I received several outstanding comments on my last piece (I still don’t get StumbleUpon) from the likes of Andy Beard, Sterfish, ganes, Lex G, and my old friend Phillip Winn from Blogcritics. It prompted me to respond with a lengthy comment that I feel deserves to be reposted here, slightly tweaked to make sense as a standalone-ish post:
I probably should have been a little bit clearer in the original post. I get what StumbleUpon is. I understand that you download a browser extension, that you can click around and find new sites, submit the ones you like to the SU community, that in theory the more you participate the more relevant the sites that are retuned, and so on. It’s not my particular bag, but lots of people seem to like it, and that’s great.
So I get StumbleUpon and certainly don’t have anything against it. What I don’t get about it is this: how publishers harness StumbleUpon to get more traffic and more site visits.
That’s why I wrote the original piece: I’d love to hear how publishers utilize StumbleUpon to their advantage. Do publishers submit specific articles to StumbleUpon? Do they actively participate at StumbleUpon to become a presence there — via accumulating friends, commenting around, and so forth — with the idea that people will check out their site in return? Or do they simply submit their site once and then sit back and wait for the SU riches to return?
By the way — some kind soul out there submitted the original story to StumbleUpon and it received a few hundred visits over night, so that answers another key question: the ability to submit specific stories versus the site as a whole.
Now, finally, I must admit that I’ve never gotten as deep into what StumbleUpon’s all about as I would have liked because I’ve had some technical / administrative issues with it. I checked it out last year, and then for a variety of reasons tried to sign up for a new account on a different computer. This proved to be nearly impossible, which was as you can imagine a little bit frustrating.
I simply find StumbleUpon frustrating to use and comprehend in general. I’d love to make use of it as a way to submit content to a social media site, help it to find an audience, and participate to some extent in that community (I’m not necessarily interested in stumbling upon new websites myself) but I’m not ashamed to say that I have trouble getting on board with how the thing works.
Anyone else in this boat? I hear that people love it, that publishers love it, etc. but I’ve given it several chances and ending up simply walking away in frustration.
For example, can you submit multiple articles from a single site, or do you submit one URL and then let the mystical forces of StumbleUpon take over? What do you once you’ve submitted a site or an article?
Maybe I’m missing the magic Easy button that everyone else has managed to find
When I graduated from college and entered the business world for the first time (I had studied history – ha!) I found the word “marketing” to be an odious term. I cringed at it and felt much the same way as Lloyd Dobbler in Say Anything when he makes his convoluted speech about not wanting to sell, buy, or process anything in the hideous machinery of the corporate life.
But the reality is that life is a long series of sales presentations. The best way to sell yourself, of course, is to just be yourself. But on the Internet, if no one knows who you are you won’t have the opportunity to make the pitch.
So how can you be yourself on the Internet while getting the word out to others about how great you are? Ah, that’s where even stranger terms apply, “viral marketing” and “social media marketing” and such.
A piece that came out today called Social Media Marketing for Small Business has some great tips for anyone who simply wants to be heard and enter the great Internet conversation via blog or small business website or what have you.
I’ll run through a few of them. Most of it is common sense, but it’s also good sense.
Comment on other blogs
If you’re going to become a great crime fiction novelist, you absolutely must become an expert on the legends of the genre, know who made the rules and then broke them, and who are simply pulp-writing hacks. On the Internet, you have to know who is in your “space,” who are the best at it, and who are the most popular. That learning process will help you to hone your own knowledge and help you to figure out how to create the best possible content or experience for your visitors.
One of the great things about the Internet is that you have the opportunity to meet and interact with people while you get your learn on.
Another great tip for aspiring writers is that if you want to be a great writer, you need to read a lot and write a lot. On the Internet, that can be modified to: you need to read a lot and write a lot and comment a lot. Commenting says a lot about who you are, how professionally you present yourself, how easily you mix with and play with others in a visual medium, and most importantly allows you to show off that you have something interesting and pertinent to add to a conversation.
Like real life conversation, commenting and interacting with other commenters is an art form. Do it in the right places and do it well and people will take notice. Do it well enough and the “legends of the genre” will take notice, and then you’re on your way to being a player.
Try StumbleUpon
I’m not a huge fan of StumbleUpon, but plenty of people rave about how much traffic it can bring you. Nonetheless, social bookmarking and social news sites can be invaluable ways of getting the word out. Digg, Reddit, Netscape, and del.icio.us are all great places to submit stories. Of course, it helps to have friends around to vote/submit for you as a single person does not have great power to drive attention on those sites.
Mailing lists and RSS are also extremely important. The more you can do to make sure people that have somehow found you and are interested in what you have to say/sell can easily find you again, the better. If you’re ambitious enough, collect contact names and send out newsletter announcements or press releases.
Join groups & mailing lists
Again, this is a vital way to stay informed and join conversations. Getting hooked up with a good RSS reader and piping in both those “legends of the genre” and a bunch of other smaller but interesting fish let’s you stay up-to-the-second.
Joining groups can be helpful but it should be something you’re genuinely interested in investing some time in. People can smell spam from a mile away so it’s not advisable to pop in and say, “Hey, check out my site, it’s like super awesome!” Likewise, when you leave comments anywhere, it should be in service of the conversation and not merely a thinly veiled ploy to drive attention to your site and yourself. But if you get and stay involved with the right group, you will be able to develop a loyal group of online supporters.
Finally
The Internet is not like television. No one will know when a new “Internet channel” comes on the air unless you get on peoples’ radars and give them a compelling reason to spend their limited time on you.
That’s why marketing is not such a terrible thing, actually. It’s simply spreading the word.
Yeah, I feel a little bit silly and sheepish about it, but I must admit that I don’t really get StumbleUpon.
The idea behind the site is pretty simple: a downloadable tool bar add-on allows you wander around the Internet (via pressing the Stumble button) with the presumption that the more you interact with the tool (rating sites along route with a thumbs up or down) the more it knows what you like and helps you to discover cool sites that you would likely never find on your own.
I get that part. It’s not something that I would personally get into, but it’s a nice little service. Where I start to lose grasp is in understanding how StumbleUpon has become “a substantial driver of traffic,” as Mathew Ingram and many others have noted, and how publishers are supposed to take advantage of the site to harness the stumblers.
Getting the toolbar installed and logging into StumbleUpon was a somewhat clunky experience for me, but perhaps that was an aberration. Figuring out what to do next as a publisher was, however, where I really got lost. I was eventually able to figure out how to submit a site URL, but I was left confused as I’ve seen other writers note how they’ve used StumbleUpon to drive traffic to individual stories.
After spending a fair amount of time investigating, I realized that there’s a tagging feature in which you can add tag words to individual “pages.” I’m not sure if adding tags to an individual “drilldown” story page in effect submits that story into the StumbleUpon system with those tag words attached, or if you’re simply associating tag words with an entire website or blog.
I like to think that I’m a relatively savvy Internet user, so if I’m confused, I’m guessing others are as well. For non-publishers, for those people just looking to stumble around and find cool sites, the service is likely less of a headache to figure out. But I’m genuinely curious to hear from bloggers who utilize StumbleUpon as part of ongoing promotion efforts. Is it necessary to tag your own pages every time you publish a story, for instance? Or is some other action involved?
There’s also a social networking side to StumbleUpon where you can find and socialize with other stumblers who have interests similar to your own. Again, I’m guessing that there are those that find this to be an engaging feature, but I’ve never really believed that social news or social bookmarking sites have an overwhelming amount to offer in terms of social networking. In other words, when I visit Reddit I’m interested in finding stories that I’m into and don’t really care connecting with others who may be as well. Maybe I’m just a curmudgeonly electronic loner though, who knows?
A standout exception to this is MyBlogLog, which does a great job of building community around the blogging experience, playing into the inherent need for bloggers to self-promote and connect with fellow online scribes.
In any event, I’d love to hear from those who have had some experience with StumbleUpon, particularly from the publisher/promotional perspective.
In essence: is there more to get than I’ve gotten?
