“Stumble Stampede” was my suggested name for Caroline Middlebrook’s course on StumbleUpon, the wildly popular social media service that’s responsible for the bulk of my traffic. And while I was too late in making my suggestion, I have to admit that she picked a much less cheesy name: Stumble Rush. (Update: Caroline renamed it as Traffic Rush, because StumbleUpon didn’t want it sounding too similar to their own name.)

Stumble Rush is a home study course in StumbleUpon consisting of 20 lessons and 20 videos. The 10 basic lessons are free, and the 10 advanced lessons are $47. I recently started the free lessons, and while I’m not planning to buy the advanced lessons at this time, that’s not to say that it wouldn’t be a great value for the right person.

In one of the early free lessons, Caroline makes the excellent point that unless your blog happens to be about internet marketing, many of your users probably don’t know what StumbleUpon is. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to give a basic introduction for those who have not yet dived into the wonderful world of StumbleUpon. If you have a blog, you need to know this.

If you’re already well-versed in StumbleUpon, feel free to jump to the very bottom and read my question about the right way to ask for social media votes. It’s a controversial topic, and I’d like to hear what you have to say about it.

What is social media?

Social media is a term encompassing many different types of collaborative systems for sharing content on the internet. Popular social media sites include StumbleUpon, Digg, del.icio.us, Mixx, Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

One of the most common reasons people use social media is to drive traffic to their blogs. Social media can easily deliver far more traffic than you would get naturally. For example, my blog has about 300 subscribers, but because my post 10 Reasons Japan Is Better Than America was submitted to StumbleUpon, it was viewed 28,620 times.

Out of all the social media sites, why use StumbleUpon?

StumbleUpon is extremely popular. If you ask someone for a vote on Mixx or Reddit, there’s a good chance they won’t even have accounts for those services. If you ask someone for a stumble, they’re very likely to be able to do it, unless they just don’t use social media at all.

StumbleUpon is fun and easy to use. There’s an incredibly broad range of categories, so you can submit pretty much anything, as opposed to Digg for example, which is supposed to be just tech and news. You also don’t need very many votes to get some significant traffic, again as opposed to Digg, where you either hit the front page or you don’t.

And perhaps the best reason of all is that StumbleUpon is my biggest traffic source! While most of these visitors come and go very quickly, you’ll eventually turn some of them into loyal readers.

How do you use StumbleUpon?

Go to the StumbleUpon site and sign up for a free account. You pick a username and tell it which topics you’re interested in. Then you can download the StumbleUpon toolbar, which works in either Internet Explorer or Firefox.

The toolbar appears at the top of your browser, though I keep mine hidden when I’m not using it (Ctrl+F11 shows and hides the toolbar). Out of all the toolbar buttons, there are three I use far more than the rest:

Stumble: This button redirects you to a web page that StumbleUpon thinks you’ll like, based on the topics you chose, the pages you’ve voted for, and the pages your friends have voted for.

Thumbs up: This tells StumbleUpon that you like the page (or photo, or video) you’re on, you’d like to vote for it, and you’d like to see more pages like it in the future. When someone asks you to stumble a post, they mean they want you to visit their post and then click this button.

There’s also a thumbs down button, but I rarely use it. The idea is that StumbleUpon will learn not to show you similar pages in the future, but I doubt it works well. If you thumb a post down, how is StumbleUpon supposed to know whether you dislike it because it’s too long, or because it contains profanity, or because you’ve already read something similar, or because you disagree with the author’s opinions, or for some other reason? Plus, I’d rather use StumbleUpon to make friends than enemies.

Review: This button looks like a speech balloon. It lets you see what other people are saying about the current post, and it lets you write your own review too. It also lets you see how many people have clicked the thumbs up or thumbs down button.

Stumbling a post

Stumbling a post means clicking the thumbs up button, but this can actually mean two different things. Normally when you see a post you like, you click the thumbs up button and your vote is recorded. Then you can write a review if you like.

But if you’re the first one to stumble a post, it says “You’ve Discovered a New Site…Please let us know about it.” You enter a short review and select the topic this post best fits in. Then you click “Submit This Site,” and the post is now in the StumbleUpon database. Now all future stumblers can just click thumbs up without having to do this extra work.

How do you get traffic from StumbleUpon?

Simple! When you write a post people want to stumble, they click the thumbs up button. This causes StumbleUpon to send more stumblers to your post. If they like it, they’ll click the thumbs up button, and this in turn brings even more traffic. More thumbs up equals more traffic, and it can really add up. The key is to get a good number of stumbles within the first day or so, as time is a big factor. It’s also best if you get stumbled by “good stumblers;” people who stumble a wide variety of quality content, instead of just stumbling all their friends’ posts.

OK, but how do you get people to give you a thumbs up?

First of all, you’ll get the best results when you write a post that is specifically optimized for StumbleUpon. For example, Cosmo-type headlines, list posts, resource posts, and great images will help you. I’m sure Caroline will go into much more detail in even the free Stumble Rush lessons.

There’s definitely an art to it. Sometimes when I’m reading or writing a post, I’ll think “This is just screaming to be stumbled.” For example, regarding the post I mentioned before, “10 Reasons Japan Is Better Than America,” some people accused me of deliberately choosing a title that was designed to get traffic. Well, yeah, that was the idea!

So writing a stumble-worthy post is the first part. The next part is getting it in front of people who will stumble it. If you’re lucky enough to have a huge readership for your blog, you can just post something and since a tiny percentage of your readers are bound to stumble it, your post will take off with no effort. But if you have a small or medium-sized blog, you might want to consider asking for help.

Asking for stumbles

And now we’re getting into a very controversial topic. Isn’t StumbleUpon supposed to be organic? Aren’t posts supposed to rise to the top on their own merit, instead of by people gaming the system? Ideally, yes. But in reality, a blog with 50,000 subscribers is going to trounce your blog with 50 subscribers no matter how good your posts are. Gaming the system in an ethical way puts you on a more even footing with blogs that would otherwise have an unfair advantage.

When I say “gaming the system,” I simply mean taking any action specifically intended to win stumbles. Some methods are ethical, and some are not. Asking your friend to stumble your post is ethical. Hacking the StumbleUpon database is not. Creating fake accounts and writing fake reviews is somewhere in between, but I’d say it falls on the unethical side. We’re just going to talk about ethical methods here.

It’s very easy to email someone and ask them to stumble your post. The problem is that it can easily become excessive. If you email someone you know well once in a while, that’s fine. If you email a stranger every time you write a post, it gets annoying very quickly. And if you email someone multiple times every time you post, don’t be surprised if they file for a restraining order!

I had to turn off shouts (request notifications) on Digg because I was starting to get multiple people sending shouts for the same post. And this might have been a post that I had already been emailed about, possibly more than once. When you send emails out to different groups, there might be some overlap, meaning duplicate requests will go to the same person, and this gets annoying. A nice way to manage stumble requests is to create a group specifically for this purpose. Assemble a team of willing participants, set up a Google group, and email the group when you have something you’d like to be stumbled.

But an even simpler way of getting stumbles is just to be a good stumbler yourself. When you see a post you think is special, give it a thumbs up and write a review. Do this enough, and people will start to recognize and appreciate you. They’ll be likely to remember your generosity when reading your posts, and they may return the favor by giving you a stumble.

Discover new sites

I think StumbleUpon’s tagline used to be “discover new sites.” Ironically, I had very little interest in using it for this purpose. I don’t understand why someone would sit there clicking the stumble button to be directed to sites that may or may not be any good, when it’s very easy to fill up your RSS reader with your handpicked favorites.

Two exceptions to this, though. One is that if you keep stumbling the same sites over and over, it severely drains your StumbleUpon power crystals. You can recharge them by using StumbleUpon the way it was intended, by stumbling a wide variety of quality content. And a really easy way to do this is to every once in a while, just spend a few minutes clicking the stumble button and giving a few thumbs up.

The other exception is that I sometimes like to set StumbleUpon to only show me pages in the Humor category, and just go through a bunch of those. It’s a very entertaining way to spend a few minutes.

Is there any downside to using StumbleUpon?

The main thing is that people can write negative reviews of your posts. If you include a stumble link in your post, it will encourage people to write a review, and if they didn’t like your post, watch out! Caroline Middlebrook had a stumbler say: “May africanized bees find your page and leave a thousand welts on it.” She also received comments that were much less polite.

However, even if you don’t put up a stumble link, anyone can still easily use the toolbar to write a review, so you really can’t protect yourself from people who want to say something mean. I see this as a small problem though, because while I got a lot of negative comments on my Japan post, I also got more traffic and AdSense revenue than from any other post. You can’t please everyone, and controversy sometimes sells.

Another downside is that you could find yourself spending way too much time stumbling your way across the blogosphere. The initial thrill wears off pretty quickly though, so I don’t think this is too big a risk once you get used to it.

How to get started

1. Sign up for a free StumbleUpon account and start playing around.

2. Sign up for Caroline Middlebrook’s free Stumble Rush lessons, and optionally buy the advanced lessons.

3. Start growing your network by adding me as a friend on StumbleUpon. While you’re at it, you can follow me on Twitter.

The right way to ask for social media votes

Those of you who have been using StumbleUpon or other social media services for a while probably have an opinion about asking for votes. Do you mind being asked to vote for something? Are you comfortable asking other people to vote for your stuff? How much is too much, and what’s the right way to ask? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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