So you’ve spent last week getting familiar with StumbleUpon right?  You’ve added friends, you’ve been stumbling sites, and your profile is personalized right?  Good!  Now onto promoting your blog using StumbleUpon.

There are two parts of Stumbling that include discovery and review sites, but essentially these two things are the same.  The discovery/review process is fairly straight forward.  You find a site you like and you click the Thumbs Up button on the StumbleUpon toolbar.  If it’s already been discovered your thumbs up icon will change from blue to green and you’re done. If it hasn’t been discovered yet a Discovery dialog box will come up for you to fill in with information about the site.  This includes a Title, your Review of the site, the Topic, the Tags, if it’s an Adult site or not, and what Language the site is in.  Fill in all these sections in detail, and make sure to add at least 5 Tags (comma separated) describing the blog post.

When you are discovering a blog it is important to use the URL that points directly to the post, not the main URL that points to the front page of the blog.

Right way : http://www.bloggingtips.com/2009/04/07/the-right-way-to-use-stumbleupon-for-blog-promotion-part-one/

Wrong way : http://www.bloggingtips.com/

In general, discovering and reviewing your own site is a no-no, and this is where your friends come in.  For example, I have a large network of friends online and about once a week I ask one of them to discover one of my blog post if they find it worthy.  Not every post I write is worthy of a Stumble, but the ones that I am exceptionally proud about about I will ask for a discover.  Note, submitting every single post you write on your blog is unnecessary, and you will risk the possibility of losing your StumbleUpon account.  Participating in StumbleUpon exchange sites will also get your account suspended.  Just don’t do it.

Once you have a friend that felt your post was worthy of a discover into the StumbleUpon network it’s time for you to try to get as many thumbs up as you can.  I like to use the Send To feature on the toolbarto send my blog post to my network of friends that I have on StumbleUpon.  The first step is navigating to your post that you would like to recieve thumbs up on then click Send To.  A list of all your friends will show up in the drop down menu.  Once you choose a friend to send it to a dialog box will come up for you to write a message to them.  I ususally say something like, “If you like this please thumbs up.  Thanks in advance!”  Then I repeat this step for all my friends in my list.  There is also a way to do this from your StumbleUpon account page, but I like to keep things nice and simple using the toolbar rather than clicking through the site to get to that section.

Once you start using this feature you will also be getting these types of request from your friends and they will show up on your toolbar like thisthat shows I have 6 messages.  When you click on it you will see the page that they want you to review and also a place to respond back to them.  If I like their site I will give it a thumbs up and send them a message back that I did so.  I also like to use this feature for saying thanks for the thumbs up on my blog post.  Being nice gets you far in life, and that includes on StumbleUpon as well.

StumbleUpon is a two way street.  If you help out your friends with promoting their blog post, they will return the favor when it’s time to promote your blog post.  By doing the above promotional steps using StumbleUpon I have increased my blog traffic significantly, and StumbleUpon is now my number one referrer in my stats.

If you’d like to add me in your network of friends and help you promote your blog post then please add me.  I’d be more than happy to help you out.  http://justjulie.stumbleupon.com/