A Twitter / StumbleUpon Combo to Benefit the Blogosphere
I’ve been a user of Twitter for many months now. If you don’t know what Twitter is then read my guide on it. I’ve also been a fan of StumbleUpon for just as long and I’ve talked about its benefits several times on this blog. I’ve just noticed a way of using them both together that benefits both myself and other bloggers…
Stumbling Good Posts
First of all let me just explain a little bit about the way in which StumbleUpon works – when you submit a page to the StumbleUpon network (and I mean submit, not just thumbs up), the votes that the page accumulates has an effect on your ‘audience score’ within StumbleUpon.
The audience score used to be public but it is hidden now to prevent it from being abused. Basically, the higher your audience score the more people will be shown pages that you submit and vote for. In other words, a higher audience score gives you the power to generate more traffic for the pages that you like.
So, when you submit a page to StumbleUpon you are credited with that submission and if lots of other people like that page and give it a thumbs up, your audience score increases. Of course the reverse is also true – if you submit a bunch of crap which nobody likes then your score will go down. So this means that it is in your best interests to submit content which you believe will be appreciated.
There are other benefits too – other people see what you submit and what you give a thumbs up to. A list of all of these shows up in your profile. If people like your Stumble Page then they might decide to be your fan and this also increases your audience score. At the time of writing, I have over 300 fans on StumbleUpon.
Using Twitter for Notification
Any decent blogger will have read my Twitter Guide by now (!) and will be regularly using it to talk about topics related to their blog and drop in links to their blog posts. Twitter is an instant notification service – somebody sends a tweet and all their followers get it instantly.
Compare that to typical forms of notification such as RSS readers. Many blogs such as WordPress using a pinging system that can cause quite a delay. I subscribe to my own feed both via email and in my offline reader and it often takes several hours for my posts to appear. However, if I am online when I publish the post (I often schedule them to appear when I’m out partying or whatever!) then I tend to send out a tweet as well with the link.
Assuming other bloggers do this too – and I know lots of them do, Twitter then becomes a great way of being notified of new blog posts instantly. If you happen to subscribe to cool guys like Chris Garrett and see the tweet about his latest blog post about growing your blog then you might be one of the first to visit the post and be able to submit it to StumbleUpon.
This is what I did yesterday and that post has now had around a dozen thumbs up votes from other people so hopefully Chris is seeing a little extra traffic to that post now and my audience score just got a bit better. Win, win situation see?
Being the First = Good
Being one of the first people to see a good quality blog post is very useful. I’ve already discussed one of the benefits of submitting to StumbleUpon but there are others too:
- StumbleUpon sends traffic, bloggers like traffic, and you can see exactly who submitted the page so the blogger may appreciate the Stumble.
- The content may also be suitable for other social media such as Digg, Reddit etc. This has a similar effect – if you submit good quality content that gets voted up, it raises your profile.
- Being one of the first people to see a post gives you the chance to be one of the first to comment and I’ve spoken extensively about the power of blog commenting.
Following Other Bloggers
When I released my Twitter Guide I turned off the notifications that you get when you have a new follower as I was getting so many that I couldn’t cope. As a result, I have missed quite a few interesting people who follow me and I haven’t followed many new people in quite a while.
After making this little observation I made a point to go through all of the blogs in my reader and see if there were any bloggers using Twitter that I wasn’t following and there were!
Of course there is a downside to the instant notification nature of Twitter – this technique only really works for blogs in the same timezone as yourself. As I’m in the UK I’ll see tweets from Chris Garrett as he’s another UK blogger but most of the people I follow are in the US so that doesn’t work as well for me.
If you have an Internet Marketing related blog and you use Twitter then get in touch with me and let me know your profile.
If you are interested in learning how StumbleUpon can be used to drive traffic to your website then check out my course, Stumble Rush. You can enroll now to receive 10 completely free lessons due for release in July 2008.
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Stumble it!
Black Zedd
February 13, 2008
Guess I’m the first here :) Thanks, that sure clears up a lot about SU. I never knew the scoring system and refuse to submit new post because I thought one have to do lots of review before the submission becomes significant.
Never use Tweeter neither, I’m in Malaysia and the time difference will cause more misery! But I’ll give it a try first..
I’m gonna stumble this one for sure ;)
Black Zedd’s last blog post..5 Important Gadgets for Executives