Entries Tagged 'StumbleUpon for CHD' ↓

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

We’ll conclude this mini-tutorial by sharing a few Power Tips for StumbleUpon Traffic

Today is the last day of this ‘StumbleUpon Supremacy’ challenge. It has been hard work, no doubt. I hope you enjoyed learning and putting what you learned into action. And if it hasn’t already happened, you will soon reap rich rewards for your efforts - in the form of huge traffic surges.

On this final day, we’ll explore more ways power stumblers use to get a lot of traffic.

Say Thank You

Simple things like saying ‘Thank you’ can give you incredible advantage over any competition - just because very few people do it! Sad, but true. But you can make the crowd’s boorishness your competitive advantage. Courtesy is so rare it is always noticed!

Thank everyone. Thank the friend who stumbled your post. And the friends who ranked it or visited your site or reviewed your blog. Thank the person who wrote the article or blog that you just discovered and stumbled, or reviewed.

Post blog comments

Comment on other people’s blogs on good posts that have already been stumbled. When visitors from StumbleUpon read the blog, they might see your comment - and follow a link on it to your website.

Don’t abuse this function. Always be sure your comment is in context and contributes to the conversation. Never use this as pure link spam. Karma is a strange thing… it’ll come back to bite you in the back!

Link spam is also easy to spot - and no power blogger or stumbler will endorse a link spammer. It’s a strategy that’s penny-wise, pound foolish.

Evangelize bloggers and their posts

Be lavish in your praise about great posts. No, not just on StumbleUpon - everywhere. Blog about it. Email your list. Twitter or Utterz it. Bookmark it on Del.icio.us and on other services.

Doing this positions you as a ‘value adder’ - and the beneficiary of your efforts will be extremely grateful to you. When it’s their turn, they will gratefully drive a rush of visitors to your site or blog.

In the end, it all boils down to being human and social.

“StumbleUpon is a network of people looking to find interesting, exciting, useful content on the Web; they respect, cherish and admire people like you who help them achieve this goal; and helping them is the quickest, easiest way to get huge surges of traffic from StumbleUpon”

The rest is detail. Technical excellence is of little advantage in a human powered network. Human empathy matters more. That, and a commitment to growing and enriching the online community you participate in.

StumbleUpon is one such awesome online community. It has the ability to drive a huge torrent of website visitors to your online properties. Take advantage of this potential - but do it ethically, effectively and enthusiastically.

To your StumbleUpon success - and may your web server crash from the flood of visitors thronging your site!

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.

New here? Please pick up your three FREE gifts - click here. Hope you like them. And drop by often!

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

Today is about how to Deepen Relationships With Your New Friends

You’re well on your way to becoming a StumbleUpon specialist.

Maybe you already got a traffic surge. Or built up an impressive network. Or made contact with an A-list blogger. Good for you.

And no doubt your work on this challenge has already brought some added visibility to the ‘Congenital Heart Defects Awareness’ effort - you are helping improve the life of a child with heart defects. Thank you for your support.

Today, we’ll begin taking your SU success to a higher level - by strengthening the relationship with members of your network, while expanding it further.

Here are a few things you can do to deeper your connection with SU friends:

- Introduce yourself with a personal note. Ask if you can help in any way. Offer your services and assistance with something. Reach out to them and make first contact. Your approach will pay rich dividends in a short while.

- Stumble their content. Visit their blogs and websites. If you find something you like, stumble it - and then write a review. They’ll be sure to thank you for the flood of traffic you unleash.

- Rate and review their picks. You can do this by visiting their blog and browsing through the links they’ve stumbled. How does this help? SU ranks users possibly based on their utility to the service. A stumbler who picks great websites that many other users enjoy should therefore rank higher. By giving your friend’s pick a ‘thumbs up’, you are boosting your friend’s authority within SU.

- Send them your top content to stumble. As a StumbleUpon user, you can send pages to specific friends, or even all of them. When you write or create something that you think all your friends will love, and stumble as their own discovery, send it to them. You’re helping them, while helping yourself indirectly.

Key tip: NEVER explicitly ask an SU user to vote up or stumble your content. It is considered bad form, and reflects poorly on you.

Over time, this kind of behavior will impress your friends - and they will begin to reciprocate. It won’t happen overnight, but gradually you will gain influence and recognition within SU, and this will translate into massive traffic from the network.

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.

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

Today we’ll look at Creating StumbleUpon ‘Link Bait’

Now that you have a fair idea of what kind of content appeals to StumbleUpon readers, today you’ll try and create content specifically designed to attract SU visitors - and get your blog or website a huge flood of targeted visitors.

Here are a few technical tips to help you get maximum leverage from your StumbleUpon traffic.

1. Longer articles with more links to explore may work better. The more ‘thumbs up’ votes you get, the greater the chance others will stumble across your page. And longer, more informative and comprehensive content is likely to get voted more often than ultra-short snippets.

2. Use eye-catching photos or visual aids to grab visitor attention.

3. Craft compelling headlines to attract readers and suck them into the content.

4. Label and tag every post. Use broad category tags like ‘money’ or ‘health’ which get searched more often rather than less frequently searched terms.

5. Take care to offer most content ‘above the scroll’ - before the visitor has to click a mouse button or scroll down. Chances are they won’t - unless you give a convincing reason to do it.

6. No advertising. Or at least, not intrusively or aggressively. You may use a form to sign up visitors to a list, dangle a juicy gift or run a contest as a hook, and even offer a freebie giveaway. But do not use Google Adsense or other flashy banners or do anything that appears to be pushy advertising.

Keeping visitors engaged and interested is critical. After all, they found you from a click on their toolbar - and another click takes them somewhere else equally interesting!

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.

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

Let’s talk about Driving Traffic To YOUR Site From StumbleUpon

Now, I’m sure you’ve been scratching your head wondering how all this is going to help YOU. After all, by stumbling someone else’s website, aren’t you really driving traffic to THEM?

Yes, and now we’re going to look at adding your own sites to the mix - so some of that juicy StumbleUpon traffic is directed towards your online property.

The real secret to becoming a ‘power’ stumbler is to establish a position of trust and influence - with your network. And the way to do it is add value to their life.

And if your own website, blog, business, service, product, membership or anything else you do online is likely to bring light into the lives of your audience - why, it is your DUTY to let them know about it!

That’s how you drive traffic - huge floods of it - from StumbleUpon to your website. By providing something of great value on your site, and telling your online community about it in the same way you always tell them about helpful, useful, valuable sites you came across.

Do NOT use hype.

Do NOT hard sell.

Do NOT be pushy.

StumbleUpon audiences are discerning and know what they like and enjoy. Just point them in the right direction, and sit back to watch.

If they do not like your content, see if you can make your resources better or more appealing, instead of trying hard to simply herd them back… that won’t work.

Here’s a critical mistake you must avoid. Do NOT send visitors to the homepage of your blog or site. Instead, link deep to the specific content that will interest them.

That way, you can target many different, narrowly defined niches within StumbleUpon - based on selected keywords or specific interests - and deliver perfectly tailored content to each group.

What Content Do StumbleUpon Readers Like?

Tough question. Hard to answer. Test it for yourself.

StumbleUpon visitors are valuable to a website or blog owner. They are more than curiosity seekers flicking from one site to another. Catch their interest and they’ll stick around.

The key to it is providing great value - informative or entertaining content, presented in a pleasant, aesthetically appealing style, without clutter or crowding, and minimal or no advertising that’s annoying and ‘in your face’.

Some generalities:

- SU users like lists e.g. 101 top Wordpress themes, 69 ways to get more website traffic, 17 POWER Tips to StumbleUpon Beginners

- SU readers enjoy learning more about StumbleUpon itself, and other social media

- Hot news… juicy gossip, breaking news, what’s happening TODAY

- Photos and pictures

- Cool sites… design that rocks, gadgets, widgets and games

These are very broad, general guidelines. StumbleUpon has a VAST user base of millions, and their interests are diverse and varied. Since you will be appealing to people in your network who anyway share your interests, chances are good that what you find interesting will be attractive to them too.

Today’s assignment is to stumble 3 or more pages/sections on your website or blog that you think meet these criteria.

In addition, because this entire program is to participate in the ‘Congenital Heart Defects Awareness‘ effort, I ask that you also find 2 sites or blogs that focus on CHD awareness and stumble them too.

If you’d also like to stumble the main ‘A Day for Hearts’ website, that would be fantastic. The URL is http://www.CHDinfo.com/chdaware/ You could give it a thumbs up, and make it visible to a wider audience.

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.

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.

Welcome to Day #2 of “7 Days to StumbleUpon Supremacy”.

Still with me? Fantastic. Hopefully you have finished yesterday’s assignment, and have registered for a StumbleUpon account and have explored the service, seen how things work, and maybe have a fair idea how everything works.

You are ahead of 90% of the people who showed interest in this 5 day challenge, who will just read it - but do nothing with the information. Your chance of getting more traffic from StumbleUpon just went up a notch by following up on the lessons your learned by taking action!

Now keep on reading and you’ll learn about some cool - and easy - things you can do to drive a flood of targeted visitors to your blog or website.

Make Your Commitment to the StumbleUpon Community

StumbleUpon is more than a traffic tap. It’s a powerful social NETWORK - an online community where you connect with PEOPLE.

Get this core principle right and you’ll reap rich rewards from the StumbleUpon community - and have great fun as you drive more traffic to your site.

StumbleUpon gives you some powerful, easy to use tools to make this process as easy as clicking a few buttons. Use them - and profit. Doing this the correct way takes some time, but is well worth doing.

Before going further, make a commitment to yourself that you will ethically tap the power of this huge network to add as much value to your network members as you can, and in return enjoy all the benefits that come from being connected to this vast source of targeted visitors.

Understand the Service

To start off, focus your attention on adding value to the SU community - by bringing interesting stuff to the attention of your network of friends and fans.

Stumble often. Stumble a lot. Stumble good stuff.

That way, you soon become a person others will watch and follow - because you point them to some nice picks that they might not have found on their own.

Do you surf the Web often? Surely you come across some nice photos, a cool widget, an incredible content resource, a funky design, a heart-warming story.

Stumble it.

It’s as simple as clicking on the ‘thumbs up’ icon on your StumbleUpon toolbar.

Then write a short, pithy, passionate review about the site, telling briefly why you like it, and why others should bother checking it out.

That’s all.

Today’s task is to locate at least 10 resources worth stumbling - and then adding them to your account at StumbleUpon. If you can stumble more than that, fine. And this will be a part of your daily routine - finding 10 or more quality sites to stumble every day, so your list of recommended sites grows and grows.

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.

Welcome to Day #1 of the StumbleUpon challenge.

This is a process that helped even a beginner at StumbleUpon like myself get amazing and fast results. By following this guide to getting more StumbleUpon traffic, you too can experience the thrill and joy of having your content viewed by thousands of people within a few days - for free.

And in the process, you also get to help spread Congenital Heart Defects awareness and help save a child’s life!

So let’s get started getting more StumbleUpon traffic - quickly, and for free.

Jump In - Start Stumbling!

It’s as easy - or difficult - as that. While you could read and research about StumbleUpon for a year, that will NOT bring you more traffic. What will, however, is if you just jump in and do things on StumbleUpon.

So, first click here to join StumbleUpon if you are not already a member.

Just register, download and install the toolbar, and come back to read the rest.

Done?

Welcome from a fellow SU member

Want to be my ‘StumbleUpon friend’? Click here and add me to your friends list - just click on the ‘Add him as a friend’ button at the right top corner.

Finished? Great.

Now let’s customize and personalize your StumbleUpon page to fit with your goals. In the beginning, StumbleUpon can be confusing. Here are some tips to get going:

1. Click on the STUMBLEUPON icon on the left corner of your toolbar. You’ll be asked to pick some preferences, depending upon your interests.

Select one or a few categories you want to focus on. Make them relevant to your main site or blog to which you will be driving visitors.

Based on your choice, the service will present targeted websites for you to stumble and review. As each page loads in your browser, you can rate it - by either giving it a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’… and move on to the next.

2. You can continue to surf the Web the usual way - except that now, when you come across a site that impresses you, you can just click on the ‘thumbs up’ icon on your SU toolbar - and it gets added as your ‘discovery’ to the StumbleUpon database (if it isn’t already in it).

There’s a benefit to being the first person to stumble a site or article or page. If you ‘discover’ a cool site that no one has stumbled before, then as more and more people notice the site and vote for it on StumbleUpon, your link will drive more traffic to your site.

How? The review page of any site in the SU database carries the name, profile photo and link of the ‘discoverer’ - which means WIDE exposure across the network for you. What’s more, if it gets popular enough to hit the ‘Buzz’ page, you could become visible to MILLIONS of people every day - for as long as the site remains on the buzz page!

This is the biggest incentive to actively stumble useful resources that help many other users.

Many people will notice you, and some will want to be part of your network, and will join your fan base or become your ‘StumbleUpon friend’, giving you increasing influence and leverage when it comes to creating buzz around sites you discover in the future - including your own!

3. Start with people. At the top of your StumbleUpon page, there is a tab titled ‘PEOPLE’. Click it. You’ll get a random list of members. Click on their profile photo or icon to go to their StumbleUpon page. There you’ll see a list of the sites they have stumbled. Start exploring, rating and reviewing.

4. Or pick a tag to go. On the right sidebar is a ‘tag cloud’ - a list of words on popular topics, based on the choices you gave indicating your preferences.

Clicking on each tag will take you to a page listing people who are also interested in the subject, and sites stumbled by other users. You can visit each and rate them. If you prefer video and multimedia, there’s a section devoted to it, again linked from the navigation bar at the top of the page.

5. Make friends. That’s another way to get started. You may find someone you already know on StumbleUpon. Visit their profile page. Click the ‘Add Them As A Friend’ button to be their fan. If they choose to, they can in turn pick you to be a ‘mutual friend’.

And in this way, you can even approach people you don’t know yet, but want to. Steadily, such growth enlarges and enriches your network. Remember this - StumbleUpon is not merely a ‘traffic tool’ - it’s a SOCIAL network!

There’s a lot more you can learn about StumbleUpon. Here is an amazing resource that lists great articles about different elements of SU. Reading them all may be too forbidding and time consuming, but take a look and go through as many as you can. It will give you a better idea of the service.

65 Must Read StumbleUpon Articles

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.