Next week will be the debut of Stumble Tumble Tuesday- the new Stumble Upon hop hosted by Simply Stacie, Still Blonde After All These Years, Kelly’s Lucky You, Acting Balanced, Shopper Gal andLuxury Reading! In anticipation, we have prepared a tutorial on Stumble Upon to get you ready for next week.
What is Stumble Upon?
Stumble Upon is a service that helps you find websites that fit your interests. It uses information you provide to suggest sites that you will find interesting. Also, Stumble Upon will give you links to sites that your friends have recommended. It’s easy to use, you just give sites a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to rate them. Stumble Upon uses that information and then when you click on the Stumble Upon icon, it will suggest potentially interesting sites for you. With 10.6 million users, it is a hugely popular community- based surfing tool.
“A Way to Find Your Corner of the Internet Sky”
“A Web service called StumbleUpon has spent the last six years trying to satisfy such a need, perfecting a formula to help you discover content you are likely to find interesting. You tell the service about your professional interests or your hobbies, and it serves up sites to match them. As you “stumble” from site to site, you will feel as if you are channel-surfing the Internet, or rather, a corner of the Internet that is most relevant to you.”
- New York Times, October 7, 2007
“The Most Addictive Website Ever”
“StumbleUpon is the greatest thing ever invented. The site makes the Internet infinite in its possibilities yet totally accessible. Warning: never has a website hijacked my brain, my attention span, and time itself quite like StumbleUpon.”
- The Oprah Magazine, January 30, 2009
Why use StumbleUpon?
For a general user:
- It’s fun and random. Great way to find new material in your area of interest
- Very easy to interact. Toolbar can be placed on your brower. No separate webpage.
- You can also Stumble Videos
For the blogger: (Reason are many, here’s the top 9 reasons)
- Generate rapid exposure for a specific website, brand or concept
- Establish a reader base for your blog very quickly.
- Gain numerous backlinks from StumbleUpon visitors with websites
- Potentially more powerful than Twitter or Facebook
- Better privacy rules and restrictions than Facebook
- You can share your website reviews
- Stumbleupon makes tagging easy, so your content is easy to find. You do not need any super technical keyword research. Broad keywords work best.
- Easy to see what your competition is up to…subscribe to their Stumbles
- Stumbleupon works best when other Stumble you post so posting your articles that you want Stumbled on our Stumble Tumble Tuesday Linky is a great way of achieving your Traffic goals!
Downloading the Stumble Upon Toolbar:
Downloading and integrating StumbleUpon is easy! All you need to do is open your browser, choose the download you want, and presto! you’re in business. Go here to choose your browser.
Drag this Stumble! button to your Bookmarks toolbar to launch StumbleUpon directly from your browser. No installation required.
Once you’ve downloaded the StumbleUpon toolbar, you’ll have stumbling available at the click of a mouse, so easy!
Types of Posts to Stumble:
You can stumble just about any type of post! It can be a post that captured your interest, one that made you laugh or a post where you learned something. I tend to stumble posts that I find interesting and that I think will appeal to other bloggers like myself. I have heard through the grapevine that you aren’t allowed to stumble giveaways.
Should you stumble your own posts?
Yes, you can stumble your own posts as long as you are stumbling more of other peoples and not just your own posts. I rarely stumble my own posts.
If you are the first person to stumble a post, please make sure to do a quick review of the post. You need to list the post title, category and a few sentences on what it’s about. It’s a one time only sort of thing so make sure you do it if you are the first one to stumble!
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Lisa Fittipaldi is best-known as the blind Watercolor artist for her Florence Art Gallery with an exhibit of latest works.
