I have a post from a few months ago that only has a couple thumbs up, but it still brings in traffic. I also have a more recent one that has around ten thumbs up, and it’s not bringing in any traffic to speak of. Any idea what’s going on?

I’ve heard you can get a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon, but haven’t seen any of it. How does it work?

Do any of these questions sound familiar?

I think we’ve all wondered about this. Sometimes giving a page a thumb up seems to make a big difference. The page you discover and thumb up suddenly makes it to the Buzz and it seems like everyone is looking at it now.

Another page that seems just as likely to be popular doesn’t do anything after you thumb it up. What’s going on?

StumbleUpon’s Audience Score

StumbleUpon uses a number called Audience Score. It wasn’t that long ago that you could see your own audience score and see how you were doing. A new stumbler will likely have a low score. An experience stumbler could have a score over 1000.

It wasn’t until a friend, Allan Cockerill, told me how within a few minutes of my discovering one of his pages, he had a number of stumblers visit, that I realized once again, that I was hearing about something happen that I’d guessed at (the importance of the score), but never knew for sure.

I’ve talked before about being on the Top Stumbler’s list. It’s a popular list and something a lot people try to get on. But there is another type of Top Stumbler who, in my opinion, is more important. This is a stumbler with a high audience score.

On StumbleUpon, all thumbs are not created equal.

I guess you could relate it to real life. Some people have weak thumbs and some are strong.

A thumbs up from a stumbler with a high audience score will put your page in front of a lot of people. That doesn’t mean that they will like it, but people with strong scores are more likely to be suggesting sites that others will like.

A thumbs up from a stumbler with a low score won’t put the page in front of many people. Even if ten people give it a thumbs up, if all of them have weak scores, the page still won’t pull in a lot of views.

One problem that “Stumble groups” have is that unless you are get some high scoring stumblers in the group, it takes a lot of people to make a post popular enough to pull much weight outside of the group.

So what makes for a high Audience Score?

No one knows for certain. The best explanation I’ve found came from Tim Nash on Venture Skills, back in September.

Our user lets call him Fred has an audience score of 10 he goes along and starts a new stumble at a site he has never visited it gets a couple of hundred visits and 3 thumbs up Fred gains a point to his audience score for thumbing something up +a further bonus because others liked his stumble so fred now has an audience score of 13 Fred is really impressed that so many visitors came to his site so he thumbed up another page, even with his increased score it didn’t do so well and only 2 people thumbed it up and 2 thumbed it down! His score is now 14 (increased for thumbing up – no bonus ) Fred tries a different domain it does well and 10 people thumb it up his score goes up to 25, Fred has realised stumbleupon can make him money so thumbs up his proxy site it gets a few visitors but 7 people thumb down the site and 2 marked it as spam. Fred audience score plummets (18 but has been marked by spam so temporarily has his score halved) so his score is now 9 poor Fred will have to work hard to regain his score.

I discussed this article more fully back in September.

So if the Audience Scores aren’t available anymore, how can you tell if someone has a high score?

You can always try to get someone particular to thumb up a blog post for you, and count how many visitors you get within a certain time frame afterwards, but I really wouldn’t recommend that approach. Many of the more active stumblers consider any request to thumb up a site as spam. You may or may not get reported for it, but you’re not likely to make many friends (or influence many people) that way.

This idea is only a theory, but if you do a search for a particular stumbler, you’ll probably see stars beside their name. StumbleUpon rates sites (including your SU pages) with up to five stars, five being the best sites. On the Help page, it says that the stars denote the quality of the site. Taking that to a logical conclusion, stars should denote the quality of a stumbler…ie, their Audience Score. In order to see the stars, make sure that you have “Highlight recommended search results” turned on from your toolbar and do a search on any major search engine.

I do need to offer one word of warning when using this method. Even if a stumbler has 4 or 5 stars, I would recommend checking to see that they have a decent number of reviews and friends.

A final note

Writing reviews doesn’t seem to affect StumbleUpon’s scoring system in any way that I’ve noticed. But, especially with the Recent Reviews page, one thing that writing a review has the potential to do is to get the page out in front of others who might not see it otherwise.
If you’re fairly new to StumbleUpon and have a few friends, then anytime a page is important to you, don’t just stumble it, write a review about it. Your friends might not stumble on your page, but there’s a decent chance they will see the review.

Thanks to a friend who noticed I was getting too caught up in being at the top of the list, and called me on it, I seriously cut back on my Stumbling activity for a while, and when I came back to StumbleUpon, I noticed I was having fun with it again, instead of stressing about always finding good articles to post.

So, here are my top 5 reasons you might not want to push to be Top Stumbler:

It doesn’t really bring you that much more real StumbleUpon traffic. It might bring visitors from outside SU, but it doesn’t bring loads of new SU visitors. In fact, many times I’ve written to friends to congratulate them on being a top stumbler and they hadn’t even realized it.

If your goal is visitors, your time would be better spent in more community involvement on SU instead of striving for Top Stumbler.

It does increase the amount of spam that you get though. Thankfully with the way SU works that’s still not a lot, but I did get requests to thumb up pages (which were usually ignored or thumbed down, depending on how I was asked and what the page was) and the occasional job offer.

If you hope to do more than appear at the bottom of the list occasionally, you need to be consistently thumbing up new and interesting discoveries. This can become as much work as a regular job if you’re not careful. There were many days when I’d thumb up more than 100 pages a day (sometimes more than double that) and times I’d post 40 – 50 reviews in a day.

You need to focus on finding undiscovered material. Each time that you give a thumb up to a page that someone else has already discovered you’re hurting your chance to become a top stumbler. I can’t say for sure, but from my own experience and reviewing the Top Stumblers on the list now, you probably want at least 50% or better of the total pages that you liked to be pages you discovered.

It discourages mutual sharing of web pages among friends. When your friends send you pages, they are usually hoping you’ll add a thumbs up and maybe a comment, not just read and forget about them. Since these pages are almost always already thumbed, giving them a thumb up hurts your percentages. Unfortunately, it can be a source of lost friendships.

This one is a small one, but probably drove me up the wall more than any other. Not thumbing up already discovered pages means you can only thumb up the pages of brand new stumblers, and not stumblers who’ve been around a while. I knocked myself off the Top Stumbler list one time because I finally got so frustrated with this and gave a thumb up to all the stumblers whose pages I liked. Eventually, for my own happiness I decided that I’d thumb up stumblers I like regardless of whether it affected my being on the list.

So there you have it, my top 5 reasons to think seriously before you try to get on the Top Stumblers list. Now I’d love to hear your thoughts. Do you think being on the list is worth it? Why or why not? (LOL that sounds like a high school essay question. )

I have to admit, since e-mail is the first thing I check right after I wake up, my mouse actually slid up towards the spam button on my e-mail before I realized what I was doing, and came to the website to label them as spam instead.

I had been thinking about writing an article on using the thumbs down button a couple days ago, but wasn’t sure what to use for an example. (Be glad the spam came along, my other idea was to use a civil liberties post I put on SU the other day, and since civil liberties is one of my soapbox issues, this post probably would have gotten a bit sidetracked).

But back to the spam. When I use the spam button on my e-mail, I’m telling the e-mail program not to let any more e-mail in from that specific source. But, if it’s not the source that’s the problem, like this morning, then I’ll be blocking an address that does send helpful e-mails, even though these weren’t especially helpful (okay, that’s not quite the truth either…they did help me know to go delete the spam from my blog).

Using the thumbs down is like hitting the spam button. If the page I’m on is spam, then I’ll thumb it down because I definitely don’t want to get any more pages like that. On the other hand, if it’s an article that I disagree with, but part of a topic that I’m interested in or a blog that I like, I don’t want to tell SU not to send me anything more from there. So in this case, it’s best to either not thumb the page at all, or thumb it up, but write a review stating my opinion of the article.

The beauty of this is that it allows you to use StumbleUpon on computers where you wouldn’t be able to add a toolbar, ie. work, school, or other public computers. Plus, he included my favorite part of Strangej and Thlayli’s StumbleUpon Add-on Toolbar, the rating selection option. If you’re like me, and usually keep your settings on SU set to G, being able to switch easily to R to visit someone else’s page is a great addition. If you do normally keep your ratings set to G, I would recommend adding both G and R to your bookmarks if you use this. That way you can force a change back to G without resetting anything or restarting your browser.

There are some other great options in the Add-on Toolbar if you don’t mind adding another toolbar to Firefox. It includes the ability to go to a random archive page, back up your SU blog, Advanced photoblog, and a box to type in the name of a SU user and go to their blog.

Technorati Tags: beginner, Toolbar, Toolbarless, StumbleUpon, SU,

Maybe that’s one of the reasons I like StumbleUpon so much. Visit almost any Stumbler’s page and you’ll see some pages that they liked, and possibly some that they didn’t.

I’ve said before that the thumb-up icon is the most important tool on your SU toolbar, with the thumb-down coming right after it. Why is that? Well, each time you thumb up a page it does two things. It tells the StumbleUpon system that you like pages of that type. AND, your thumb up adds credit to the page, so that it will be sent out to other people.

The thumbs down does the same thing in reverse. It tells the SU system that you don’t like pages of that type, and it takes away some of the credit for the page.

Now, notice I said it tells the system what you think about that type of a page. Each time you thumb up or thumb down a page, that information is added to the system’s picture of you, refining the types of pages that it will send next time. If you don’t like the information on a page, but want more pages of that specific type, be cautious about thumbing it down. Also, if you don’t care for what a page says, but want others to see it, a thumb down won’t help to pass it along to others.

Okay, so I understand the theory behind using the thumbs, but what about practical use? I have a blog that I want people to see, but I’m never sure whether I should thumb up the pages I write or not. I got in trouble on Digg for posting my own stuff.

Good question. StumbleUpon is unique among most of the social page-ranking programs because it doesn’t penalize you for promoting your own stuff. I’ve mentioned before that as soon as you create your StumbleUpon page (the http://yourname.stumbleupon.com page), you should thumb it up. You like your own stuff, right?

By the same token, when you write a blog post, thumb it up if you like it (and if you don’t like it, ask yourself instead why you’re writing articles that you don’t like). If you really like an article, quote it on your SU blog, but please, please, please, don’t make your blog entirely links to your own (or other) advertising sites. A link like that here and there is all you need to draw attention, and you’ll keep people coming back to both your SU blog and your own site.

Technorati Tags: Thumb up, toolbar

I have an apology to make. I’ve been giving you hints and tips for using StumbleUpon and never thought that maybe you don’t have StumbleUpon installed yet. So, first things first, run, don’t walk, to StumbleUpon, sign up, and download the toolbar. (Think I could throw more cliches into that sentence without it sounding ridiculous?)

Okay, so you’ve signed up at SU, you’ve got the toolbar installed, you’ve added a picture of yourself (or anything that’s different than the ipody looking temp avatars SU gives), you’ve even read (or watched) my instructions on how to set up your toolbar, and now you’re wondering what to do next.

Well, the first thing I’d recommend doing is to give yourself a thumb up. I’m serious! You like yourself, right? You like your Stumble page, and want others to visit? Then apply that thumb button to your SU page! You can even write a comment if you’d like, it’s really not a bad idea, thanking others for visiting your site and leaving a comment. Your review of your own site will always appear at the top of your review page, so that anyone who looks will see it.

The next thing I’d recommend doing is to make a couple posts. Find a picture or a website you like and share it. (Here’s how to add a picture to your page.) When you start getting visitors, you want something interesting on your blog so that they’ll stop for a bit. Hopefully they will give you a thumb up also, which will start bringing even more people to visit.

After you have a few items on your page, I suggest visiting other stumblers some. You can do this several ways. You can see which stumblers are online now, you can use your toolbar and set it to show you other stumblers, then click on the stumble button, or if you already know a stumbler, you can visit their page and click on their friends list. I love doing the last one, visiting friends of friends of friends…it’s like watching the 6° theory in action.

Oh, and while you’re visiting, don’t forget to pop over to my page and say “Hi.” I try to return visits, but don’t always get to everyone before the list changes (you’re shown your 10 most recent visitors), so if I don’t stop by after your visit, please forgive me, and feel free to come by whenever.

Technorati Tags: StumbleUpon. Stumbling, Stumble, SU, Stumble upon, Beginner, Getting started, Toolbar,

Pseudonym, a friend on StumbleUpon, once told me: “Coming to SU was *definitely* the best move I ever made in my life…the experience has given me ever more confidence in myself, in what is possible, in what is available, happening, knowable, fascinating, and just plain *fun* out there in cyberspace.”

This is the what the StumbleUpon toolbar looks like when you first download it…well, maybe not so squished, but I wanted it big enough to see.

Clicking on the stumble button will take you to a web page that someone else has already discovered and thumbed up. A number beside the SU picture, or icon, shows how many pages your friends have sent that you haven’t viewed yet. Only your friends can send pages for you to view, so you don’t have to worry about a stranger spamming you.

The thumbs are the most important buttons on your toolbar. Giving a page a thumb up means “I like it,” but in a broader term, it means “I like this type of page and would like to see more.” By the same token, giving a page a thumb down means “I don’t like pages like this. Please don’t send any more.”

The Send to button let’s you share the pages you’ve been visiting. You can send a page to anyone that you are mutual friends with or anyone who’s e-mail you have.

And the Comments button let’s you read what everyone else has said about a page, or add your own comments. SU refers to this button as both the comments and reviews button, depending on whether you have text turned on for your toolbar or not. Either way, it takes you to the same page.

The Channel area gives you several options to choose from. If you are only wanting to stumble news, or friends, or one of your interests, you can choose an option from the channel area. Clicking on the word All brings up a drop down list that let’s you choose any of your interests to stumble.

Favorites is another button that will get a lot of use. It takes you to your StumbleUpon blog, where you can see the websites you’ve commented on.

Friends takes you to the same page that the Friend’s tab does. You can see up to ten friends who are online, up to ten people that you are fans of, and up to ten people who are your fans.

Finally, Tools brings up a drop down menu…

…that looks like this. There are several sections on the tools menu that you’ll want to note. This is where you come to invite a friend to SU, and on the rare occasions that you need to sign out of StumbleUpon for some reason.

Let’s look at more at the Toolbar Options for now.

For the rest of this video, I will be focusing entirely on the Appearance tab. Under the configuration tab, you can set whether SU shows if someone has discovered the page and what the page rank is when you use a web search such as Google or Yahoo. The default is to show this information, but if you prefer not to get it, unclick the first box under Search.

Now that you know what the buttons on the toolbar do, it’s easy to create a toolbar that fits you.

There are several buttons I recommend keeping on your toolbar, in addition to the permanent Stumble and thumbs buttons.

The inbox puts a mailbox icon on your toolbar. If you have mail, the flag on the mailbox stands up. I love knowing when to check my inbox, without having to wait for an e-mail notice.

The Channel Menu puts everything from the channel area into a drop down menu, so it doesn’t take as much space on your toolbar. If you’d like, you still have the option of adding to the toolbar the channels that you use most.

Send to so that it’s easy to send web pages to your friends.

Reviews or Comments

Favorites, which gives you a fast way to get to your blog

And lastly, the Tag icon, which lets you easily add tags to any page. Once you’ve added tags to a page, the icon will turn to the right, and will turn from blue to red. Hovering over it will show the tags you’ve selected for that page.

One thing I LOVE about the StumbleUpon toolbar is that they let you add it to other toolbars. The easiest way to do this is to click on “Drag to position,” pull the SU toolbar in front of the Google toolbar, and click OK. You can also choose a different position from the drop down menu, but just as a note, all toolbars don’t play as nicely as SU and Google, so you may have to try several to get it to work.

Happy stumbling!

Need more help? Check these out:

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Technorati Tags: StumbleUpon, Stumble Upon, SU, Toolbar, Pseudonym, Thumb up, Thumb down, Reviews, Favorites, Toolbar Options, Stumble, stumbling, StumbleUpon Comments, Taggzilla