Keeping up with my friends stumbles is getting hard and harder, as my mutual friends and targets list grows. I currently have 30 mutual friends of whom I try to stay updated with all the time. I am also targeting another 22 people, of whom I want to become friends with. That’s a total of 52 people who I am trying to be very active with. So you can imagine how hard, and time consuming it was getting to visit their profiles to see if they posted anything new.

I decided to do some research, and testing on ways to stay informed. I figured out a nice little technique using RSS feeds. If you notice on each stumblers profile page, there are two RSS buttons. One is for anything they review, and the other is for anything they thumb up. I find it most important to stay current with the ones they are reviewing. This means they have either submitted an article themselves, of which they want to promote, or they are helping the promotion of a friend’s article.

Using RSS helps simplify, and reduce the time of checking up on all your friends’ activities 24/7. Now you can syndicate all your friends, and targets into a reader, and check it whenever you have the time. It now takes about 30 minutes to catch up on all 52 friends’ activities. Review their articles, and thumb them up. Really nice considering this process used to take countless hours of visiting each friend’s page individually, and I usually had to do this several times per day.

Now the only thing left was to find a really good RSS management system. One that will allow me to group the feeds, and mark them as completed when I finished reading, and thumbing. Technically you can use any RSS reader service out there, however the one I decided to go with is feedeachother.com. It has a simple to use interface, and loads about 10 times faster than Google reader. It also has the ability to archive the articles you are completed with, so you don’t have to revisit the same ones over and over. It allows you to clip an article, in case you want to spend additional time reading one specific article later, if you don’t have time to read it right at that moment. Lastly, it has a share this article feature that allows you to push the article to all your feedeachother fans.

I have also heard about another service called friendfeed.com, which is currently in beta, but it will allow you to synchronize all your friends’ social networking profiles such as digg, propeller, reddit, and all the rest. I have already signed up to be notified of its launch, or if I can get in as a beta tester.

If you are finding it hard to keep updated on all your friends’ activities, I highly recommend taking advantage of this feature. It will reduce the time needed to stay active with all your friends, and all of your friends, and targets will really appreciate you keeping updated on them, without them having to request attention from you every time they want to promote an article.

If you want to network with me you can find me at http://feedeachother.com/robertpriolo/

Also, don’t forget to add my StumbleUpon RSS feed to your reader, so that you can stay updated and current with all my latest reviews and articles

http://www.stumbleupon.com/syndicate.php?stumbler=4655332&comments=1

The Rest of the 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?
StumbleUpon Series Part 4 – A Different Perspective On Your Friends And Fans
StumbleUpon Series Part 5 – Making The Right Friends In The Right Places
StumbleUpon Series Part 6 – Fans, Fans And More Fans
StumbleUpon Series Part 7 – Be An Active Member Of The Community
StumbleUpon Series Part 8 – The Importance Of Understanding Taxonomy
StumbleUpon Series Part 9 – Submitting An Article Like A Pro And Not Like A Newbie

How do you get around this mistake? Simple, don’t send the article to anyone until you have thumbed it up yourself and submitted it to a good category. OK, so you wanted to send your own article to a friend, so it doesn’t make you look all spammy right? Next time email the link, or instant message it to the person you wanted to stumble the article into the system. This will save you the grief of improper categorization, and the annoyance of nobody getting any credit for your find.

I have also noticed that the articles I “accidentally” did this to for my own site, generated little to no volume. This is because there is nobody’s authority behind the article to get it into rotation.

However if you plan on submitting please remember the

5 Steps To Submitting A Site

Clean Title – Many site titles get all jumbled up and place weird characters in the headline. Clean it up, make it look good, and if the author didn’t write a compelling title. Write one yourself.

Review – You don’t have to review every new page you find, but when you do write a review, make it interesting. If possible include an image. Even if it’s the site logo, many stumblers will recognize the author and be more willing to read and thumb when they see a familiar picture.

Category – Try to submit the article to one of the top categories, especially if you plan on promoting it to all your friends. Don’t select a category from the pull down bar unless one of the top29 really don’t match. You will have a higher chance of getting thumbs, which adds to your authority, and the site owner will have a chance to get more traffic. This is really great if you are trying to make an impression on them

Adult – Don’t forget to select the NO it’s not adult, unless it really is.

Submit – Finally push the submit button and get it added to the database.

You notice I crossed off the tags section. You really don’t need to tag the article, since it will automatically get tagged as the category submitted to. Additional tagging only clutters up your tag cloud, and its really annoying to see people with thousands of tags. (Also I think there is a tag limit)

If you want to send massive traffic to that article, I recommend contacting your top 20 friends ASAP and ask them to thumb it up (That is if they like the article, of course). The more friends that have authority in the category submitted, the better chances of rotation in the stumble button. Don’t have your accounting submitting buddy with a 1,000 friends thumb up an internet submission hoping for massive traffic. He has no authority in a category he does not submit to often, which means the article will not rotate as much.

The Rest Of the 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?

StumbleUpon Series Part 4 – A Different Perspective On Your Friends And Fans

StumbleUpon Series Part 5 – Making The Right Friends In The Right Places

StumbleUpon Series Part 6 – Fans, Fans And More Fans

StumbleUpon Series Part 7 – Be An Active Member Of The Community

StumbleUpon Series Part 8 – The Importance Of Understanding Taxonomy

When you submit an article to the database, you are actually classifying the article for StumbleUpon. This is important to understand because it plays a crucial role in the amount of exposure an article can get. Since we now understand that articles are circulated by the taxonomy they are given when they are submitted, stumblers interest and positioning within the 1^st page of stumblers favorite tag, we can take this into consideration when attempting to draw a higher volume of traffic.

StumbleUpon has simplified the mass interest of stumblers within the following cloud.
You can find this cloud by clicking on the websites tab on the StumbleUpon website

This cloud represents the mass interests of StumbleUpon. As you can see of the 501 subcategories, only 29 of them are extremely used.

This is important because

Pro – Submitting an article to one of these categories will allow for a chance of more circulation, since the majority of stumblers have these interests selected in their preferences. As we know from my previous article How The Stumble Button Results Are Returned, when you push the stumble button it picks a random interest you have selected in your preferences, then a random authority stumbler for that interest, and then a random liked, “thumbed”, article within the first page of that stumblers favorites tag.

Con – When submitting an article to a popular category, your article has a small window of time to receive a massive amount of traffic. Since stumblers often submit to, and thumb, within the 29 most popular categories, your article will be pushed off the first page of many stumblers favorites tag quickly. This, in effect, will only allow you a small window of time to get on as many 1^st page of stumblers favorites tag. Usually about 24 – 48 hours, depending on how active the ”thumbers” of that article are.

CASE STUDY:

Article 1 – This Is What Real Spam On StumbleUpon Looks Like – This article was submitted to the database, under the tag “cyberculture”. I then notified all my friends to thumb ASAP. It has received well over 50 thumbs up, however true count is unknown. My friends thumbs consist of about 10 – 15 thumbs total. All others are from those who found it from the stumble button.

Article 2 – How The Stumble Button Results Are Returned – This article was submitted to the database, under the tag “Internet”. I then notified the same people to all thumb again ASAP. It has also received over 50 thumbs up, and current true count is now unknown. My friends thumbs consist of about 10 – 15 thumbs total. All others are from those who found it from the stumble button.

RESULTS:

Article 1 – This article was create on Jan 27^th and has received a total of 1,522 unique hits, directly from the stumble button, at the time of this posting.

Article 2 – This article was created on Jan 29^th and has received a total of 2,802 unique hits, directly from the stumble button, at the time of this posting

Conclusion:

Article 1 was kick started by the same stumblers and had extra time for exposure on the stumbleupon system yet it still was not able to drive as much traffic as article 2. Article 2 was created about 24 hours ago and has almost received twice the amount of traffic as article one. Article 1 was submitted to the cyberculture tag and article 2 was submitted to the Internet tag. This example shows how important it is to submit an article to a top level interest.

However, some of you may be saying, “I have submitted lots of articles to the top 29 interests”. The failure for traffic is due to, not getting the article onto as many stumblers 1st page favorites tag as possible. The more stumblers who have the article on the 1^st page of their tag cloud, the higher changes the article will rotate in the stumble button.

So who will be the first to stumble this article? And what category will they assign to it? I hope it’s a good one =)

The Rest Of the 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?

StumbleUpon Series Part 4 – A Different Perspective On Your Friends And Fans

StumbleUpon Series Part 5 – Making The Right Friends In The Right Places

StumbleUpon Series Part 6 – Fans, Fans And More Fans

StumbleUpon Series Part 7 – Be An Active Member Of The Community

I came across an interesting find today while attempting to understand how the Stumble button works. How many of you stumble your friend’s articles? I do it all the time, and always wondered how the results were driven. I did not crack the code, but I have noticed something that makes the returned pages traceable.

When you push the stumble button a random mutual friend, or someone you are a fan of, is selected. A submission they have thumbed is returned. The submission that is returned must be categorized within one of your interests on your preferences page. Secondly the returned result always remains on the first page of that tag.

Here is an example of a scenario

You have the toolbar set to stumble your friends
You push the Stumble Button and a random friend is selected
Then a random page is selected that was submitted within one of your interests
If you have internet as an interest, then a page from your friends internet tag will be returned
One of the latest 10 thumbed up articles is return to you for viewing.

This is very hard to explain in writing, so I decided to do a desktop screen capture of the process. I am new to editing video and using the screen capture software that I have, so it may not be the best or greatest quality, but it should be able to visually show you how this process works.

In this process there are only two things I really don’t understand.

Friend Selection – How is the random friend selected? I have not been able to define this reasoning, but my guess is that the stumbler who submits frequently and/or who has a lot of stumbleupon authority gets his thumbed pages displayed more often. While testing this, I have seen many different articles being returned from the same stumbler. This tells me that some stumblers have more authority within a specific category or tag then others.

Article Selection – While it is obvious that the page returned will always be within the 1^st 10 results of the submitted tag, I have not been able to determine which of the 10 or why one over the other. I think it’s just random, or even possibly weighted against others who have thumbed the article.

What Does This Mean?

It basically means that your articles, or the articles you thumb up, have a higher chance of exposure if they remain within the last 10 thumbed articles within a specific tag. If you thumb up 10 articles today within the weblogs category, then every time you are selected as the random stumbler, one of the last ten articles will be selected.

It also shows how important it is to submit an article to the correct category. If more stumblers have internet selected as an interest in their profile, then you want to submit more articles to the internet category than the weblog category. You can be limiting the amount of exposure with an improper submission, because you are limiting the exposure based on stumblers interests.

Stumbling ALL

I have also tested this method with “ALL” selected on the stumble bar. It seems to work exactly the same, however I think it’s the first 20 results instead of just the first 10. There is also one other variance. If you try this out, you will get one of two types of returns. One that is traceable as defined above, and the other return result will be a historic stumble ranging from 2004 – 2006. I cannot find a similarity in the historic returns, so I assume they are random and just returned as “all time favorites” from within their assigned tag.

I did a search for blogs today on StumbleUpon, and this is what I got as the results. As you can see, there are a whole bunch of penguins “SPAMMING” up the results.

Click Image for full size

I looked within the search results, and noticed the following two results. As you can see, these one of these postings has 30 reviews, and the other has 107

Click Image for full size

I then looked at the reviews for that submission, and noticed that all the reviews were identical, and there were lots of them

Click Image for full size

This post is for those who are out to hate on all the SEO and internet marketers. Fellow Stumblers, THIS IS REAL SPAMMING!!! You will never find a legit SEO or internet marketer spamming the system in this way. These are the real people you should hate, and boycott. These are the people that you should be directing all your hate mail and spammy comments. I am an internet marketer, and this is shameful and gives all of us a bad reputation. Please do not ever associate this type of crap, with someone who has only legitimate intentions, such as myself, on the StumbleUpon website.

This is not SEO…

This is not MARKETING…

This is how you really abuse the system =(

The mystery many people want to know behind StumbleUpon is why some of your articles get massive traffic and others don’t. What causes the traffic mass?

While I am doing this research, check out these articles on StumbleUpon Authority.

All Thumbs are Not Created Equal

StumbleUpon How it might work

Stumbleupon mathematics for stumblers

Breaking Down The StumbleUpon Algorithm

Organic Stumbling Tip

Here is the basic idea I have learned so far.

Discovery – Being the first to find an article adds to your authority, however the more articles you discover from the same site, the less effective your submission becomes and the less authority your are given for that Stumble.

Getting Thumbs – Getting your discovered articles thumbed up adds to your authority, and getting articles with thumbs down will take away from your authority. Be sure to add articles from sites you believe will get the most thumbs up.

Giving Thumbs – The amount of articles you have thumbed up or down to other articles adds to your authority. In this theory, you need to thumb hundred, and maybe even thousands to gain lots of authority. More preferably they need to be thumbed by finding the site using the stumble button.

Fans – The more fans you have the stronger your authority is, so go out and mingle with as many as possible.

Same domain same friends – Submitting articles from a previously stumbled domain, and having the same fans and friends thumb articles who have also thumbed those domains for you, creates a diminishing effect. Example if you submit 10 different articles from xyz.com and have 5 same friends stumble those articles for each of the 10 submits, your authority will lessen over time, due to repetitive submits from the same site and thumbs from the exact same fans or friends.

Reviews – The more reviews your submitted articles receive the more authority you are given.

Organic Thumbs – This means a stumbler thumbs your article by using the StumbleUpon bar. If a random stumbler comes across your submit and thumbs it up you get a good amount of authority. It is also theorized that using the send to from within the StumbleUpon bar will also contribute to an organic thumb.

In Conclusion

You need to submit articles from different websites all the time, and get new and different people to thumb your articles. Do not submit articles from the same site all the time, and don’t get the same people to thumb the articles from a site they have thumbed already.

If you submit an article from a site you have already submitted from before, you need new friends or fans to thumb it up. This may be why I have seen less traffic to my blog when I have had many of the same stumblers thumb my article, and then notice a small burst of traffic when an unknown stumbler thumbs it.

If you submit an article from a site you have never submitted from before, then you can have all your current friends thumb it up. You will get lots of authority and the site will get lots of traffic. This may be the reason why many new stumblers are excited about their new found traffic when they first submit their own site. It’s a new submit, from a new site, from a new stumbler, with thumbs from people who never thumbed that persons article before. However StumbleUpon has cleverly devised a way to ensure the spammers don’t continue to get floods of traffic by taking away their authority as the same site is submitted, and stumbled by the same friends.

Disclaimer: All of the above is only theory, and I have not proven anything as of yet

I hope to add an official release on this subject in the near future

What’s New Page – I check the “what’s new page” frequently all day long. For those of you whose life does not revolve around a computer, and the internet, like mine does. I would recommend, checking this all the time while you are on. When you notice a new article that you have not seen before, be sure to check it out, and thumb it up if you like it. As long as an article doesn’t piss me off, or state inaccurate information I will thumb it. The site deserves credit and so does the person that finds it.

It is important to keep an eye out on these articles because it helps the Stumbler build up authority. The more thumbs up, and reviews an article receives, the more authority within the StumbleUpon system that member gets. The more authority you have the more traffic StumbleUpon will send to the articles you review and thumb. (At least this is what I have been told, and it seems to hold true from the traffic volumes I have witnessed)

Favorites Page – I frequently (About 5 times a day per person) like to visit my top StumbleUpon friends, and Stumblers who I want as friends, to check their favorites, and thumb up the articles I like. I try to be active in their posts so that they will be active, and return the favor in mine. I get to read a lot of great articles, most of them are really good and I learn a lot about others interests as well as mine. As thanks, I thumb it up

Discovered Page – While I view my Stumble buddies and Stumblers I want as friends, profile page, I also check their discovered page. This is probably the best way to win someone over, because many of the pages they have discovered have not been reviewed yet, and since StumbleUpon adds to the Stumblers authority when they get thumbs up on the articles they find, you make your friends and future friends happy by adding to their authority.

You have to give first, and then receive. Don’t be stingy on giving praise to others. The good old rule of “do to others as you want them to do for you” especially applies here. I notice that some people do this naturally, while others don’t. Those of you who are in my fans list, I have my eye on you. The more you are active in my posts, the more I will notice you. Eventually, I will even move you to a mutual friend, and work with you directly.

If you are new to my RSS and my blog, we are currently on a discussion of StumbleUpon. I have put together an in depth series of how to use stumbleupon and all its features and advantages. You can follow the first part of the series from the below links.

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

StumbleUpon Series Part 5 – Making The Right Friends In The Right Places

StumbleUpon Series Part 6 – Fans, Fans And More Fans

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

StumbleUpon Series Part 5 – Making The Right Friends In The Right Places

You Are a Fan Of

When I first start, the first day I signed up, I went out and befriended everyone, probably about 100 – 200 people. I assumed this was the way it worked. Wow, big NO, NO… The problem is that you are reaching out to way to many people, and your “what’s new” page gets flooded with a never ending massive list of new sites being reviewed. Hit the refresh button and you have a whole new page of reviews. Plus it makes you look really noobish.

I have analyzed many of the top stumbles, have spoken with some of them, have reviewed people with hundred and thousand of fans, and I noticed something. They were a fan of 1 – 10 people. I questioned why would stumblers be doing this?

Here are my Theories:

Attention – If you want to get the attention of a stumbler you can be their fan. It is best if you focus on just 1 or 2 of them. If you have the time, maybe up to 10 of them. If you are very active you will remain as their top fan and your profile picture will always be displayed at the bottom of their friend’s page. The idea behind this is branding. If someone sees something long enough, eventually they will like it. If they see your face on everything they are doing, they will notice you and eventually want you as their friend.

Reminder – You can use it as a reminder for yourself, to stay on top of the people you are targeting for friends. If you really want someone as your friend, you need to be reminded all the time of who they are so that you can frequently visit them, check out their stumbles and comment on their work.

The people you are a fan of should only be those stumblers of whom you want to get noticed by. Don’t make the mistake of adding everyone for no reason at all. If you, and them, are very active, then you will mutually want to be friends for many reasons.

Which Stumblers to Target?

Those who are very interested in the articles you want to read. Don’t just attempt to be a friend of a stumbler due to the amount of fans. If you want to move traffic then you want qualified traffic who will be interested in your articles.

Those who have at fan base of at least 200. These stumblers are influential on many other stumblers.

Those who are highly active, and stumble pages submitted by others. You want people who will thumb your articles since the more thumbs you get on the articles you discover, the stronger your StumbleUpon authority becomes. You don’t want sleepy Stumblers who don’t hit the thumb button.

Fans of Yours

Anyone and everyone should be your fan. You can’t control who wants to be your fan, so the more the merrier. Your fans get to see what you review, so you should be reviewing articles that you really want promoted into other friend groups.

Fans of yours are a mix of newbie’s who don’t know what they are doing, people who know what they are doing and really want to be your friend, and stumblers who simply enjoy your Stumbles and comments. Pay attention to your fans, because one of them could become your next best stumbling buddy. Pay attention to the ones who really want your friendship. These are the stumblers who are thumbing your articles, visiting your blog and emailing you for advice.

Getting Lots of Fans

Currently the best method of getting fans is passively. It requires no work on your part and people just keep asking to be your friend. How is that? Submit great content and provide great reviews. I will post another article on reviewing like a pro, but you can get about 5 – 10 new friends per day if you are discovering new articles all the time and then posting great informative reviews for others to read. People enjoy that you took the time, and they will be your friend with nothing in return.

The next method of getting fans requires a lot of work, but is able to get you a few fans per hour. If you have already stumbled and reviewed at least 100 pages you can do this trick. Again it is time consuming, and you don’t get many quality fans. I discovered this by accident. Simply visit as many profiles as possible. Just visit them. Why, because when you visit a profile a little red number shows up on the top of their page to let them know someone viewed their profile. Usually, they will check you out in return, and possibly become your friend. Again, these are usually people with 1 – 30 fans, and people who are not very savvy on StumbleUpon. I do not recommend this method. Use the passive method, because they came to you for what you offered. I just felt obligated to let you know of a little trick I discovered by accident.

Well, I bet you think, great that’s all there is too it. Now I am ready to be the next StumbleUpon Pro. Well you’re wrong. Look forward to these next topics about

How to give great reviews

How to get on the radar of your favorite stumblers

How to submit articles to StumbleUpon the professional way

A guide to StumbleUpon taxonomy.

How to configure your StumbleUpon bar

How to build up your StumbleUpon Authority.

Plus many more, ideas are coming in every day =)

If you really want to know more on one of these subjects, please comment so I can consider which article should come next.

Also, just as a reminder, you comment I follow. I have removed the nofollow attribute

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

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.

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?