Using StumbleUpon to Get on the Radar of Other Bloggers

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.