This is the first in a series of social media posts, where I pretend to be very smart and use poorly worded analogies in an attempt to explain complex things.

Today I am going to talk about Stumble Upon, and you may be rolling your eyes right now all, Stumble Upon is like 900 years old in internet years, what’s next, a tutorial about how to customize your MySpace profile or how to create a really awesome site featuring funny pictures of animals using the Impact font and phonetically spelled words with no sentence structure?

And to that I say, shut up, because that animal website sounds genius, nobody steal my idea!

So, whether you are a Stumble Upon newbie or seasoned vet, one thing we can all agree on is Stumble Upon is confusing as fuck. So, I wanted to take a second to share what I know about it, as well as welcome your tips and tricks, so that we can all get a better understanding of how to use it effectively, and by effectively, I mean, we all makes lots and lots of money because that’s why the internet was even invented. We all get rich, and that Numa Numa guy has a place to feel pretty.

I have been using SU for a few years, and one of the best things to come from it is residual traffic. There is not a day that goes by that I do NOT have traffic coming in from a stumbled post. It’s like the Seinfeld of blog traffic. A post may be years old, but much the like way Jerry cashes in when a Seinfeld episode airs every four seconds on TBS, every time my old post is stumbled, it brings in more traffic, which translates to more ad dollars. And that is easy money for no work and no puffy shirts.

So, how does this whole thing even work, because Brittany, I need another social networking tool like I need a hole in my vagina. (That’s a saying, right?)

I know. GooglePinterestFacebookTwitterDonkeyYipes overload. I get it. But, this is one of those great sites that requires very little witty banter and re-posted chain mail status updates, and has huge immediate rewards. Trust me, I wouldn’t be taking the time to write this, when there are perfectly good Law & Order episodes to watch, if I didn’t believe in it.

So, first things first, what the hell is Stumble Upon? Well, like most sites today, it’s a means of social networking. Participants are able rate the sites they visit by giving them a thumbs up or thumbs down. Posts that are given a thumbs up are then shared with your network of followers. The more thumbs up a webpage receives, the more networks of followers it’s shared with.

To put it in Facebook terms, it’s like me sharing a link on my wall, and then all 2000 of my friends sharing my wall post on their walls with all their followers. And so on. And so on. And so on.

You’ve all seen Wayne’s World 2, you know how this works.

Now, there’s a lot to be said about the “rules” of Stumble Upon, but the only “rule” I find to be true is that there are no hard rules when it comes to being successful on Stumble Upon. There are, however, tips that aid the process and help you not look like an asshole on yet another form of social media.

Before anything, sign up, make your profile (doesn’t need to be fancy or long, I don’t think anyone ever reads them, anyways), and download the toolbar.

Yes. This.

Download the toolbar.

I don’t care if most of the blogs you read have a Stumble Upon icon on the bottom, do it anyways. As I will explain shortly, you should be stumbling lots of things, not just SEO advanced blogs with shiny buttons and widgets, so install the tool bar. I’ll wait…

Ok, let me break this bad boy down for you a bit. Your bar should look something like this (if it doesn’t, I have no idea what to tell you, are you sure you’re on a real computer and not the stupid cardboard versions on display at Sam’s Club so you can’t stand there eating a giant pretzel from the food court, looking at porn, because I fall for those almost every time?)


This is what you actually need to know about it…

1. Stumble! Button: Click this button to look at the stumbled posts of the people you follow, every time you click it, it will present you with a random page that was given the thumbs up treatment from one of your friends. It’s a great time killer at 3am when you can’t sleep and you feel like you’ve reached the end of the internet.

2. Thumbs Up: On a webpage you like? Give it the thumbs up! Rad blog post? Thumbs up. Bad ass article on zombie ants? Thumbs up. Cool shit on etsy? Thumbs up. If you are the very first person to give a webpage a thumbs up, you are the discoverer. Settle down, you apparently don’t get a plaque for this, I emailed them to ask already. Four times. When you discover a site, a little box will pop up asking for more information about the site you are stumbling.

Questions like, is this site safe for work? YES. CLICK YES. Unless it’s a website of a giant clitoris or a multi-species gang bang, click yes, because clicking no qualifies the site you are stumbling as pornography, and it will get zero SU related traffic, save for the people who specifically opt in to receive such sites, in which case, they will load your mis-marked recommendation and be pissed there are no boobies anywhere to be found.

Next, select the topic that best describes the site, again, not pornography, and then add relevant tags as well as a super quick review. Boom. Done.

Tip for blogs: When giving the thumbs up to a post you love, make sure you are on the actual post url, and not the main blog url, so that it’s the specific post being stumbled, and not the entire blog as a whole, that way, people see the exact post you want them to read.

3. Thumbs Down: This post blows. Self explanatory. If you thumbs down a post, it will not be shared with your followers. Tip: You cannot thumbs down a post that hasn’t already previously been stumbled with a thumbs up. Even though I would so love to, because some people allowed on the internet need the online equivalent of sterilization. I don’t know what that would entail exactly, maybe cutting off all their fingers, or restricting them to dial up internet through AOL.

4. Share: If you come across a page you want to share with your followers in a more immediate manner, or maybe it’s your site and you would like some thumbs ups on it, clicking the share button allows you to share the site via email or stumble bar notification instantly to a select number of your followers. Use this with discretion. This shit gets annoying fast.

5. Info: If the post you are stumbling has been stumbled before by someone else, after you give it a thumbs up, a green sideways arrow will appear over the Info icon. You can then click the icon to read previous reviews of the page, as well as enter your own.

6. Favorites: Clicking Favorites takes you to your stumble page, listing all the sites you have stumbled so far. It’s also a great way to go back and see if sites you have given a thumbs up to have taken off with lots of views…or if you have horrible taste. Which is entirely possible. Quick test: Did you love or hate Caddyshack 2?

So, you now have the toolbar down, you can begin stumbling anything and everything, which you should, because the next facet of SU is authority, aka, how much power your stumbles have, aka, how often the crap you stumble shows up in the stumble feed of your followers and SU as a whole. This is based on a number of things.

1. How much stuff you have stumbled. The more the better, period. Other random things that help you make the most of your stumble numbers are being the person who discovers a site, as well as leaving reviews as opposed to simply giving something a thumbs up. Tip: Get in the habit of stumbling everything you do online. From online shopping to blog hopping, give everything a stumble rating. A great exercise for me is stumbling posts out of my reader each day. It is a habit I have developed that really ups my stumble numbers, giving my stumbles lots of weight and exposure.

2. Variety. I hear this a lot. Stumble Upon is stupid, I stumble my posts all the time and I get no traffic. Yeah, we all know, we see you doing it. Stop it. It’s annoying. If there was a such thing as stumble etiquette, the first line would be, stop stumbling your own shit all the time, asshole. SU is smart, and probably operates based on some super technical algorithm which totally can tell when you are genuinely stumbling a variety of fun sites to share across the network, or if you are being a selfish douche who only wants to promote your own content. If you constantly stumble the same site, you will have zero stumble authority, and the followers you haven’t driven off with your endless self promotion won’t see your posts, because SU won’t share them.

This is not to say you can’t use SU to increase your traffic, just make sure that you are also taking the time to stumble lots of other things, as well! Many of us believe in the unspoken 1/15 ratio.

That means, never stumble the same site more than once every 15 stumbles. Want to give yourself a thumbs up? Awesome! Just makes sure you have stumbled at least 15 other things since the last time you did it (hint, hint use the Stumble! button on your toolbar to get that variety of stumbles under your belt). It also helps if you can get another person to be the one to stumble your site first, and then you going back and giving it a thumbs up.

Stumble Upon hates selfish llamas. ( It’s the new sad panda, I’m trying to make it happen.)

Finally, based on the scribbles I made on this here McDonald’s napkin in line at the bank this morning, I wanted to discuss what kind of content takes off on SU, and what stuff sits dead in the water. The truth is, it’s a crap shoot.

I can only offer you these tips:

1. Keep it short. Stumblers are an ADD breed by nature, so short and zippy typically plays well. How-to’s, Top 10 Lists, hilarious cartoons, etc. Those typically do great on SU.

2. If it’s a long post, hook them in the first sentence. I will admit that when I am stumbling, and Harry Potter book 7 loads on my screen with minimal paragraph breaks and nary a period in site, two boring words in, I stop reading, my brain has an earthquake, and I write your name down on the list of people I plan on punching in the face should I ever meet you in real life. Unless, of course, you peak my interest from the start.

For example, click this post right here. It’s like Homer’s fucking Odyssey in length, but the first sentence is catchy, so despite the fact that my post is 4 million lines long, it does well on Stumble Upon. Click here to see how it played on Stumble Upon.

3. Lastly, be original. Why isn’t your four step tutorial on how to boil water not taking off on Stumble Upon? Because there are 4 million other water boiling tutorials on Stumble Upon, so unless your tutorial features you boiling water naked, drunk, and holding a koala, the interest might not be there.

In summation, Stumble Upon is an excellent way to find some of the best shit the web has to offer, and it’s also an amazing and easy way to successfully promote what you do online and increase your traffic.

Have questions? Ask them. Tips? Leave them. Wanna follow me on Stumble Upon? Click here.

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