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I know you have been waiting for the, how to make the right friends article. I have been doing a lot of research on this subject for the past week. I have questioned many Stumblers’ and have received tons of advice. I have tested many different theories about friends, and have worked many of them out. But first, you need to understand the friends system. You need to understand how it was developed, and why it is structured the way it is. At least in my opinion…

StumbleUpon Structure of Friends

First let me explain the structure, of the StumbleUpon friends section. You may have noticed that there are 3 sections of friends, broken down to mutual friends, you are fans of, and fans of yours.

Mutual Friends – Mutual friends are when both you, and the other person, both agree to be fans of each other. This means that you enjoy their stumbles, and they enjoy your stumbles.

You Are Fans Of – When you enjoy the stumbles of another person, and you want to remain updated on their article reviews, you can become a fan of another person. This means you will get to see their reviews on you, “what’s new” page.

Fans Of Yours – When others enjoy the pages you stumble, they can become your fan, the same way you can become another person’s fan. This means, they want to see your reviews on articles, which will be displayed on their “what’s new” page.

The Idea Behind StumbleUpon

What I believe StumbleUpon wanted to do when they created this site was to allow Mutual friends to scour the web for websites, pages, articles, pictures and videos, so that you can share them with Your Interest Group. Since one person alone can’t possibly find everything on the internet, it would be easier if a team of people went out, and submitted pages to a mutual database, of everything they liked on a particular subject.

If you put together a group of 10 people, whom all really enjoy auto racing, and you know that this tight niche group of people are only going to submit auto racing articles, then you, and those ten people are going to develop a highly targeted database of websites, pages, articles, pictures and videos on this subject. If in one day each of the 10 people added 10 different articles, you would have a database of 100 articles.

You can then stumble all the articles in your mutual database exposing yourself to 90 additional articles you were not aware of. Of those 90 articles you might really enjoy 10, 20, 30, or even all 90 of them. As you browse your mutual database of articles, you can give it a thumbs up, letting the StumbleUpon system know which of the 100 articles are most interesting.

When all 10 of your mutual friends decide to stumble all 100 articles, the thumbing voting system will track the most enjoyable articles across your entire group, ensuring those articles get more circulation to your fans and your friend’s fans.

Article Exposure Potential

Now let’s assume that you, and your 9 other stumble buddies, each have 100 fans. Your group’s article circulation potential is 1,010 people. Meaning you can potentially send 1,010 people to an article or website within a 24 – 48 period, which depends on how active those fans are, and how savvy of the StumbleUpon system they are.

In a way, you can view your mutual friends as a group of promoters (Similar to a club promoter). Your, mutual interest group, fans are your groups subscribers (Similar to an entourage or groupies). When you and your group of promoters collaborate to promote a specific web page, your group has the POWER, to send a massive amount of traffic to a website. This massive amount of traffic is usually within a 24 – 48 hour period, or as long as you and your promoters keep that article on their top review spot, combined with how long it takes all your groups fans to visit those articles.

The more active your group’s fans are, the more likely they are to visit a promoted article. The more niche your groups fans are, the more likely they are inclined to like the site and stick around. If you had a very diverse group of fans, it will become easy to get a thumbs down for articles, especially when someone who is interested in pictures, videos and funny stuff is sent to a site about making money, marketing or any other off topic interest.

SUFriendsDiagram

Some may say this is gaming the system… But I think it’s using the system, the way it was designed.

What do you think?

If you are new to this series, here are the first couple of issues, on my StumbleUpon Series.

StumbleUpon Series Part 1 – A Commitment To Mastering StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon Series Part 2 – My True Intentions Are Not To Spam Or Game The System

StumbleUpon Series Part 3 – Where Does All That Traffic Come From?

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