The real value of StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a blogger’s best friend, particularly for new bloggers such as myself. Quite simply there are few other ways (if any) to generate hundreds of new visitors at a time… without paying for it. So it was with some surprise that I discovered a ‘hidden’ feature this week that I suspect will give me more value from StumbleUpon than its’ traffic generation qualities…

Before I reveal the secret I should make it clear that I have never been a big Stumbler myself. Instead I have predominantly used the toolbar to support sites that produce content I find useful. My personal experiences were that StumbleUpon rarely delivered me content that was truly relevant. Perhaps I need to define my interest categories more tightly…

Despite this, in the last fortnight I began to befriend some of the digital marketing and social media industries biggest players, such as Shana, Kimberley, Tamar, Tim & Marty. I did this for a couple of reasons:

1. To provide a virtual introduction of myself.
2. So that they’d recognise my face when it appears in the Recent Visitors plugin on their blog (and within other social media networks such as Sphinn).
3. In the hope that I can develop meaningful friendships with them over time.

I have now befriended about 80 industry experts. A couple have created a mutual friendship which is nice. But the real kicker came when I began to see their most recent Stumbles in the What’s New section of my StumbleUpon profile. Whoa! Talk about a gold mine! All of a sudden I had constant access to the content they were voting upon. It wasn’t long after this that I found the button allowing me to Stumble the content submitted by my friends (and nothing else). This is now my favourite button in Firefox. Whenever I have a spare moment I click on it to find more A grade content.

StumbleUpon is now THE place I go to find great new content in my niche. My RSS reader is feeling a little lonely at the moment. Retrospectively it seems so obvious. If you want great content go straight to the top of the food chain. Perhaps I’m just a little slow…

The key to the process is to select your industry experts wisely. Poor friend selection is likely to result in a poor quality of content. Finding the most popular social network in your niche is the ideal place to start. I chose most of my friends based on their interaction and status within Sphinn. I then expanded the list by looking at who they were friends with.

In the end quality is more important than quantity. A smaller number of well selected friends will provide more than enough content for you to peruse. Of course, this process somewhat contradicts traffic generation tactics, which recommend you befriend as many people as possible in order to build an army of personal Stumblers. In the end, it comes down to a choice. What is more important to you… quality content or traffic generation.

For now I’m choosing content. And it’s my suspicion that a good relationship with a handful of power Stumblers is worth more than 200 friendships with semi regular Stumblers. We’ll see if that changes if my stats begin to drop…

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Tagged as: Social media, Social networking, social news, Sphinn, StumbleUpon, Traffic generation