Stumbleupon came with a big surprise for the social media guys. They have introduced some great improvments:

• add more than 200 Friends

This is good and bad. Let’s start with the good aspect. Members like you and me will be able to get in touch with more passionate bloggers or interesting people. Regarding friends, sky is the limit! About the bad aspect, spammers will have the chance to add more and more friends so they can send pages to them and promote their websites, but stumbleupon took care of that as well. You will receive this message if you add too many friends in a very short period of time:



• subscribe to another member’s Stumbles without becoming their Friend

This wasn’t really necessary. First I didn’t get it. But if you think a little about it, you will realize that maybe you just want to subscribe at someone’s favorites and not to become a friend with him or her, although, if you like someone’s activity you might consider getting to know that person.

• members who’ve unsubscribed from StumbleUpon no longer appear as your Friend

Oh that’s great! It won’t be necessary anymore to delete your “dead” friends.

• “Fans” will now be known as “Subscribers”

Doesn’t need any explanation, does it?

• Subscribers who are new StumbleUpon members appear at the top of your Subscribers list

Okay, this might help, you can now see who is new to stumbleupon and who isn’t. You can put an eye from time to time on the new members to see how they manage.

More than that, you can now see how similar you are with another stumbler. To see that you just have to enter a page of another stumbler, and on the right side it will appear something like this:

All in all, I really like these changes.

If you didn’t know, Propeller is another great social network, smaller then digg but very effective and now, there’s a new function available on it.

Propeller’s developer announced a few hours ago that now, everyone can make groups there. Personally, I made the group called “Google”, feel free to join it!

There are still many good groups available, so create one immediately if you have an account on propeller. It never knows. I do believe that “Google” group that I made will become huge and I might attract some fans too. That’s a way of building your profile too.

Later edit:

Unfortunately, there are some bugs at the moment. The developer is taking care of them all so don’t worry!

A few days ago, a story from cracked.com hit digg’s front page. That article was about some cheats that will help you gather more votes for your submissions.

They were saying that if you put “Digg this:” in front of the article’s title when submitting it, you might get a few more votes. Oh please, I always bury stories like that. Yes, it’s true, the title of the story from cracked.com that hit the front page was “Digg this!: 7 cheats for hitting the front page of Digg” and it got about 4000+ diggs.

I don’t say that this technique doesn’t work! Not at all, but don’t abuse! After reading that “cheats”, many and many new digg users tried them, especially this technique. They put in front of their submissions the “Digg this:” structure, although they were submitting crappy stories. I asked another active digger what he thinks about this, his nickname being: diggboss. This is what he said: “Never put digg this in front of the title, looks spammy. You never do that“.

I also asked world reknown copywriter, Trevor ‘ToeCracker’ Crook who is also a high profile digger his opinion and he said while he agrees with the cracked story and where using Digg in the title is relevant, the main problem is, people will abuse putting digg in nearly every title and is will lose impact.

It’s the same as when everyone puts ‘Breaking’ or Breaking News in the title. When you do this too often, nobody will take any notice.

When it comes title’s - ToeCracker says he changes the original title in approx. 95% of the time when submitting as each word is critical to getting your story voted.

Getting your title correct can be the difference between you getting a front page story.

So, folks, stop doing that! There are different ways to attract more attention with your submissions. Title and description help a lot, but don’t do it the bad way. Here’s a great article I found that gives good advice regarding this: “How a good title and description can make or break your social media submission“.

A very important aspect of socializing is to respect your friends from the social networks. This is like an unwritten rule that you should know.

When I said that you should respect them I didn’t mean that you should treat them with “hello sir”. From time to time, take a look at your friend’s profile, especially at his favorites and if you like what you see, vote / comment!

The how many friends you have number is insignificant if you don’t have a good relationship with that friends. Don’t understand that I promote the votes exchange. No way, but I consider normal to check out your friend’s profile from time to time to see what are his new discoveries. If he will see that you are interested in his profile, then, he’ll check yours too.

It’s just like in real life ( I like to make comparisons between blogging and real life because is easier for you to understand what I mean ). If you have a very good friend but you won’t give him a call anymore to ask what’s new or something and if you don’t appear to be interested about him, that friend may get upset and you will have a surprise. Same thing here on the social networks.

Everyone wants to have great big profiles on social media with many fans and friends. This is not hard. Here are some tips that I learned in time.

- Don’t be a hater

This may be the most important aspect. Being a hater isn’t good at all. It’s true, you can’t just like everything you see on digg, sphinn,stumbleupon,reddit and so on, but not liking everything … this is a big problem! You are definitely frustrated. So cut off this attitude, be nice. I am talking about social media, the keyword is social so you must get in touch with others, be nice and make friends!

- Don’t be desperate

Let’s say that you like someone’s activity there on a social media, you add him as a friend and then you beg him to add you as a friend too. No, this is not the way to do it! First, just introduce yourself, something like “Hey, I liked your profile so I added your as a friend. I had a good laugh reading …” talk more with him or her and the chances are big to become mutual friends.

- Get involved in discussions

Getting involved in discussions is very important. On stumbleupon you can find some nice targeted groups and discuss with people that have same preferences as you, this way you could gather some more friends and fans. Digg, sphinn, don’t have groups like that but there is no problem! Comment on the articles you liked, many times there will be “hot” discussions on some. Get involved in them! Let your voice be heard because your opinion does matter!

Just follow these steps and you’ll see the good results coming, hit me with a comment or e-mail if you have any more tips regarding this.

I knew I had this problem and I was just thinking what I had done wrong and what I have to do to make the things be all right again. The problem was that in the first 2-3 weeks of my blog, I often stumbled a few articles / week and received thousands of visitors without a problem. After a while, stumbleupon suddenly stopped sending me traffic even if my articles were rocking!

My plan was to do nothing for a few weeks, and that’s exactly what I did, I made a pause from stumbleupon with my auto blog. It was hard, but that was the best thing I could do. And in the meantime I tried to build my profile.

So, the thing I am trying to tell you is to stop stumbling your blog for a while ( you and your friends ) if stumbleupon stopped working for you, make a small pause.

Another tip is that you shouldn’t be the only one that submits the articles to stumbleupon. Try to gather some friends and please them to do that. I am not talking about stumble exchanges, no! That is forbidden and I don’t recommend it. Just ask your stumble friends something like “Hey .. what do you think about this article? Impressive, huh?”.

This method really works! As a result of it, today I submitted an article from my auto blog to stumbleupon and received 1500 visits so far. That’s pretty good I think, 1500 and counting!