Using StumbleUpon To Connect With People In Your Niche

Recently I introduced the idea of connecting with people in your niche and one of the avenues that I suggested you explore was Social media. I did not mention StumbleUpon in that post as I wanted to dedicate a little more time to it.

Using StumbleUpon as a Social Networking Tool

A lot of people use the SU toolbar just as a discovery tool, and that is of course what it was designed for so there’s nothing wrong with that. But behind the toolbar lies a Social Networking tool that sometimes goes unnoticed.

The toolbar offers a number of ways in which you can find people directly interested in your niche. Before I get to the people part, first let me show you just how you can Stumble upon just the topics that relate to your niche, rather than all the interests that you may have signed up for.

Channel Based Stumbling

Every submission to StumbleUpon is categorised in a number of ways. Firstly it is sorted by type - pages, videos, photos etc. Secondly it is assigned a channel which is a choice of the interests that StumbleUpon allows you to pick and lastly, it is tagged by users.

By default, when you click the stumble button you can get any kind of submission that matches your interests. The default is set to ‘All’:

The first thing you can do is change the channel. If you click the little triangle next to the ‘All’ you can select a different channel. You can filter on the type of submission and you can select from one of the interests you have chosen. So for example, I have chosen the Entrepreneurship channel in the screenshot below:

So the very first thing you should do is look through the available topics to see if any of them directly relate to your niche:

This then allows you to select that topic as the channel and every time you hit Stumble you will be presented with something from that topic.

Keyword Based Stumbling

Not all niches correspond neatly to a StumbleUpon topic but you can also do a keyword based Stumble. Drop down the channel menu again and look for the search option:

Click that icon and you’ll get a popup dialog into which you can enter search terms. Now your channel is changed to the phrase you typed in:

I’m not sure if the results are based on tags or on a general search of the content of the page. Both I should imagine. So now you have a way of using StumbleUpon to look for all sorts of content based around your particular niche. Now let’s dig deeper and see how we can reach the people who are interested in these pages.

Reaching the People Behind the Stumbles

First of all, every page has been submitted by a StumbleUpon user (at least I think that is the case - not sure how that works for paid Stumbles). As you stumble, the toolbar will change to reflect the user who submitted that page. Here we can see that somebody called ‘ghelms’ submitted this page about sausage making:

Click that user’s profile. If they took the time to submit the page you can be sure of their interest in the subject material. In actual fact you could skip this step and instead, just click on the icon that shows you the reviews for the page:

Now this takes you to do the all important StumbleUpon submission page for the content you were looking at. There are several important pieces of information to look at here:

• Who Submitted the Site - At the top right of the page is a box showing who submitted the site.
• Who Liked the Site - The bulk of the page is dedicated to showing you who gave the site a thumbs up. All of these people are saying ‘yes, I’m interested in sausage making’!
• Reviews of the Site - Anyone who submits a review will also appear in the thumbs up section but this section highlights those people who take the time to leave a review rather than just clicking the thumbs up button.

The submitters and the reviewers are your key people - these are the people who not only use the toolbar but actually use the site as a networking tool. If you can connect with these people and provide them with content that they like, they are likely to give your content the same treatment.

Making the People Connection

So now you have a way to find the people who have shown an interest in your niche. StumbleUpon allows you to add friends like many other social networks but unlike most others it has a restriction - you can only have 200 friends. That does not limit the number of fans that you have - but you personally can only befriend 200 others which means you need to choose wisely.

When you click on somebody’s StumbleUpon profile you’ll see something that looks like this:

Examining The Tag Cloud

Look over to the right and scroll down to the tag cloud. This is a great way to get a good feel for what this person is about. Most people have a wide variety of interests. What you want to figure out is if this person just happened to have a fleeting interest in your niche two years ago or if it is a major interest for them.

The tag cloud will give you an idea of this. This cloud shows all the tags that this stumbler expressed an interest in. By clicking on a tag you can see just what they thumbed up that fell into that category. Take note of how many there are and most importantly - the date. If the stumbles are recent that’s a good sign but if they are from a long time ago this user has probably moved on.

The About & Friends Tabs

When you first click on a user profile you are on the Favourites tab. An often overlooked part of the profile are the About and Friends tabs.

Many people forget to update their About page and they have nothing but a profile picture. Those that use SU properly may have a link to a site they own and show any StumbleUpon groups that they are a member of. This gives you a better idea of what they are about.

Next click on the friends tab. How many friends does that person have? At the time of writing I have 44 mutual friends and I’m a fan of 44 other people. So I still have room for over 100 more friends. You are looking for people who have some friends but are not yet at their limit.

To Friend or Not to Friend?

So why add people as a friend on StumbleUpon? When you click on your own profile, your default home page shows you all the latest stumbles from your friends. If you select friends with similar interests to yourself then this page will become a nice source of interesting content for you.

When you are mutual friends with a StumbleUpon user you can send pages directly to them. By carefully selecting your friends and limiting them to only people who are interested in your niche you can be more confident that they will be interested in your content.

Personally I dislike this feature and I wish I could turn it off because it tends to get used mainly by people asking me for a vote on something.

Here is something else you can do - remember the channel surfing feature I mentioned earlier? You can select the ‘Friends’ channel and then you will only be shown sites that your friends liked. This does two things - firstly it brings you more great content related to your niche but secondly it allows you to give thumbs up to your friends submissions.

If they check who stumbled their submissions (I check all of my blog posts for stumbles daily) they will start to see your name popping up - this alerts them to your presence which is the whole idea of this post.

If you happen to be in the Internet marketing niche, check out my profile and add me as a friend :-)

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