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While StumbleUpon traffic is not really reliable and I strongly advise you not to depend on it for your blog StumbleUpon is still one of the most valuable places to get attention on the Web. To show you how a succesful submission can generate overwhelming buzz I will take apart a recently hugely popular stumble I did myself. This is an article that was chosen out of 10 by my readers. People power is SEO 2.0!
So: How to get a StumbleUpon submission reviewed 200 times in 2 weeks?
Take a look at this image first:
The submission I am talking about is an somewhat artistic work of the “us” design studio titled “Free range workers“. It deals with “the similarities between many office work conditions and battery farmed hens”.
While it is a really weird piece and I submitted it because it deserved attention by the people interested in radical art (I am an art blogger for over 5 years in Germany, I even organized a whole festival in 2004) I would never have expected the huge amount of attention it got on SU. Why? I submit strange artworks all the time. Some of it gets some attention, some other stuff gets ignored altogether.
So when I discovered that the “Free range workers” had received 200 reviews after a mere 2 weeks I decided to take a closer look at it and compare it to other similar submissions. Moreover I tried to find a pattern comparing it to other wildly popular submissions.
I have come up with some characteristics that these have in common. While this is not a recipe to repeat this success whenever you want you surely can deliver a better suited type of content for the StumbleUpon community after reading this.
The right topic. A popular one
This is crucial for success on StumbleUpon: You have to offer a potential audience what it wants. In sports stadium the people want to watch a football game, in a movie theatre people prefer to watch movies, in an art gallery they want guess what? So what kind of content do people on StumbleUpon prefer? Well, art is not bad but you need to get more exact in your research. How can you determine the preferences of stumblers? it’s simple. Just take a look at which groups are popular. My submission fitted at probably 3 of the most popular groups of SU users “Awesome Pictures“, “Bizarre Hunter” and “Photography“. Of course not the groups themselves made it go big, but the groups can be used as an indicator at what kind of content will perform well on SU.
Similarly, one of the most popular submissions of mine was one about Firefox. It wasn’t something really important but the huge attention it got was due to Firefox being one of the most popular topics on SU. In fact the Firefox group is the single most popular group at SU.
Zeitgeisty but timeless at the same time
StumbleUpon is not social news like the infamous Digg or the bright upstarter Mixx. Nobody wants to read news there as it takes too long from sender to recipient. You might get served the news by SU long time after they were originally posted. Thus the events have probably unfolded in a different direction already. So StumbleUpon sumission must be timeless. the information must still be valid or make sense in a few days, weeks , months or years. What stumblers do want is that the submission reflect the current zeitgeist.
So here again: Timeless art but the currently popular Firefox come to mind. When I started using Firefox a few years ago (it was called Phoenix back then) it was a really light weight, fast and underground browser. By now it’s a monster which will eat up all of your memory. So I often use Opera for certain tasks. It does not matter. People are used to FF by now and they want their preferences to be respected. So you can’t post something about there being better browsers than Firefox which would fatal for your submisson. You have to accept the zeitgeist of the time which says that Firefox is the #1 to succeed on SU.
The free range workers are timeless in their attempt to make life worth living for both humans and animals alike while they are reflecting on the current zeitgeist of the webgeneration, living in offices without much daylight.
No bullshit
This is something more savvy users already know. If you use tons of distracting ads, widgets and there is portal like clutter on your page, social media users will hate it. If you take a look at the Free range workers page you notice that there is nothing beside the single work, not even a link. Basically it a frame based site so that I had to open the frame content to submit it. So it was done accidentally exactly right for the StumbleUpon audience. In fact I will “thumb down” submissions that have more ads and clutter that actual content.
So remove everything that is not necessary to get more stumblers to vote for you. Social media users do not click on ads anyways so using Adsense and other CPC ads does not work anyways. Correct me if you have different experiences. I don’t use Adsense at all so I only rely on what others wrote here.
Controversy
This in fact surprised me a little. Many people report that bad reviews result in less visitors etc. Not here or at least not if there is a good mix of both. At the beginning several people voted the Free range workers down, sometimes for no other reason than me submitting it as some people just vote down everything just because I submit it, “the evil SEO”.
It seems that negative reviews of this misguided kind motivate others to write a review of their own when they disagree. After a while only positive reviews followed suit because most stumblers think for themselves and do not take bullies seriously. So while it does not make sense to submit crap it works fine to submit stuff not everybody agrees on.
The fitting categories
I already made you aware that it is very important to submit a post to the fitting category. As tags and categories are mixed on StumbleUpon you can submit to several fitting categories by adding tags that match categories. I see the same mistakes on SU with categories over and over.
For instance most people fail to see that the Science/Tech category is not about “tech” in the sense of “everything about computers and Internet” but about science and thus technology related to real life, like in engeneering. Also “computers” is used for all types of content while it is in fact about, surprise!, computers… yes, the boxes with chips in them you use to access the Internet.
So if you have a post about Firefox it’s neither about science nor is it about computers. It really depends on what exactly you write. It could fit in “web development”, “software” or even “marketing” (Firefox plugins for affiliate marketers) or search (SEO plugins for Firefox).
In the case of the Free range workers I chose “bizarre”, “arts”, “food” (it was at about chicken wasn’t it? ;-) ) “vegeterianism” (Boys just wanna have fun!) and design. The category was later changed to “satire” which I didn’t realize existed before as SU some far too many categories to know them all.
Do not miscategorize. StumbleUpon is like watching TV. You do not want sports on the discovery channel do you? So people will switch off their TV set.
Now I hear you crying out:
My website is far too “boring” it has nothing to do with bizarre arts or Firefox!
- Do I have to dress like a jerk,
- make ridiculous photos
- or make a list of the best Firefox plugins for plumbers?
Well, it sure would get some attention. You don’t have to though. It’s like in real life, banks and companies sponsor artists or art fairs, even have their own galleries.
- Sponsor an artist or simply pay him to be able to display hers/his works,
- hire a programmer to create a Firefox extension everybody needs etc.
- or do not take yourself too seriously, make something ridiculous, the people love exploding iPods and the likes.
While doing all that always remember that social media is not a direct response channel, it’s about long term reputation building.
This thing has 14 Comments
Are you really surprised?
You represent a profession that is paid to try to get as many visitors as possible to your clients.
Don’t you understand that when you join a community like StumbleUpon, that relies on quality submissions (without any commercial strings attached) people wont trust you?
Even if only 1% of your thumbs up are you promoting your clients or your splog, how are we stumblers to know which is which.
Therefore we trust NOTHING put into the Almighty Stumbletron by SEO & Co.
If you can’t understand that basic premise of why SEO’s are SOOOOOO hated here, then you’re in for a long struggle against negative reviews of your submission, no matter how “arty” or non-comercial it is.
We can never trust you, because your very profession goes against the philosophy of SU:
Quality content peer-reviewed, sorted and tagged by a passionate following of people from all walks of life with one thing in mind… To find the best of the Internet and sort by interest so others can find it easily.
Having people getting paid to submit content is unethical, immoral and just plain wrong.
Don’t you get it?
ThungurKnifur: Yes, I’m really surprised that you are able to utter more than gibberish full of profanity. You surely will understand that I had to delete your other “comments” as they only consisted of verbal violence as we say in Germany. Now that you managed to express yourself for the first time I tell you a little more.
Indeed I am also surprised that you got the first part of the SEO definition right “a profession that is paid to try to get as many visitors as possible to your clients” as you are one of the people who misrepresent SEO as spam like people who are complete noobs on the Web.
I perfectly understand that “a community like StumbleUpon … relies on quality submissions (without any commercial strings attached)” thus I offer high quality unique content on my blog that helps people to use social media in a responsible manner. As I do this many stumblers submit my blog postings to SU and they in many cases get very popular unless the topic is too SEO focused to be of much interest to most stumblers.
I’m in fact surprised that although you seem to know what SEO is because it seems you lie to the others about it. Also you seemingly can not differentiate between a legitimate blog from a splog (an autogenerated scraped content “blog”).
I am not surprised that you don’t know what I do because you do not care about me, you are on the lookout for a scapegoat. In fact I do work for German clients and StumbleUpon does not count in Germany, sites in German do not get SU traffic. So SU is worthless for my clients.
Above all I am surprised that you still do not notice that in fact not SEOs are a threat to the StumbleUpon community but obnoxious people like you harassing stumblers, sending them death threats and abusing them verbally. This is actually more than ignorance. You are on some kind of bizarre holy war. I know people like you, I’m on the Net for 11 years by now and I dealt with trolls on the Usenet, on mailinglists, in forums, on blogs and social media long before I even knew what SEO is.
Also I’ve dealt with many people like you in Germany who abuse others for being part of a group. We call them Nazis here, but some may prefer the term “fascists”. These people along with the perfectly normal citizens who just want to criticize Israel or applaud when the lynch mobs burn houses of foreigners act in the same way attacking me for being Polish in Germany. You probably do not understand that as someone being born in Poland I am not responsible what other Poles do or rather for your hate against Poles, Jews, gays, Muslims, blue collar workers, SEOs, or whatever kind of group.
So get a life, I guess you are angry because nobody wants to have sex with you or you failed in life altogether so the only thing left for you is attacking others out of frustration, but you can’t faze me.
In fact you and your gang inspire me, since you tagged me AIDS I get messages by stumblers who seek my support in AIDS benefits.
Each time you abuse a stumbler they contact me to ask how to deal with abuse on StumbleUpon and I forged new friendships on SU. Some of my best and most popular postings where inspired by you and people like you who abuse social media users.
Btw. I removed the bold tags from your comment as writing everything in bold letters is considered abuse in itself. Also you are not really promoting your wacky flash site on my blog do you?
nicely put onreact. a troll is a troll is a troll wherever they hide these days. the one thing that unites them is bravery on the internet and cowardice everywhere else.
so this is one of those stumblemorons ive been reading about is it? ..from that website certainly looks like it ;)
“So you can’t post something about there being better browsers than Firefox which would fatal for your submisson. You have to accept the zeitgeist of the time which says that Firefox is the #1 to succeed on SU.”
I’m going to research both and do my best to prove you wrong :). Groupthink is retarded.
Besides that, in connection to boxes with chips in them, it’s good you specified “that you use to access the internet.” Otherwise I was gonna ask if you meant Pringles :D.
Well, dog, I prefer not to speak of “morons” and the likes as these people use such words themselves. I do not want to become what I fight.
Hey Gab, I would be glad for you to prove me wrong, but it’s the same thing as saying “Apple is bad” on Digg or “SEO is OK” ;-)
Masses prefer prejudice over judgement.
Wow, Tad, I’m not sure which I loved more… your great post or your amazing comment back at ThungurKnifur. Both were written brilliantly.
I already knew you were the most brilliant blogger in a sombrero, but now I think I can move you up to the most brilliant man in a Sombrero. Thank you so much for telling ThungurKnifur exactly how it is. :)
Shana
What a jerk! Well replied Tad. I hope this guy gets so many Flag (This person is… violent, hostile, vulgar) in StumbleUpon that they will kick is him out.
The funny thing about it is that your submissions to SU seem to be high quality.
Does it really matter to the community what the motive behind the Stumble is, as long as it’s a quality site placed in a relevant category?
I don’t think it does. I think these are just bored people looking for something to “fight”. Sadly, they are wrecking the community that they claim to be protecting.
Great article Onreact, I have recently increased my stumbleupon traffic by leaps and bound. Largely, by having a great artistic picture to go with my posts and keep them full of useful information and not having to much text to read. The best way to get a thumbs up is by giving them a quick laugh or smile, along with some useful info.
Cheers
J
This is stupid. Why not take a picture or an article for what it really is rather that looking at who submitted?
You know..at first, I was reading your reply to ThungurKnifur and thinking, “Yea, what TAD said!” then, I began to travel with you to the more serious implications behind the mind sets of the trolls and with whom they “FOLLOW” (as opposed to “lead”..which would have to imply LEADERSHIP ability)
As sensible as your response was Tad, blindness prevails with the majority of his type in SU. Which is why I’m glad to also see how you also are man enough (reflecting on Shanas comment) to say you do not want to become what you fight. It is easy to do. I have been stalked and attacked in SU (some time ago) and it was painful. I am sincere when I submit something that I think others may appreciate. Not just SEOs, but SU in general. So I have wanted to fight back. But learned quickly, that all I’ve got, is what I give, not just in SU, but in life.
This dude that’s attacking you here is only burdening himself in the long run. Looking at it like that, makes me feel sorry for his lot in life.
You always produce quality Tad. I’m never disappointed when I come here. SU knows that…at least those who in there for positive interaction and information exchanges. The rest don’t matter.
As Dr. Seuss so perfectly coined, “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.”
Good post Tad and great comments.
I also tried to explain to ThungurKnifur that I work in the Russian market, so SU traffic is not something we sell or find value in. He has some trouble seeing past the profession though.
Nice article, mate…I gave it a thumbs up, even though I found you via google.
I wanted to say something to Thungur, but I can say nothing that’s already been said. Obviously, the lad (or lass?) has never been the proud parent of a website before.
Well, I agree with you, but i thing that I want to know about stumbleupon is how can we create such creative images and artwork, as big media company hire professional but for small companies cannot hire such professional. SO will you suggest how to get top in stumbleupon.
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