Welcome to the third day of “7 Days to StumbleUpon Supremacy”

Today we’ll talk about:

Working on Relationships

StumbleUpon is a social network. Incidentally, it also drives huge volumes of traffic to sites that its users consider popular or valuable.

How to get a sizable chunk of StumbleUpon users to rate your website or blog as ‘popular’?

The answer is one word: RELATIONSHIPS.

Let’s work next on the relationship building process on StumbleUpon.

Create a powerful profile

When members of the StumbleUpon community look for you, the first thing they come across is your profile. It is important that you create a great ‘first impression’. You want to knock their socks off!

What’s the best way to do this?

Visit the list of ‘Top Stumblers - click here

This group of ‘power users’ have each submitted thousands of pages to SU. They are experts at serving the community in a way that gets them recognition and influence. You want to follow their example.

Click on a few profile photos/icons and see their personal pages. What’s on it? How do they present themselves? Many of them use photos and their real names (or a brand/pen name). Copy the things most top stumblers do on their blog when you customize your own page.

Remember to brand. Your user name and profile picture must extend the brand of your website or blog or business to StumbleUpon readers.

Create a customized version of your homepage, selecting your interests from the topics listed on the sidebar to match the theme of your StumbleUpon presence.

Pick your topic, interest and keyword choices carefully, as they will determine the kind of people from the community who get exposed to your profile and site picks through SU’s matching algorithm.

Personalize your StumbleUpon homepage. To do this, click on the PREFERENCES tab and start customizing. In your PERSONAL PROFILE, you are allowed to post a brief introduction message - in which you can link back to your regular website, blog or even sales page or other social media websites.

I would greatly appreciate it if you linked to the ‘A Day for Hearts - Congenital Heart Defects Awareness Day‘ website from this section of your StumbleUpon profile. Click here to pick up the code for a banner or button graphic.

Start Growing Your Network

Connect with fellow stumblers. Pick a theme or keyword, and see who else is interested in the same topic. Visit their blog/homepage to see the kind of sites they have stumbled. If there’s a match, add them to your list of friends - and sign up as their fan.

Send a message. You can take this further and send a message - just click the link on the sidebar and type. The first contact could be just a brief introduction, with a quick mention of how you found their site and what you liked about their stumbles. Then wait for a response - and keep the conversation flowing.

Rate their content. After you enter their orbit, do something to help your new friends. On StumbleUpon, the best thing you can do to help is to vote up their content. Check to see if it is good, because by stumbling and rating poor quality stuff, you will harm your own reputation in the long run. But if the content is good, stumble it - and rate it with a ‘thumbs up’.

Write a review. Don’t stop with a ‘thumbs up’. Write a review. Far too many reviews are short, standard and not compelling. Stand out and be different. Write a RAVE review - one that will get other visitors to the page take notice, and grab the site owner’s attention.

Review the homepage. An even better way to get on a Stumbler’s radar is to review their SU blog (homepage) itself. Click their photo to go to the blog - and then pick the link on the sidebar labelled “Review Their Blog”. Write a review of the person, or the content on his/her blog. A StumbleUpon blog with many reviews carries higher ‘authority’ - and every SU user appreciates action that you take to boost that authority.

Make friends with your readers. StumbleUpon shows you how many people visited your homepage, and their details. It’s a flashing icon at the top of your right hand sidebar, next to the inbox icon. Click on it, and you’ll get a list of recent visitors to your StumbleUpon blog. These are people who were curious enough to check out your blog. Click on their profile photo and go to their site, where you can add them as a friend, or send a message or review/rate their site picks and profiles.

Seek out powerful bloggers. Search for prominent bloggers who also are active StumbleUpon users - and then you stumble their posts! Do you see how this benefits you? Active SU members understand how your action was responsible for their blog getting extra visitors - and will return your favor at some time in the future, even if you don’t ask for it!

Any of these actions could become the seed of a fruitful friendship - don’t knock it until you’ve tried doing this.

Today, customize your StumbleUpon page and then connect with at least 15 SU users. This is another target for every day. You should make every attempt to contact at least 15 new SU users daily and get on their network.

By doing just this and submitting interesting content to StumbleUpon on a daily basis, you’ll stand an excellent chance of becoming a power user - even if you do nothing else. But then, there’s a LOT more you’re going to do… tomorrow!

The “CHD Social Media Challenge” is a project to spread Congenital Heart Defects awareness. There are 4 mini-tutorials and 1 firesale making up the ‘challenge’. You can join in and help too - click here to see how.