU.
Thank you so much for the mention, Darren. I feel the need to gush a bit, so please bear with me. ;-) I was a Webmaster for 6 years before I started blogging. When I decided I wanted to learn how to Blog… the site that I used to teach me was yours. My sister pointed me in the direction of your Blogging 101 section (I think this was what it was called at the time). I followed your tutorial pages to teach me what I know …. and today I have several blogs including SocialDesire.com . So, thank you. :-)
Have a wonderful weekend!!
Shana Albert
TheNanny612
This is a neat idea . . . I hadn’t thought about this angle on it.
I generally thank folks who give me an original stumble. (I don’t thank subsequent stumblers, and some of them consider it an egregious form of spam. Go figure.) Maki has stumbled a few of my things, which always gives me an especially nice boost. And I have definitely come across some new great sites by clicking through on those who have stumbled mine.
I get more out of SU as a stumbler than I do as someone benefiting from stumble traffic, though. From watching my logs, very few stumblers seem to linger.
On the other hand, at the end of the day, I’m just very pleased that folks are reading my stuff.
Hey i know that girl lol! .
Btw I had almost same situation like you did Darren. For first time I did not want people to stumble my blog because it was new then a girl that I just did not know stumbled me, so i track her down to see why did she stumble me?
Now we are best friends lol. And guest posting each other.
I am thinking of writing an article: How to Get Pretty Girls to Stumble Your Post! LOL
StumbleUpon has provided me with over 55,000 hits, and I couldn’t be more grateful. I became a Stumbler on a whim, because I found stumbling enjoyable, whereas most of the other social media sites are kind of a drag. I also know that I’ve acquired many readers and subscribers through Stumble. It’s a great service, and you’ll find that a highly successful post will continue to reap benefits for weeks, if not months, through Stumblers giving it a thumbs up.
I am just getting into stumbleupon, and I like it a lot. I think the whole social media idea can work very well. I have actually run into TheNanny (Shana) on mixx.com, my favorite site.
Okay, I give up. I have a SU refer in my stats and it takes me to where it reads “Your page is on StumbleUpon.” When I click that statement it links to my page but I can’t seem to find out who stumbled. I need some enlightenment here.
I hope that doesn’t sound whiney; I just can’t seem to break the code.
Thanks for the help.
My kids introduced me to stumbleupon a year or so ago. They would spend hours on the computer just stumbling around. :) I used to have a toolbar so I could rate things but it has disappeared in the last few months. I did find a toolbarless stumbleupon bookmarklet though. It allows you to review any page that you are on with just a click. For those that don’t have a Share This button.
http://dreamcore.home.comcast.net/~dreamcore/toolbarless/
Works like a charm.
I never realized that you could check to see who stumbled you but the link above does have a bookmarklet to read the reviews too.
@Glenn: that friend was me stumbling your post on Surviving the Digg Storm… resulting in 1000% increase in traffic ;) I know you know, just had to say that here :)
@Deb: if you use firefox, once you are on post that says your page is on SU. just check the ‘check reviews of this page’ bubble and it’ll tell you who submitted your page
SU remains my all time favorite site although I’ve tried others and do use Digg and Mixx frequently…
Hurray for Shana!
SU is really great. As my SU network continues to grow, I am getting lots of trafficx from SU.In fact, the traffic that I get from SU is much more than that which come s from Google and Yahoo! combined. SU power!!!
This advice is very timely for me because just yesterday a visitor to my blog commented that I should add a StumbleUpon button (and I did). It’s good to hear that this is working for people.
I have not had any lick with StumbleUpon whatsoever. I’m not sure why, maybe I’m just too inept to get it and make it effective.
Stumble is great. Certainly it is a great networking mechanism.
I love stumbleupon. In fact I am seriously addicted. I have met some wonderful like minded people. Its a wonderful social networking.
As always enjoy your post
Megan
http://passportmentors,wordpress.com
cool. the world’s getting smaller. much easier these days to rub shoulders with blogging superstars than a while back.
Since I started stumbling a little while back, the same has happened for me. Bloggers popping up in the radar because someone stumbled my page and vice versa so I too believe it is good karma.
Stumbleupon is so easy… especially with their toolbar in place. It is one of my most favorites to use,
That was a great tip Darren!
Good tips Darren. I’ve been actively use SU too this few weeks. Works like a charm and traffic seems to be growing too. Its a great plugin on Firefox.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but my understanding is that if you’re using Adsense or something else that counts impressions, it’s not that okay to receive major Stumbling Upon. Two or so months ago we had three days where we 800-1200 pageviews from it on each of those days; this artificially skews traffic numbers. 99% of Stumble Uponers don’t come back and (it seemed) 99% didn’t even look at another page.
So, those with medium to Lots of traffic; and have advertising, Stumble Upon may not be right for you.
I got on top page of digg but I never got more than ten people a day from stumble upon to my blog http://livelymoney.blogspot.com I have like 14 friends but I guess it takes more time to socially build a presence on stumble upon
Stumbleupon is fantastic. We get half our web traffic from there.
My husband and I got our first 12,000 hits in one day at Beyond Megapixels because of one person’s kind stumble. Our month was barely a month old then. We’re approaching our second month now, and we’ve been receiving consistent traffic from StumbleUpon ever since. I love it.
Erm, sorry. I forgot to close it with the tag.
Darren thanks for sharing. I have still not sussed stumbleupon. I only used it once and it ended in disaster. But several months later I’ve noticed I’m getting quite a bit of traffic. How do you find out who’s been stumbling you?
I only recently signed up for Stumble once I had a traffic spike that was around 50x my normal daily traffic. Since I signed up I’ve had an increase in traffic around 15-20% and can see that the referrals are coming from posts that have been Stumbled..
Anyway, have you heard of, or had any experience with Pay Per Play, as I see they have a beta program for their audio ad network that is shortly closing off for affiliate sign ups?
Nice story, stumbleUpon is very addicitive and I love the social aspect.
Something so simple and easy. It may be hard to believe but I only just started using Stumble.
SU has been a great source (so far) in generating traffic for me. I love it, though. In fact, it’s how I found your page!
I blog about money, which is something a lot of younger people aren’t TOO interested in. I’m 22 though, so it’s has a fresh perspective… so we’ll see.
Best,
Shauna
http://shauna26.wordpress.com/
Darren, I couldn’t agree more. SU has been probably the most effective online networking tool for me and I have connected with great folks (like you) in the process. I am going to be doing a few posts on blogging this week myself, and will link to your article here.
Anthony
Fantastic ideas on the web site! Stumble Up9on is addictive for me! Patrick
I’m just now getting into SU. I’ll see what happens :)