StumbleUpon Uncover the confusion Part Two
Submitting your OWN Articles
I want to clear this up right away. It is ok to submit your own articles. As a matter of fact, I recommend that you submit most of your articles. Unless it has no value, for instance informing your readers that you won’t be posting for the next week. However, you do want to submit your articles. Here’s why, when your article is first submitted, a discovery screen will appear where you can enter the tags of your article as well as a review or comments. Who better to fill in this stuff than you the author of the article?
Here’s what I do when I reach the comments/review field. I simply use the first paragraph or so as the review. Sort of like a teaser, this is very easy to do and you just copy it from your site.
Now when another user comes to your site and they stumble it, all they have to do is hit Thumbs Up and they are done. No need for them to fill out the discovery form. So by submitting your own posts, it makes it easier for someone else to give you a thumbs up.
Giving Some Stumble Love
Keep in mind even though you are submitting your own articles, it even more important to stumble others on a daily basis. Here’s why, by stumbling other articles your profile is not full of just your self submitted articles. If you do not stumble other articles you will be seen as a spammer and you could possibly be temporarily banned from submitting your own articles.
Make stumbling part of your daily routine. When you are out surfing the web you can just hit the thumbs up button on any articles you have found to be interesting to you. Of course, if you really don’t like it, then you can click on the thumbs down.
When you are out giving some stumble love (thumbs up) make sure that you also go back to your home page and click on sites you stumbled and click on the review cloud. Providing reviews not only helps the person who received your stumble love, but it alos helps your user profile.
Let’s GET READY TO STUUUUUUMMMMMMBLE!
Simple Stumbling
We now have the StumbleUpon toolbar in our browser which allows us to stumble articles in two ways.
1. Clicking on the Stumble text on the toolbar. This will bring up new articles into the current window of your browser which you can then click on the thumbs up or thumbs down. After voting, you could then click on the stumble toolbar for a new article
2. Another way to stumble and help other bloggers is to simply click the thumbs up or thumbs down buttons while reading an article from your favorite blog.
The above example are simple explanations of the actual stumbling process. Remember that StumbleUpon uses an algorithm so it actually is timing how long it takes you to stumble an article. This timing process not only affects the article you are voting on, but also affects your profile as a stumble user. So be careful to take time stumbling article. Now, I am not saying you have to actually wait 5 or ten minutes. But at the same time you probably shouldn’t give a thumbs up on an article in a matter of seconds. Especially if it’s the first time you’ve seen the article.
Today’s Exercise
So for today’s exercise submit an article from your current site. Keep in mind that if you do submit an article and the discovery form does not come up and the thumbs up turns a different color. That means that someone else has already submitted your article. So you will need to select a different article from your site. Look in the comments section of this series of articles. In the comments section, click on the links where other’s have left comments. Go to their sites and give them some stumble love. If you want to participate, Leave a comment so that others can click on your site as well.
After submitting your article, use the stumble toolbar and submit at least 10 different articles. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post. Tomorrow we will be discussing ways to become a power stumbler. Hope to see you tomorrow.
October 4th, 2007 at 10:26 am
We are having a big go round at my blog about StumbleUpon so this series couldn’t come at a better time for us. It’s easy enough to spike visits for a day or two but there must be more to it. We are looking forward to hearing about the long term.
And I attempted a trackback for this post. I hope you will let me know if I did it right. The only URL I could find was the one at the top of the page. Hope that was it. Thanks for your efforts on this subject.
October 4th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Our friend Bernie has been stumbling his friends. Last time I looked he had about five hundred stumbles. But he wasn’t stumbling himself. Much.
So now his thumbs up sign doesn’t work anymore. Does that mean they turned off the tap for awhile?
Or did he maybe just use it so much he broke the software?
These are the kinds of issues we worry about in the trenches.
October 4th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
David,
First of all thanks for taking the time to comment on our site!
Here’s the track link for this post:
http://arsenalmarketing.com/web-20-internet-marketing/stumbleupon-uncover-the-confusion-part-two
As far as Bernie’s thumbs up not working, could be a couple of things.
1. He’s already voted for the article where the thumbs up doesn’t work.
2. He’s been giving thumbs up for a multiple of articles in record time. Meaning he’s voting on stuff even before the page loads.
This happens a lot when folks try to start a stumble exchange club. The folks that run these clubs don’t want to explain the proper way to vote. If this is a club where everyone exchanges votes. Then at least wait a few minutes prior to voting. Make sure you do this for every article. If he has not been banned he will eventually get his thumbs back…..
October 5th, 2007 at 8:15 am
Thanks. I tried it again. I clicked on the trackback message before. Was that right?