How Do You Create a Powerful StumbleUpon Profile?

Top Stumblers

It is clear from website traffic reports that not all stumbles are created equal.

Traditionally the rule has been to get as many votes as possible. Quantity is of course an important factor, it is a lot like a popularity contest in this regard. Using the share features, the web based toolbar, and Twitter to garner more votes has become commonplace.

Variety is also important, you do not want the same faces voting on the same domains, otherwise it looks suspect and the system shuts those votes down or discounts them.

There is more to it though. As well as quantity of votes, there seems to be a quality score going on as well.

  1. Weak versus powerful accounts send fewer initial visitors
  2. Votes after discovery amplify the original strong or weak vote, almost like a multiplier of an initial score
  3. More subsequent votes amplify the original review more or less strongly

Getting votes from strong accounts is essential if you are going to reap the full benefits of StumbleUpon.

So how do you create a good StumbleUpon profile?

Here is the official stumbleupon definition:

Top Stumblers are our most active and helpful community members. These members frequently suggest new sites to be included in our database, and frequently rate new sites they stumble upon.

When you submit a site, it is shown to other stumblers (for evaluation). If those people like your suggestion (by rating it I-like-it! often) your community ‘Karma’ will increase.

Your Top Stumbler rank will also increase by frequent rating. You do not need to rate every site you see, but if it stands out as particularly excellent (a website you really like) or bad (you don’t like it, or it is spam), make sure you rate it. This regular participation will increase your Top Stumbler rank.

That is useful to know for growing your own power account. Essentially, participate. A lot.

As well as having our own good accounts, we also need to make friends with other stumblers. How do you recognize someone who has a good account?

These are the very top StumbleUpon users. Notice anything about them?

Essentially a strong account will show a level of activity over the norm, a high number of “favorites”, and a high number of “subscribers”. Plus you can tell if they are a quality user, see how many testimonials they have and the kind of bookmarks they favorite.

Also look to see your compatibility rating to see if they like the same stuff as you do.

If you take a look at my StumbleUpon profile, I have a fairly good account even though I spend less than 30 mins a week on it. It is not up there with the best, but pretty decent.

There are a good number of positive reviews of my stumbling, and I actually participate in the service rather than pimping my own stuff :)

That is the key to most social networking, it is about participating and adding to the community rather than just taking from it.

With StumbleUpon what you put in you get back out. Your participation is rewarded.

As I say above, you do not want to be stumbling the same domains over and over, and that includes your own.

The main benefit of having a powerful account is to help other people. By doing this favor you will get noticed – people look at their web stats and see traffic coming from StumbleUpon, then look to see who submitted and reviewed.

Consider it another valuable “pay forward” tool in your social networking portfolio!

Posted on June 12, 2009 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Software Tools, Web 2.0

Comments

7 Responses to “How Do You Create a Powerful StumbleUpon Profile?”

  1. Robin Cannon on June 12th, 2009 3:19 pm

    I find that Stumbleupon seems to be one of the more random submission sites as regards activity/engagement versus popularity. I see people with around 100 favorites, few to no discoveries and yet hundreds of fans and reviews. Similarly I’ve seen people with 4-5000 stumbles and yet less than 10 fans. I have 1600 favorites, about half of which are reviews, yet under 60 fans and only 3 reviews (well, it says three, but I can only see one).

    Curious as to how many of your favorites are your own discoveries. I have about 200 discoveries but looks like you have over 700. Wonder if that’s a relevant factor in regards to improving a StumbleUpon profile (though still doesn’t explain the 100 fans profiles).

  2. Tracy on June 12th, 2009 3:54 pm

    Hi Chris! I’ve heard from others that when I’ve discovered their posts it throws a few hundred views their way. That makes me feel great, as I love nothing more than sharing good quality posts and getting my fellow bloggers some attention.

    One concern however is the effect of the same group of stumblers stumbling the same url. I have mixed feelings about this; I know that SU doesn’t want people continually thumbing up their own posts however it also stands to reason that most blogs have a core group of readers that will tend to enjoy the posts and thumbs them up. I’ve noticed that over time SU sends me less traffic and I’m wondering if it’s because often it’s the same group of stumblers discovering it.

    On the flip side I wondering how often I can stumble posts from the same url without it having a dampening effect. And if the number and mix of other urls I thumps up has any bearing on that.

    Very interesting stuff!

  3. Chris Garrett on June 15th, 2009 11:44 am

    @Robin – Discoveries are definitely a factor – I am often surprised when I thumb review something only to find I am the one to discover it. It seems many SU users are to busy/lazy to discover but they will happily thumb up.

    @Tracy – It seems the dampening effect kicks in most within 30 days or so from what I hear. So once a month would be ok. I know one guy who didn’t realize the negative effect of stumbling the same domains would have until he finally had to open a new account. Another, more “commercial” friend seems to have a penalty that his domain always seems to be marked as pr0n. SU can be mystery sometimes!

  4. Tim Maughan on June 16th, 2009 5:17 pm

    Hi there great article – starting to give me an idea about how SU works..

    The reason I’m interested is that I recently had a post on my site get over 30,000 hits from SU, which was amazing. Over the next few weeks some other posts got picked up, and had a lot of traffic as well. This was without me personally submitting any of them.

    Now I’ve just posted a follow up article to the first post, and so far (after 3 days) the traffic is just a trickle from there. I guess what i’m wondering is if there’s any way of recreating that success….?

  5. Gem on November 5th, 2009 3:13 am

    Besides a nice profile you could use vote automation to increase stumbles given to a particular article you want to promote. (I use http://www.ratingriot.com

  6. The Fatal Flaw in Social Bookmarking for Bloggers — Olinda Services on January 29th, 2010 9:03 am

    [...] Are submitted by people with power accounts (see how to grow your own Stumbleupon power account here). [...]

  7. Charlie Hash on June 24th, 2010 11:13 am

    Thanks for nice article, Chris

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