StumbleUpon Guide to Discovering New Sites

With millions of new pages being added to the web everyday how do you discover great websites that interest you? StumbleUpon is a free tool that discovers websites based on your interests, learns what you like and brings you more.

Every time you click the Stumble button you are brought to a website that matches your personal interests.

Say you are really into art. With StumbleUpon you can discover great web pages, videos, blogs and photos about art. All personalised for you.

Clicking the Stumble button will bring you to one new website after another. Whether you are interested in humour, photography, cooking or astronomy, StumbleUpon has over 500 interests to choose from and tens of millions of websites all submitted and endorsed by StumbleUpon members.

If you were trying to discover great websites on a particular topic using a search engine you would be hunting and clicking through pages and pages of results, most of which wouldn’t be of interest to you.

The difference with StumbleUpon is that everything is tailored to your interests. You get to rate the websites – thumbs up or thumbs down.. so that StumbleUpon learns what you like. And your Stumbles become more and more personalised and the more Stumbling you do the better it gets.

StumbleUpon uses your ratings along with the ratings of millions of others members to determine which sites are best for you.

All of your rated sites are saved for you in your profile page so that you can access them again and again.

StumbleUpon also makes it really easy to share websites you find with other StumbleUpon members or to anyone with an email address, so you can share your discoveries with your friends.

StumbleUpon

Getting Started

Create an account, verify it, then sign-in to StumbleUpon.

Setup your Preferences by clicking on Your Home –> Preferences,

Here you can upload a photo, add your name, email, DOB, communication settings, etc.. all the basic stuff you do when setting up your profile. Click on <Save preferences> when you are done,

Now click on <Customize Profile> on the right hand side, to further enhance your profile,

Here you can add a link to your website, add your interests, change your theme, etc.. click on <Save preferences> when you are done,

Manage your Interests

It is important to select all the topics that interest you so that StumbleUpon can deliver you the best rated sites when you Stumble.

Click on Manage Interests or <Stumble>,

Go through each of the main headings and select the topics that interest you. When you are done click on <Save now & submit>,

These interests can always be changed at any time by clicking on All Topics from the toolbar, then Edit,

Toolbar

I highly recommend downloading the StumbleUpon toolbar from here, and installing it. It makes it so much easier when it comes to Stumbling upon new sites and managing them.

If you don’t want to install the toolbar you can use the WebToolbar from within StumbleUpon,

This guide will be based on the installed toolbar.

Stumbling Upon New Sites

The <Stumble!> button loads a new random site. The contents of these random sites are based on the interests you specified earlier,

Click on the <Stumble!> button and a random site will be displayed.. every time you click this button a new site will be displayed.

Thumbs Up Button

The <I like it!> button aka thumbs up, does three things,

1. If the site displayed was reached via the <Stumble!> button (which means it is already in the StumbleUpon directory), it will be added to your favourites,

It will also train the recommendation engine to learn what you like, which will improve the quality of your stumbles.

2. If the site was reached independently of StumbleUpon, it will open the Discovery panel allowing you to submit the site to the StumbleUpon directory,

3. If a site has already been thumbed-up, the thumb-up button changes colour from blue to green,

Pressing the button a second time will undo the initial rating, remove it from your favourites and change the colour back to blue.

Thumbs Down Button

The <Thumbs down> button shows that you don’t like that site. Your negative ratings will help StumbleUpon’s recommendation engine learn what you don’t like, so you aren’t shown similar sites again.

The <Thumbs down> button has four options,

1. Not-for-me = poor targeting. Use this whenever you receive something that you dislike or that does not match your interests.

2. Report Spam = use this option whenever you receive content that provides no value. If it’s something you personally don’t like, use the option above. This option can be used for unsolicited requests to register and sites that look suspicious or contain scams.

3. Duplicate Content = content that has been copied from another page with no added value from the original.

4. Block Website = you can opt to block an entire domain, which means you will no longer receive any stumbles from that site again. You can unblock the domain at any time later if you change your mind.

Share Button

The <Share> button has a few options,

1. Twitter / Facebook: StumbleUpon have released a URL shortening service called Su.pr which you can now easily share sites you like with your friends and followers on Twitter or FaceBook. All you need to do is sync up Su.pr (your StumbleUpon account) with your FaceBook and/or Twitter accounts and you are one click away from posting your favourite sites.

Please refer to the Su.pr section below on how to setup and configure Su.pr for posting to Twitter and Facebook.

2. An email address: you can share a site with someone who is not a registered StumbleUpon member (family members, co-workers, etc) by sending them an email with a link to the site you shared.

Enter recipients email address, then click <OK>,

Enter the subject, then click <OK>,

The email recipient will receive an email with a link to the shared site,

3. Your StumbleUpon Friends: Your friends will receive the site you sent in their Stumble queue, next time they click on their Stumble button. A red numeric indicator will show them that they have shares waiting in their Stumble queue.

Info Button

The <Info> button shows reviews other members have made about the site you have Stumbled.. or if you want to make a review yourself,

Firstly, you may want to check if your own site is listed in StumbleUpon by visiting the StumbleUpon website reviews page.

Enter your site’s URL then click <View Reviews>,

If your site hasn’t already been reviewed then review it, add some tags.. then click <Add Review>,

Clicking on the <Info> button when viewing a site allows you to review the site and assign tags to it.. all of your reviewed sites are saved.

Categories

The categories across the top of the StumbleUpon page – News, Photos, Videos, Art, Business, Computers, Health, Fun, Lifestyle, Music, Science, Sports, Technology contain sites that have content relevant to those categories,

You can subscribe to sites within that category by clicking the <Subscribe> button,

Sites within this category are added to your interests, which can be seen at Your Home –> Preferences –> Manage Interests,

You can unsubscribe any time by unselecting from the manage interests screen.. or by clicking on the <Unsubscribe> button,

Your Home

The Your Home tab (far left hand side) contains everything relevant to you,

Your Home –> Your Favorites

This section contains,

• Reviews: show all the sites that you have placed a review. These reviews can be edited or deleted at any time from here.
  
• Favorites: shows all of your favourite sites. Any site that you have thumbed-up will appear here. Your favourites can be edited or deleted at any time from here.
  
• Photos: shows sites tagged with photography
  
• Video: shows sites tagged with video
  
• Discoveries: shows all the sites that you have discovered. These discoveries can be edited or deleted at any time from here

Views

There are two views within StumbleUpon – List View and Grid View,

List view lists out your sites with a brief summary of each and allows you to easily edit or delete,

Grid view displays your sites in rows of five with no summary displayed, with just a picture and the title of the page. There is no option to edit of delete in this view,

Your Home –> What’s New

This section shows new and recent reviews by people you have subscribed to and recently rated sites from your subscriptions,

Your Home –> Friends

This section shows your friends and people you have subscribed to,

Your Home –> Inbox

The inbox is self explanatory,

Your Home –> Groups

Your Home –> Preferences

This was covered at the start of this guide.

Su.pr URL

Su.pr is StumbleUpon’s URL shortening service that also helps your content get discovered. Every Su.pr URL exposes your content to StumbleUpon’s 8 million users.

My post Su.pr – StumbleUpon’s URL shortener provides a good overview as to why it is so powerful.

Some of the notable features of Su.pr are:

• One-click posting and/or URL-shortening to your Twitter and Facebook accounts.
• Ability to schedule your posts at optimal times.
• Suggestions for best posting times.
• Reporting and graphs for your posts.
• Exposure for your content to the entire StumbleUpon community.
• Ability to highlight the best pages on your domain along with the main post.
• Advanced options for your own custom short URLs.

To be able to share Stumbled sites and post links to them on Twitter and Facebook, you first need to authorise Su.pr to post to these services.

Sign-in to Su.pr with your StumbleUpon details.

Authorize on Twitter

Firstly, click on <Authorize on Twitter>,

Click <Allow>,

Authorize on Facebook

Now click on <Authorize on Facebook>,

Click on <Allow>,

Click on <Allow Publishing>,

Posting from Su.pr

When making a post you can either,

• Post immediately
• Just Shorten the URL (to be used elsewhere, eg other social networks, blogs, etc)
• Schedule your post for later

I am going to post immediately to Twitter and Facebook,

Successfully appears on Twitter (and the URL is automatically shortened),

Successfully appears on Facebook (and the URL is automatically shortened),

Stats

As soon as you’ve made a post, you can immediately start checking stats in real time,

You will be able to see how the post will appear to your recipients, how many times the Su.pr link was clicked on (15 clicks), how many other views it got from the StumbleUpon community, how many times it was retweeted and how many times it was reviewed (1 review) by StumbleUpon members.

Overview of StumbleUpon

Friends and Subscribers

One of the best ways to Discover interesting sites is to connect with other members as a Friend or Subscriber.

If you enjoy content another member has Shared or Discovered, subscribe to their profile so you can follow their Stumbles while using the Toolbar.  If someone subscribes to your content, they’ll see pages you rated and reviewed when Stumbling.

Friends may not always share your interests, so you’ll only see their reviews when you choose to or if they’ve already shared content that matches your interests.

Requests to become someone’s Friend must be approved, if you’ve chosen to make your Stumble activity visible to others, any member is free to Subscribe to your content.

Building Relationships

Like with all other social communities connections are everything at StumbleUpon as they determine,

• Authority: the more friends you have the higher your authority as a member is
• Influence: the more friends you have the more people you can share your favourites to

The most effective ways of building connections and making relationships are,

• Initiate friendship: by sending friend requests
• Testimonials: give generous reviews to other members profiles

Website Popularity

There are a number of factors that determine the popularity of a page on StumbleUpon.

Every time a page or site or discovered it ranks on a 0-5 star scale, which makes up the submission score. This submission score is determined by,

• Reviewer’s and stumbler’s score: all StumbleUpon members are ranked based on their authority which includes,
  • the number of thumbs-up given and reviews made
  • the number of testimonials received
  • the number of subscribers and friends
  • age as a StumbleUpon member
  • the diversity and consistency of topics Stumbled
• Rate at which the story is thumbed-up: the more thumbs in a short amount of time, the hotter the story
• Source of the thumb: if a post is thumbed or review from the page itself, this won’t rank as highly as if the post was randomly discovered or Stumbled
• Diversity of Stumblers: if the page is thumbed or review by a wide variety of unrelated people this will also increase the popularity of the page

Finally..

StumbleUpon is a fantastic way for targeted traffic to visit and learn more about your site, as well as discovering new sites for yourself.

Building up your friend-base and can help further expose your website to their friends, especially if you have a good reputation and always thumb-up good sites. The more sites that you thumb-up (that interest you), the more it will attract like-minded people to your site, connections are made and referrals start to come in. StumbleUpon works very well as a brand and link building tool.

Have fun Stumbling!