Ultimate Guide to Using StumbleUpon
September 9th, 2007
While browsing around the internet you may have noticed people mention StumbleUpon or seen a “Stumble It!” link posted at the bottom of many blog entries (you can find one at the bottom of this post). If you haven’t used StumbleUpon before, you probably aren’t familiar with what exactly the service is. My hope is that this guide will give you everything you need to know in order to find success using StumbleUpon.
What is StumbleUpon? StumbleUpon is a website owned by eBay that allows users to discover and rate all sorts of web content, including webpages, photos, videos, games, and even news articles. Website is discovered via their web browser plugin, which is available for most major web browsers.
Why should I use StumbleUpon to find good content? StumbleUpon shows you one site at a time, rather than seeing a bunch of news stories summarized on a single page (like Digg). This allows you to look over the post, rate it (if you choose to), and move on to the next one. Digg instead relies on users to provide accurate descriptions of the post. If the description is poor, no matter how good the post is, it won’t generate very many views due to the poor description given to it.
How do I join StumbleUpon and get my toolbar? In order to become a stumbler, you’ll first need to set up a free account. This can be accomplished by visiting their official website and registering your own account. You can then download the appropriate toolbar for the web browser you use primarily. If you are a Opera user, you’ll have to go off their site and download the Opera Stumbler.
How do I go about stumbling the internet? After your toolbar has successfully installed, you will probably need to restart your web browser. Once the restart has completed, your StumbleUpon toolbar should show up. In the far left corner of the toolbar is a Stumble! button. By clicking this, StumbleUpon will randomly take you to a site that fits within one of the categories you elected to see.
How do I rate websites? A big part of what makes StumbleUpon so special is that the users ranks the sites that are stumbled, which helps StumbleUpon to determine what sites to show others with similar interests. In order to vote, you’ll simply need to stumble the internet and click the thumbs up (I like it!) or the thumbs down icons. After voting up or down, you can then click Stumble again to take you to the next site and repeat the process as you go. If you accidentally click the wrong one, you can just click the other one to change your vote, or re-click the incorrect one to remove your cast vote.
How do I find friends on StumbleUpon? StumbleUpon has made it easy for users to find their friends with their friend finder. If you use GMail, Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Hotmail, AOL, or Facebook, you can log in to your account from that page and it will let you know if any of your contacts are already on StumbleUpon! Once you’ve added your friends, you can adjust your toolbar to always search for pages that your friends have given a thumbs up to.
How do I install a “Stumble It!” button on my website to encourage people to Stumble my work? This is actually pretty simple if you are a WordPress user. Simply use the following code some place within the post:
<a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>"> Stumble it!</a>
Why would I want my posts to be stumbled? If your goal is traffic, StumbleUpon can do this just as well, and often better, than Digg. StumbleUpon has a similar yet different effect than the well known Digg effect. Rather than getting a flood of visitors over a short period of time like Digg offers, StumbleUpon will instead give you a large number of visitors over a steady length of time.
What separates Digg and StumbleUpon? Both are user generated social sites that rely on submitted content, however StumbleUpon will actually recommend stories through their rating system, allowing you to stumble on to sites that you are more likely to enjoy. You are also less likely to find breaking news, but are more likely to find useful content that is bookmark worthy.
That should cover just about everything you need to know to find success with StumbleUpon. As you find useful posts while exploring the blogosphere, I recommend you take the time to write a quick review or at least give a thumbs up to any posts you think others would find useful. It helps promote other bloggers who do good work, and you’ll often find that those same bloggers will stop by and stumble your posts every now and then!
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Great work man! I only use SEO for firefox and SeoQuake 
No, Gravatar does not have an affiliate program. 
Does Gravator have an affilitate program? 
Great list. All the important ones covered. I've made my own Top 10 list at the following;
http://thatimportantblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/10-best-greasemonkey-userscripts-2009.html
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Even though Digg can potentially bring in more traffic, I actually like StumbleUpon better. Great crowd.
I absolutely love StumbleUpon. The Opera Stumbler is pretty good, but unfortunately the number of categories you can browse with it are limited at this point.
Brown Baron – I couldn’t agree more! When I write these Guides, I try to take out personal emotion as much as possible and just present the facts. I personally do prefer the StumbleUpon traffic though, is it is more consistent and it is MUCH more likely that people will actually read the content and click advertisements.
Ryan – I have it installed on my Opera browser, but don’t use it very often. It looks like it is a work in progress, though, so hopefully improvements will continue.
Wow! Indeed this is an ultimate guide! Stumbled
Stumble is better than digg. It can give recursive traffic again and again. I did get twice for same post and 5000 each time.
Great guide, Kyle!
Thanks
Nirmal – Thanks for stumbling my StumbleUpon post! LOL
Ashish – Yes, that is kind of what I’ve found as well. I tend to prefer the StumbleUpon traffic anyway because they actually view the page. Many diggers never even click over to your site.
Zia – You’re welcome! Glad you found it useful.
SU is awesome and it has been the single most prolific traffic source for me!
Great guide, Kyle! Stumbled.
I wished I stumbled upon this post before I joined SU. I spent a lot of time figuring out out to work around SU when I joined a few days ago!
K – Thanks!
Pelf – Glad you found it useful!
Kyle,
I’m wondering why your blog has an “” symbol after some sentences.
This shows up on Firefox on a Mac running OS X 10.4, also on Safari on that same machine.
Here’s a pic of it: clicky
Lou,
Thanks for letting me know about it and for the pic!
I’ve actually been investigating this for a few days. I’m not sure what caused it, but I think I tracked it down to involving a plugin I was using called Link A Dink. Since I deleted it, my new posts have been fine. It looks like I’m going to have to go back through these posts manually and remove these.
Thanks again for the heads up!
Kyle,
This is a great article. I linked to it today on my blog. I am not sure why the trackback is not showing up.
Fred – Thanks for the interest and the link! I’ve been battling a problem with trackbacks/pingbacks for awhile now. I’m not sure what caused it with my theme, but I’m in the process of tracking it down. Trackbacks do show up every so often, but pingbacks never seem to.
Digg gives you a one time traffic. You get lots of unique visits to the page which got digg frontpaged but there are lesser pageviews. With Stumbleupon you generate more pageviews with a less number of visits which mean the traffic is ‘converting’, that is, liking your content
Nuts – Yes, it is certainly more targeted to your site through StumbleUpon. You are also mroe likely to get a true page view, rather than people that click over from Digg, then go back before the page is done loading.