Last week we talked about a few ways on how we can create an influential Digg profile. Today we will take a look at another highly populated social media site- StumbleUpon. Before we go into details on how we can create a compelling Stumble Upon presence, it is important to note that although StumbleUpon can be gamed to some extent, it is almost impossible to gain consistent results with StumbleUpon in comparison to Digg and Reddit. Although I am most active on Digg, StumbleUpon is my favorite. I have been noted as a "power stumbler" on StumbleUpon and have been able to consistently drive traffic to my sites and others. Due to the recent changes StumbleUpon has become even more powerful as web surfers can use SU without being a member. This is a huge, a huge bonus for us since "non member" market is widely ignored by most social media services but StumbleUpon has embraced that market with the new changes that were implemented couple weeks ago.

As I have mentioned above, I am a power stumbler and with my heavy use of SU (StumbleUpon) I have been able to note a few things that has consistently worked for me both to generate traffic and to become a influential member of the community. Some of the things I will mention below might be things that you already know and for some it might be new information. However, the tips that I will be mentioning below has worked wonders for me and I am sure it will for you as well given you put some time and effort into it. The reason most people give up on becoming influential on social media scene is simply because of lack of time but the most common reason whether anyone admits or not is simply patience. Results when it comes to gaining recognition in social media scene doesn’t come overnight. As with anything else, it takes quite a bit of time but when you are past that time every bit of your time you put in and every ounce of patience you saved is well worth.

Enough of my rambling, lets get started.

1. Act as you would in the real world

Before we carry on let me put a real life scenario : Imagine every morning you take a bus to go to work. There are 10 people at the bus stop. Some you like and some you don’t. If someone came over to you with a banner and just kind of shoved it right at your face and said "Hey, buy this for me" what would your answer be? Of course you would retaliate with some kind of rudeness in response to that and you probably wouldn’t hesitate to tell that person that you don’t like them either.

The reason I brought that up is because most users on StumbleUpon completely ignore the "I don’t like" (thumb down) button while using StumbleUpon. SU’s algorithm is a very smart one so you have to make it look what you are doing is pretty legit. For example, if you see something you don’t like go ahead and thumb it down. Does it have too many ads? Does it contain content that you disapprove of? If so make use of the "I don’t like it" button. If in the real world you wouldn’t hesitate to tell someone you don’t like them why the heck should you hesitate in the virtual world. The point here is to make sure you make yourself a natural stumbler, someone who "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" naturally. Think about it, if you are thumbing up everything you see on SU isn’t that a natural redflag? Instead find something to thumb down once in a while. I would say daily. If you are thumbing up 20 articles it can’t be that hard to find 5 that you don’t like. Go ahead and make use of that button, trust me it will make a difference both in the eye of other stumblers and the algorithm will love you as well.

If you look at this image you can see I have thumbed it down and the reason is simply because I think its, well, dumb. Go ahead and start down voting things that you don’t like. Make it real, keep it natural. Yes vote up for you friends articles and all but make sure to make use of that "thumb down" button as well. Its there for a reason.

News : recently one of the power stumbler who had about 30,000 stumbles under his belt got banned. The reason : he was thumbing up the same sites time and time after and guess what, among those 30,000 stumbles he didn’t have one article that he didn’t like. It doesn’t take an algorithm to figure that out. A silly mistake like that can be caught by a human moderator within minutes.

2. Rotate your network

We all promote our content on different social media channels. Some prefer Digg, some reddit and many prefer StumbleUpon. When it comes to instant traffic StumbleUpon might not be the best option but if you are looking for residual traffic nothing beats StumbleUpon. But there is a trick, a simple one at that to make sure StumbleUpon brings you both instant and residual traffic. Here are a few pointers on how to rotate your network and what to do to maximize visibility through SU for your blog or content,

Many StumbleUpon users have a group of people that "thumb up" each other’s content. There is nothing wrong with that but there is a downfall to following this strategy consistently. SU algorithm likes to see diversity. Due to this reason most users see a huge surge of traffic on one content when their group thumbs up and when the next article comes around they barely see anything. The reason is simply because same pattern is being followed time and time after. Although rotating network might sound hard it is as easy as it can be. There are couple social media voting groups on the web. Some are email groups and some exist as google groups and in other forms. Try and be a part of these groups. If you can be an active member on 2 or 3 of these groups. This allows you to easily rotate your network. And don’t forget your IM network. If you have2-3 voting groups and then IM as well rotating network is simply a matter of managing who to send and who not to.

For instance say you publish 4 articles in 1 week. Send the first article to one group and do not promote it to any other group. Second article to second group and so on and so forth. By the time you reach the fourth article your first group most probably won’t have thumbed up for a week or so, this allows you to pull in more traffic next week when you have your first article again. Of course, you have to make your own judgement as to which article you want to get the most traffic to. By the way, do not promote every article on StumbleUpon. Once in a while let it be, hopefully some random reader will submit it who have never submitted or voted for your content, this will help boost your traffic count tremendously. Remember diversity counts. Use your network but make it look as diversified as you can.

The image above shows my Instant Messaging network. As you can see this is an image for my digg (stumble as well) network. And this is only my IM network without taking into consideration my other email groups and such. The number highlighted are total number of people that I have on my instant messenger. You can see that I have quite a few people on it. This allows me to rotate my network easily. There are times when any given article is "thumbed up" by one person once a month which significantly boosts my contents visibility on SU. By the way, if you would like to use all your IMs ( MSN, gtalk, AIM, Yahoo Messenger ) try using Pidgin, it helps you access all your Instant Messaging from one central hub.

3. Get yourself seen within the community

This is a no brainer. We all know why social media is called "social media," because it allows you to be social. Each social media channel (most of them) provide you ways to contact other users, make use of these ways and communicate with others. When it comes to StumbleUpon the best way to get noticed seems to be by leaving reviews for other StumbleUpon users. If you find a random stumblers stumbles quite interesting, go ahead and leave them a review. While leaving reviews make sure it sounds genuine and nothing sort of spammy. This allows you to be noticed by that particular stumbler as everyone seems to enjoy reviews about them (who doesn’t like to hear good stuff about themselves).

Another good way to get noticed is by sending direct messages to the users who seem to have similar interest as you via StumbleUpon’s "Send a Message" feature. This is one of the reason why I try to stumble random stuff as much as possible as this allows you to see other people and add them to your network and of course make new contacts that might be of mutual help in near future. Now that SU even provides you with a "How Similar Are You?" feature it makes it a lot easier to find stumblers that might actually like what you like. This is a win win situation. So go ahead and message other stumblers, make sure not to ask for favors starting out. First send them a meaningful message and build a solid relationship. It’s all fun and games after you pass that phase.

This is why I urge you to get out there and stumble random sites as well. Its a lot fun to use StumbleUpon so do not let it be something that you use solely to promote your stuff and help out your friends with their content. Make use of the StumbleUpon toolbar and hit the "stumble" button whenever you get a chance. Seriously, SU can be one of the most powerful social media channel if you utilize it properly and build a good network. On any social media site you need to be noticed and to do that is by diversifying yourself.

There it is. I personally find the above mentioned tips to be of high importance when it comes to getting the most out of StumbleUpon. There are other ways to crack the system but unlike Digg, StumbleUpon is very different. SU’s algorithm works way different in comparison to Digg’s and I will admit that StumbleUpon is one of the hardest social media services to game at this point. But if you follow the tips mentioned on this post you should see some results both in terms of being recognized by the StumbleUpon community and to gain more traffic for your site and or content.

Bonus tip : StumbleUpon also offers paid StumbleUpon campaigns. If you plan to run a paid campaign each visitor ( visitor not stumbles, your content will be shown but it might get thumbed up or down or the visitor might just not do anything and stumble along ) costs only 5 cents. Sometimes if your content is going pretty good on SU and you would like to maximize that even more, give the paid campaign a try. I have tried this twice and so far the results have been pretty good. Nothing out of extraordinary but still worth the money I have put in. The strategy is to see how the content is doing and if its doing pretty good go ahead and run a campaign which will give you some diversified stumbles.

Next week we will look into Reddit and although I had planned on doing a three part series, we will try and look into twitter as well once we finish the reddit tips next week.