How To Improve Your Buzz Using StumbleUpon

Did you know that up-voting only your own posts on StumbleUpon can get you penalized? It's true. Take these steps to make sure you're using StumbleUpon responsibly and avoiding bad habits for maximum effectiveness.

buzzfeed.com

Here at BuzzFeed we already make submitting your Buzz to StumbleUpon easy by incorporating your SU stats right into the page header.

But did you know that up-voting only your own posts can get you penalized? It's true. Take these steps to make sure you're using StumbleUpon responsibly and avoiding bad habits for maximum effectiveness.

1. Sign Up For StumbleUpon

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If you haven't already, go to StumbleUpon.com and sign up for an account. StumbleUpon is a great way to discover content recommended to you based on your interests and activity.

2. Manage Your Interests Selectively

Everyone likes going for long walks on the beach, but not everyone necessarily enjoys dubstep. So think carefully about what types of people you want to appeal to. The more general your interests are, the more your competition your content will have.

If you're truly passionate about rare colonial-era taxidermy, you might it easy to become easy to dominate the niche. But even if you're a tastemaker of Internet Humor in other web-spaces, if you're just starting out on StumbleUpon, you'll have much more work to do to catch up.

3. Build Your Following

The people you follow on StumbleUpon play a big role in deciding which content is added to your discovery queue. It's up to you to decide how specific or how general your interests are, but the people you follow ought to be those with similar interests.

Likewise, you can share content with other StumbleUpon users who follow you. Generally speaking, following many people is a good idea, although there's potential for becoming overwhelmed with shared-content from too many followers. So follow at your own discretion.

4. MOST IMPORTANTLY: Submit From A Diverse Set Of Sources!

Do not make the amateur mistake of only ever using StumbleUpon when you're trying to drive traffic to your own posts, like I had been.

This sort of behavior is detected by StumbleUpon and can reduce your visibility in StumbleUpon's recommendation engine.

The ideal StumbleUpon user is one who gives and takes from a variety of content sources. So even if your motive is to increase the visibility of your own content, remember that you are a citizen of the StumbleUpon community, and a good citizen is one who interacts, not one who simply shouts self-promotional slogans all day.

5. Schedule Your Posts For Their Appropriate Hour

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Is your post a round-up of amateur Batman drawings? Submit that to StumbleUpon during the morning commute. People tend to Stumble drawing-related content more during the morning hours than any other time of day.

Top 10 Sexiest Librarians? It doesn't take a genius to figure out that more people will consume that content in the evening hours, in the privacy of their own homes.

stumbleupon.com / Via stumbleupon.com

25+ year-old's make up the majority of active Stumblers from 4:00 AM to 3:00 PM. During these hours, adult Stumblers are generally looking to distract themselves from their work-a-day lives.

18-24 year-olds show similar behavior, lagging behind their older counterparts until roughly noon when the rest of society loses their patience and demands the slackers get out of bed.

By 3:00 PM the young kids, 17 and under get out of school and hop on the internet ready to lol themselves silly. From here, the kids dominate StumbleUpon until roughly 11:00 PM when mom or dad calls for lights-out.