By: Tim Nash

So my presentation might not have been earth shattering but it covers some basics, it might also have come over slightly negative. The goal was really to dissuade the bloggers in the room from treating StumbleUpon as purely a marketing tool but to see it from the normal stumblers point of view it's their fun your playing with. Does this mean great content shouldn't be on Stumble? Of course not indeed by not overly promoting and not chasing Stumbles you may find your average number of visits increase.

Warning I used a custom font so slideshare has done it's best to convert but hasn't quite managed it

Other Notes

Do not Spam, keeping track of categories and tags is pretty important, people actually spend their lives recategorising misplaced stumbles.

Related posts are not always the best idea for the bottom of the page, this is a general tip that real estate at the bottom of the post between the post and comments is a great location to focus their attention on your best posts. To often related posts do not provide any meaningful results.

What would Seth do plugin is interesting if used with referral data (or indeed something like Waynes' socialize me) to provide a means to give stumblers a call to action. However avoid linking directly to the review page, if they want to leave a review or thumb up they can use the toolbar and this will be more useful in the long run.

Stats are ambiguous at best, with StumbleUpon precaching pages, JavaScript stats being unreliable at times any way your stats will be haywire. Also like most social media your bounce rate will not make much sense. If you have an analytics package that will segment stats from a source you will see just how much confusion Stumble causes.

Thumb up content you like, seems obvious but if you like content thumb it up, if you don't like it think carefully about thumbing it down. Of course if it's rubbish then thumb down.

Never use the sendto... or have buttons linking directly to reviews, get them to vote via tool bar.

Try not to stumble your own site or someone else's site continuously you are not doing yourself any favours, likewise if the same person constantly stumbles your site first every time it maybe worth asking them not to. Very politely.

How do I know if my content is good for StumbleUpon you can always test it via a sponsored stumble , these are adverts that are shown to non Pro Member stumblers they can be thumbed up or down as normal but the effect of these thumbing up and down are not felt till after the ads number of stumbles has come to the end. The nice thing about sponsored stumbles is you get pretty good figures as to how many stumblers liked dislike your content. While normally in stats you want a lot of data even 100 visit sample is enough to get an idea of how well the content will do. For the pro blogger who is really aiming at linkbait you can try changing on page conditions using the Google web optimizer to create multivate test though for accurate results you will need more then 100 visits. Also it would take some clever coding to associate the thumb up as your goal but it is possible.

Negative Stumbles, afraid it does happen we discussed some of the dubious tactics to upset a competitors stumble site.

If you are interested I have some articles on Does Social Begging Work?, Second chance for Stumblers, Stumble graveyard and StumbleUpon Maths some of these posts are old but still valuable I think. Don't forget my profile is tnash.stumbleupon.com but really I want people to join StumbleUpon and have fun, its not a tool its just an addiction...