StumbleUpon FAQ, Guides, Tools, Addons And Scripts

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StumbleUpon is really beautiful website where you can find regularly top content in areas you’re interested in, share interesting content and finally drive very good traffic to your own website. Actually I must say, I’ve built this website completely on social networks and StumbleUpon plays really important role too in this whole process. This time I wanted to explain some basic principles how to use SU better in daily basis and I spent some time to find many useful Wordpress plugins, Stumbleupon addons, tools, several big unofficial guides to SU, Greasemonkey scripts to help you automate and make your stumbling time even more enjoyable and customizable.

Before I start, you can view my StumbleUpon profile as well, to see I am not just talking nonsense, I really spend time to build relationship, find more good friends and finally be active myself and help my friends as good as I can! I strongly encourage to look through this article, look for guidelines you are interested in and I am sure you’ll find something you didn’t know too!

How to find more related friends

- Meet people like you

I did this proactive activities for some time, because I was struggling with too less contacts and friends, who could help get more stumbles, because really – more stumbles you can get in short period of time, more traffic it will deliver. Right..it’s not so easy but in short, that’s all that matters.

I’ll now explain how to find similar friends, just go to your friends section and on the right sidebar under your friends you’ll see section – with title “Meet people like you” (see the screenshot below). In my case address is http://dainix.stumbleupon.com/friends/. Now just spend time to establish relationship, I suggest you to send message explaining what’s you are up to before and only then friend request. In that way you’ll be something more than just some unknown fellow in their friend request page.

If you’re really serious about finding very focused people to your niche, also use this “”Browse stumblers” feature:

You’ll find it on your public profile – http://dainix.stumbleupon.com/public/ in my case and there you really can search by interests, gender, find people from your country and more.

- Check what kind of people are stumbling your website

If they like your content already, why not establish good relationship with them? To dig even deeper, check also who is stumbling related sites in the same niche, for example I am checking other design blog article review pages to find new friends.

- Buy sponsorship

I tried this one just know and sponsorship is really rewarding. Thing is – you pay 10$ (minimal donation price) and become a sponsor for a year. Before you start complaining why to that, I’ll explain my reasons. The first thing you get is that small sponsorship badge on your profile (you can see it on my profile too), which means that you’re respected SU user and second the most valuable one – your account shows on StumbleUpon Sponsors page and it actually delivers ~3-5 friends every day. I find it really rewarding because I don’t have to do proactive friend searching any more.

How to establish better relationship

- Don’t spam to your friends with numerous non-related content webpages every day. This is obvious I think, nobody loves spammers;

- Try to respond to your friends shares and establish personal relationship, people will help much more gladly people they know.

- This is time consuming task if you have many friends, but if you spare time and write reviews (testimonials) to your friends, you’ll be more likely noticed – remember before you ask others something to do, be first to take action! People love friendly and helpful friends!

- Spend time to create good profile – fill About me page, customize theme so it looks more eye candy – let people know what you really are!

- When adding new friend, write him a short message explaining why do you want to be friends with him and introduce yourself building personal contact in that way.

How to share article

If you use StumbleUpon in daily basis, you should know several months ago SU added Share This feature to easily share websites between your friends automatically. I just love this feature because it let’s me more focus on stumbling articles, not spending like an hour to share it between my friends manually.

This feature is a little bit hidden so I’ll explain it too. The first thing to do is stumble and review article you want to share. Then just go to your profile, in my case it is dainix.stumbleupon.com. You’ll find reviewed article on Reviews section, now all you must do is mouse hover to the image and Share button will reveal.

Click to it and you’ll get Share this feature pop-up on right side of profile. And one more thing – I strongly recommend you to enter that optional personal message, because usually it’s the best way to get personal relationships with friends. Now just check all friends and send your new discovery – and you’re done!

How to get StumbleUpon traffic

This is common question how to play with StumbleUpon good enough to get traffic from it. And it’s really easy – as soon as you got 10-20 friends to Stumble your website quickly you’ll get like ~500-1000 new visits almost immediately! StumbleUpon is great for new blogs, it was main traffic for my website in early month and even now it always take 3-4th place in top traffic sources.

- Get many active friends

More friends you’ve got – better traffic it will deliver. In short that’s so true, more stumbles you can get in short period of time, better your new article will do.

- Create your IM friend list

This is very powerful tool not only for StumbleUpon but for other social networks. I use Gtalk (it’s very popular between Digg users) for my all business contacts and there I can contact with my friends rapidly and contact only ones are online – I strongly recommend you start using IM if you’re serious about bringing traffic and social networking. If you’re just starting, here you can dowload Gtalk and feel free to add me as your friend too (Gtalk user-name: dainis@1stwebdesigner.com) , I already benefit from such networking!

- Good Design

Really people on StumbleUpon are more to look not to read, well designed logo and website is very crucial to leave good first impression and people will much more likely stumble website in that case and may even remember your website.

- Don’t use many ads

If the first thing new visitors see will be many ads, you’ll really turn them away, of course you need to monetize your site, but don’t do it too much.

And finally be always active and helpful because these kind of people are rare, your friends are your success!

StumbleUpon Addons, Buttons And Tools

1. Promote Your Site with StumbleUpon Buttons & Tools

Add a button to your site to make it easy for your visitors to submit your content to StumbleUpon. Simply copy and paste the code into your site and start receiving free exposure on StumbleUpon.

2. Tag Blaster Online

This page modifies text so that it will not be parsed by stumbleupon.com as HTML/PHP formatting. It also fixes URLs so that they will not be changed to SU review links. It is designed for web developers to be able to post visible HTML/PHP code for tutorials or problem solving.

3. StumbleUpon Random Group

Great tool if you’re searching for new groups, but you enjoy how SU offers you random links – here you get random StumbleUpon groups! Just refresh that page to get a new random group.

4. SU Archive Links Creator

5. SU Music Player

This tool let’s you to create a custom music player for your StumbleUpon blog. After registering, you can add MP3 links, customize your player and then embed it into your blog page.

Wordpress plugins

6. WP_StumbleDigest

WP_StumbleDigest is a Plugin to create daily posts on the things you stumble across on the web. Using you StumbleUpon Account.

7. Stumble! for WordPress

Stumble! for WordPress extends WordPress to support a “random article” feature, similar to StumbleUpon’s StumbleThru and Wikipedia’s (Mediawiki’s) random article feature. Not really SU related plugin, but interesting plugin with that kind of feature – should work good for blogs!

8. StumbleUpon WordPress plugin

Wonderful plugin which shows the popularity of ALL your links and gives you can active StumbleUpon bookmark button.

9. StumbleUpon Favorites

StumbleUpon Favorites is a widget based on the default RSS widget that was developed to allow the sharing of bookmarks with blog visitors. This plugin makes it much easier to use and customize the list grabbed from your own StumbleUpon account. Also there are several features you can change on the panel, which is not supported by default RSS

StumbleUpon Related Userscripts (Greasemonkey required)

10. EmbedWidgets

Allows viewing and embedding of flash widgets on StumbleUpon Pages.

11. SU Visitor Icons

The visitor icon script has optional dynamic updates. If you have dynamic updates enabled and your visitor page open, any new visitors will be added to the top of your visitor list. Any changes to friend/subscriber status are also dynamically updated.

Additional visitor count displays the number of visitors added to your visitor list since you opened the page.

Dynamic update switch allows you to enable or disable the dynamic update functionality. Visitor icons will still be enabled.

12. SU Status Indicator

This script adds functionality enabling you to set and display an online status on your public profile page, similar to MSN. It does not affect your normal SU online status indicator, this script is meant to provide an additional indicator, with more options. You can set your status on your favorites page, which will stay that way until you change it to something else (so don’t forget to set to offline when you go to bed).

13. SUEditor

A WYSIWYG Editor for Stumbleupon.com, works on blog, forum, contact, and site review pages

14. SU Element Styles

Basic HTML/CSS editor for SU. Preview blog posts and edit CSS styles by clicking on any element.

15. Clean’n'Readable

Very small script that solves the problem of low-contrast, over-styled and plain unreadable su blogs. It collapses all custom backgrounds, sets bg color to white and font color to black.

16. SU Extended What’s New

This script adds an option to generate an extended “what’s new” page, with the following:

• Full length posts
• Blog posts
• Thumb down reviews

It generates this page by visiting the first page of up to 20 people you subscribe to, and checking for new posts. It remembers approximately the last 1800 posts it has shown you and doesn’t show anything over 24 hours old, so you should always get only what is actually new. Retrieving the first page does register as a visit, so the script keeps track of the last 60 people it has taken posts from and refrains from visiting again for at least another 3 refreshes of the page.

17. SU Page Control

This is a simple script which replaces the normal page control on SU pages with a drop-down box, and buttons. Currently works on the following pages:

• Blog
• Reviews page
• Favorites
• Discoveries

18. Tag Details for StumbleUpon

This script replaces StumbleUpon tag clouds with ordered lists.

FAQ and Guide for Stumbleupon

19. Unofficial StumbleUpon FAQ

Read this unofficial StumbleUpon FAQ to get many more and different questions answered than in official SU FAQ.

20. StumbleUpon Wiki

StumbleUpon Wiki is a place where groups of stumblers work together to describe and evaluate the best of the web.

Other related resources and useful reading:

• StumbleUpon Addons
• How To Take BackUp Of All The Email Ids Of Your Friends On StumbleUpon
• 28 Tips To Make You a StumbleUpon Superstar
• Building Your Blog With StumbleUpon
• How To Get StumbleUpon Traffic
• How to Write Posts That Set StumbleUpon on Fire
• A Comprehensive Guide to StumbleUpon: How to Build Massive Traffic to Your Website

I’ll be happy to hear about your experience with StumbleUpon and maybe you know more StumbleUpon tools I didn’t list here?