Stumble Upon has doubled my views every day since I started using it three weeks ago on Mini Travellers.
There are some great articles kicking about, about Stumble Upon and how to use it so I don’t want to try and re-write those, but personally I have found some of them quite difficult to follow until I started to have a play around with Stumble Upon and then it started to make more sense. So this post suggests you start playing around with it before you try and ‘use’ it to promote your blog posts.
FIRSTLY CREATE A STUMBLE UPON ACCOUNT
- Tip 1 – Log in, create an account and tell Stumble Upon what YOU like personally. Don’t think about your blog at first just tell Stumble Upon what you like. For me that is Travel, Food and UK.
- Tip 2 – Stumble Upon has a mainly American user base so if you are trying to find local things you need to add UK as one of your interests.
- Tip 3 – Click on the Orange Stumble Upon button in the middle of the page and see what webpages come up. Every time you click on ‘stumble’ a new page comes up and someone somewhere gets a new view on their blog/web page. You then click like or dislike (clicking on thumbs up or thumbs down). Stumble Upon then starts to see what you like or dislike and will try and show you relevant content to you i.e content you like.
- Tip 4 – Play around doing this for a while, you will start to see what will encourage you to press like. For me it can be a catchy headline but usually it will be a very strong featured image. Remember this when we talk about adding yours.
SUBMIT YOUR BLOG PAGE
- Tip 5: You don’t submit your blog, you submit a post/page on your blog.
- Tip 6: You can log into Stumble Upon and click add a page (this is in the drop down section next to your image in Stumble Upon) or you can add a Stumble Upon button to your blog posts and add it that way by clicking on it yourself and you will get a submit your blog page.
Don’t add you post to Stumble Upon on your phone. You can’t choose categories if you do it this way. This will influence the number of views.
- Tip 7 – Once your page/post is submitted to Stumble Upon, Stumble Upon may show it to other people. In this way it is a bit like Facebook. The more people who like your page, the more people Stumble Upon will show it to.
- Tip 8 – Stumble Upon has a mainly American user base so posts about a city in Europe do well, whereas a very local UK attraction (think a play centre etc) may not. Content about craft or interiors that all can like will do better than a post about a product you can only buy in the UK. Think about this when choosing which posts to submit.
- Tip 9 – When submitting your post to Stumble Upon choose the categories you want it to be found in. For example I will tag a Family Holiday in Rome as: Family, Italy, Europe, Kids
- Tip 10 – Submit posts with strong headings/strong featured images. Think back to tip 4 in the first section. Which pages caught your eye, which ones did you click like on. Chose pages to submit that others may like.
STUMBLE UPON THREADS
With Sarah Christie of Extraordinary Chaos I have started a Daily Stumble upon Thread you can find it here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/954414294652966/
The idea behind the thread is that you ‘like/thumbs up’ other people’s submitted Stumble Upon content to give it more Stumble Upon juice. As I mentioned in Tip 7 above the more people who like your page, the more other people will see it. So if 10 people in a thread like your page on Stumble Upon chances are lots more will see it too.
One post I submitted last week on Mini Travellers has now had 1000 views. It had previously ‘bombed’ and had only reached 30.
In order to join a Stumble Upon thread you really need to have a Stumble Upon button on your blog. Albeit you can link up by adding your link to the Stumble Upon page. For some reason, I know not why, the second option is apparently not quite as good, but I’m afraid I can’t explain that!
In order to join a thread like ours. Submit your post to Stumble Upon first so that you choose the categories you want it recognised in and then commit to ‘stumble’ the requested number in the thread. In ours it is the ten posts above you.
I hope that clears up a few issues but if not do come and join our thread and ask a question. We can hopefully help you out ‘on the job’ so to speak!
