Posted 5/20/08


Mitchell Blatt, owner of Juiced Sports Blog and the Sports Blogger Forums for discussing blogging

How I Added 50 Stumble Upon Friends in One Week

Social media sites are a good way to build traffic to your blog with little effort, but most of them don’t work for sports blogs. Digg certainly won’t work, and even if it did, it offers terrible traffic quality. Stumble Upon, however, works for almost any kind of site. I’ll tell you from experience it works great with sports blogs and has great traffic quality.

Take a look at how Stumble Upon visitors compare to the average visitors to my site Juiced Sports Blog:
Source-Pages/Visit-Time on Site
Stumble Upon-2.11-1:45
Site Average-1.73-1:07

Furthermore, you don’t need a ton of friends to get good traffic volume. However, the more friends you have the better, so here are some tricks I used to increase my friend count by 50 in one week.

Give Away Free Stumbles

This is the fastest way to build your friend count. Go to webmaster forums and post saying you are going to give away free Stumbles to anyone who wants them. Tell them to PM you and reply. There are sub forums in most forums titled “services” for these kind of exchanges. Some forums like Digital Point have banned free Stumble giveaways, but many haven’t, and I’ll list some good ones in a sec.

But first, here’s how it works. How do you gain friends by giving away free Stumbles? After you Stumble their site, send back a PM saying you Stumbled them and asking if they would please add you as a friend and give them your link. 90% of the people will add you as a friend.

Here’s some forums to make such a post, ranked in order of traffic:
V7N
Webmaster Talk
Webmaster Forums
Webmaster Forums.net

For many of these forums, you will need 10 or 20 posts before you can post in the requests/services category. I know for V7N, it’s 10, so just make posts in other categories first.

You will get a lot of PM’s early on, but they eventually die down and your thread will get buried, so periodically, you should go back and make a post yourself to the extent of “Sites Stumbled.”

Message People With Similar Interests

On social media sites, people like to be interacted with, so if you make an effort to connect with them, they will likely reciprocate. Get some interesting things Stumbled on your page about the topic you are targeting, possibly write a blog post on your profile, then search for people interested in that topic, “sports” for example.

See some stuff they Stumbled, then message them about their Stumbles, offering your opinion on some of those topics, or just saying, “Nice Stumbles. Friended you,” if you’re lazy. (Actually friend them before saying that.)

I like messaging people more than reviewing their profiles, because messaging them doesn’t show up on your profile as recent activity, and if you have a lot of reviews of Stumbles on your profile instead of reviews of websites, you’re profile won’t look very interesting. Also, messages are more personal, so they seem to have a higher chance of getting people to friend you.

Add Me as a Friend

Add me as a friend here and I will reciprocate. There’s one add right there, and a good one. I like to Stumble sports stories I see, and I have a relatively large reach among my number of friends. It’s nice to have some highly friended people among your group of friends, because then if they Stumble it, it goes out to a large audience.

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