If you have been reading my series on StumbleUpon then you should have a really clear idea on how the friends system works. If not then you should read my previous articles on this subject.
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?
StumbleUpon Series Part 4 - A Different Perspective On Your Friends And Fans
Now the next question is how do you develop a tight niche of mutual friends and get lots of fans with your interests in mind. I have tried a few different methods, some of which I found really useful, others I didn’t. Here is what you want to do…
Who Your Mutual Friends Should Be
Your mutual friends should be highly selective, and only open to the following:
Those who are highly interested in your Niche (Topic or interests)
Those who understand how StumbleUpon works
Those who are going to review your blog articles
Those who will thumb your stumbles
Those who will review the articles you review
Those who will collaborate with you
You may want to send traffic to yourself, to your friends, to your favorite bloggers, to bloggers you want to get on the radar of, or just too some article you think everyone in your interest group, would want to read.
If your mutual friends are going to do this for you, then you have to remember you must do this for them as well. Only wanting them to review your pages with nothing in return, is selfish and will only get you flagged, and flamed.
Finding Mutual Friends
Since you only want highly targeted mutual friends, you want to be very selective who you ask to be your friend. Here are the most effective ways that I have discovered, to find likeminded stumblers
Check who reviewed a page – With this method, you will find a website, article, picture, or video that you really enjoy, and visit the page directly. Examples, if www.xyz.com/thisarticle was a really interesting article that you really enjoyed, then go to that address in your browser. When you get to the page, click on the reviews of this page button in the StumbleUpon toolbar. You will be taken back to StumbleUpon. On that page you will notice a couple of things, reviews, and people who liked that page.
Start with the stumblers that wrote a great review and not the ones that just said “interesting”, or “must read”. Look for someone who put why they liked it, and why you would like it. These are the people that really understand StumbleUpon. However, many page reviews will only have 1 or 2 reviews and many times they will not be very informative. At this point just pick the stumbler that submitted the article.
Search StumbleUpon – With this method you will search StumbleUpon for your topic of interest. One thing you should know about the StumbleUpon search is that it does not index the submitted articles headlines, or content. It only searches through the tags of the articles, which Stumblers use, when they submit the article to the StumbleUpon database. If you search for “How to Rule the World”, you will not find any of my articles, unless, someone has tagged one of my articles with that sentence. You must search for a tag such as blogs, blogging, internet, business. Your search should be very broad.
Again look for Stumblers with good reviews and look for those who look like they know what they are doing. At the top of the page you will notice some stumblers before the results. The top rows are people who often submit articles into that tag. The more articles you submit with that tag the higher you become on that list.
Friends of friends – When you find a Stumbler with your interests, check out their friends list. If you have prequalified them enough then they should be savvy enough to choose the right kinds of mutual friends as well. Often you can hit a gold mine of possible friends when you discover a really pro Stumbler within your niche.
Qualify them as a good stumbler by:
You don’t want, as your mutual friend, just anyone interested in your topic as a friend. Those people should be fans of yours. You want Stumblers with certain attributes. Here are the attributes I have found to be most prominent in professional Stumblers.
·
About Page – Do they have a well written, eye catching, and informative about me page.
Blog - Check to see if this person has a blog. Bloggers are usually the most active stumblers.
Groups - Check to see what groups the person belongs to, and if the groups are like minded.
Tags - Check the stumblers tags. Are the tags on topics of your interest, and are the tags properly utilized. Users with thousands of tags are usually unorganized and don’t understand the taxonomy of StumbleUpon.
Favorites – Check their favorites to see what pages they choose to write about and also pay attention to the way they write their reviews.
Friends – Check out the stumblers friends and evaluate them in the same way as above.
Fans – Check to see how many fans the stumbler has. You want to target your top friends to have at least 50 – 100 friends, but more preferably 200 or more.
Reviews – Check the stumblers review page, and see what others have to say about them. If the reviews say things like really friendly this usually means the person will read your messages and probably respond.
If all, or at least most of these qualities apply, then you really want this person in your mutual friends list. The next part is trying to get them to become your friend within your mutual friends list. I have learned that many Stumblers are hesitant to add you as a friend, until you have a reputation, and friends that they recognize. However I think the level of difficulty to getting them added is as follows.
Difficulty level of Stumbler
0 – 50 Friends – These people are usually really easy to get as friends (There are some exceptions). Mainly because they are new and don’t understand StumbleUpon to much. You can get many of them as a friend by simply visiting their StumbleUpon page or dropping them a message saying hello. Just ask them to be a friend.
50 – 150 Friends – These Stumblers usually understand StumbleUpon a little more, and require a little more work to get as friends. Usually you have to get to know them, their blog, their friends and their stumbles. Send them a few messages, talk about their blog and stumbles, ask them questions and visit them often. Eventually they will become a friend
150 – 500 Friends – These Stumblers are usually advanced. They understand StumbleUpon very well, have already established their mutual friends list, have been stumbling for a while, and not as open to adding you as a friend, or they may simply not have any more room for a mutual friend since the StumbleUpon friends limit is 200. Advanced tactics to get on their radar is required, of which, I am still developing techniques for. I will go into more detail on this in another article, but as a preview you will need to do things such as Stumble and review their blog articles, and send them a lot of traffic, as well as lots of communication, thanks, praise, and an active commitment to their work on StumbleUpon.
500+ Friends – These stumblers are elite, have been around for a long time, have a tightly closed list of friends, and are usually hard core Stumblers of which many are probably on the Top Stumblers List. I am testing many ways to get them as friends, and again will probably include this in another article about advanced friend developing.
When starting out on StumbleUpon, you need to network as much as possible with other stumblers. Start getting to know them. Social marketing is going to require you to be… Well… Social! You have to talk, and get to know one another. It’s all about meeting the right people
So get out there and start mingling… and remember it’s not about quantity on StumbleUpon. It’s about quality. But you need a lot of quality to be able to drive the masses in the direction of your choosing.
Next Article is about the people you should be a fan of, and how to get stumblers to be your fan, without being their fan in return.
I hope you have all enjoyed this series so far. Please comment and leave me your ideas =)
Thanks
-Rob
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Just a note:
1) Requesting friendship, except among brand newbies who don’t know any better, is generally frowned upon by more veteran stumblers and won’t get you as far as you think.
2) Make sure when you do review pages, in order not to get a bad reputation, that you CORRECTLY tag any pages you review.
3) The “Top Stumblers” page is widely known as being rather arbitrary and is a completely mystery to those of us who have been there a long time, yet if you take time to really look at some of the “featured” stumblers (especially near the bottom of the list), you’ll find that some of them have few friends, few stumbled pages, and few reviews. So frankly, most of the SU community is stumped as to how this “Top Stumbler” page is even configured since it makes no sense in a number of cases.
4) Lastly, a better reference (and one that is not manipulated by SU itself) is http://stumblerank.com which lists the top 100 stumblers in descending order in five separate categories. (At the time of this comment, it is currently having server trouble so it’s completely in disarray, but when it’s resolved, it will show much more information statistics-wise than SU’s “Top Stumbler” page.)
5) Lastly, make sure your own SU pages are interesting, or no amount of “friend-scouting” is really going to net you much of anything except others who have equally uninteresting pages and are desperate for friends also. I gave one newcomer who asked, some advice on how to present content (in whatever interest category she had, which was marketing, not really my big thing despite my own marketing/journalism degree) but she listened to my advice, and within less than two months landed on the Top Stumblers list. Not that she’s surpassed many of the more long-term stumblers in any way, but she at least got noticed. There are plenty of other articles about SU that state that the SU version of the Top Stumblers list is not what it’s hyped up to be.
My best advice: Build it, and they will come. And beware of open self-promotional tactics. That will be very counter-productive to your aspirations on SU.
I plan to start writing my own articles on a non-SU blog myself, since I get so many mails on SU asking for advice that I may as well (hopefully it will cut down my mail pile). *Grin*
The problem is that so many relatively green SU members are writing all these SU advice articles, and more often than not, the advice is bad and counterproductive, because they haven’t been there long enough to see the backlash that occurs due to some of their own suggestions.
I hope this helps.
Cheers,
caile~
http://caile-girl.stumbleupon.com