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.

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!

It’s great to be popular on different social medias, you can get huge traffic from them. I was writing here how important is building your profile and how to build it, today I would like to tell you another great tip that will help you improve your strength on social medias.

Let’s say that you are an old member on digg and have a very powerful profile with many fans and a lot of activity. You have started a new profile on stumbleupon, and you would like to grow it in a fast manner. To do that you should put a link there on your digg account, a link to your stumbleupon page. If your fans are in love with your activity on digg, they will like what you will do on stumbleupon too, so if they have profiles there you’ll get some fans from the beginning.

And don’t stop here, make more profiles to other social medias, like mixx, propeller, reddit and do the same thing! After that submit daily some great news and you’ll see the traffic coming.

Be careful when requesting stumbles, you can easily get your account and blog banned from stumbleupon, and that would be a big impact, you could lose traffic and money. Stumbleupon usually gets mad on a blog when it receives stumbles/discovers only from the same group of people. This is considered spam and you must avoid it!

I know good and strong blogs that have been banned from stumbleupon, for example dodevice.com which was is still is a powerful tech related blog, but the traffic had a significant decrease because of that ban.

How should you protect your account and blog? Well don’t ask for stumbles anymore, make some big breaks in requesting stumbles and naturally grow your profile! Stumble/discover/review everything you like! Spend some minutes per day doing that, and you’ll grow in strength.

As I said in the past, stumbleupon is a great way to receive traffic to your blog. I really love it, it’s good for bloggers and for surfers too, you can surf the internet in a very easy way and find only the things you are interested in. But be careful, stumbleupon is addicting :D.

photo by Dennis Goedegebuure

Ok, so you have a blog, and you stumble a great article of yours. People like it, and you receive traffic. Be intelligent, convert this traffic into money.

I think that most of you use adsense, it’s so popular. Well, adsense is good too, it can generate some money but stumblers usually don’t stay much on a page, they just read the article, see what’s the deal with it, rate it or not and then they hit the “Stumble!” button and go on another page. This is how stumbleupon works, and because of that you won’t receive so many clicks on your ads.

The best way to convert stumbleupon traffic into money is using a CPM ( cost per mile ). You just have to find a website that pays you for holding its banner on your blog (don’t worry, usually these kind of banners are small and they won’t disturb anyone). There are many websites that pay you a certain amount per 1000 views of their banner. The best one I know is http://tribalfusion.com/ but the problem with this one is that you get approved very hard. Anyway, google will always help you.

So now that you know, go and write a great article and submit it for stumbleupon!