10-Step StumbleUpon Plan To Make Your Article Famous

StumbleUpon can be a great traffic generator – if you give the Stumblers what they want.

It’s a 2-part puzzle:
1. How can you get a LOT of “Thumbs Up”?
2. How can you turn those folks into dedicated fans of your blog?

Here’s a 10-step StumbleUpon plan that works:

1. Focus on a very clear-cut, targeted niche market. Who are they exactly? Describe them. Which StumbleUpon categories appeal to them? Write your article very specifically for those categories. Get your posts submitted to those exact categories.
2. “Lots of significant detail, clear and concise.” As you write and edit, hold that thought. The StumbleUpon reader craves examples, but they don’t want your life history.
3. Your 3 most-likely traps: too personal, too complicated, too unrelated. If a bit of information is interesting, but you can’t make a simple, strong, direct connection to your article focus, get rid of it. And don’t “wax eloquent.” Get to the point immediately.
4. Model a title with impact AND curiousity value from a “swipe file” of great viral titles. Use strong, concise subheads. Make the article easy to start and easy to continue reading.
5. Carefully craft your first paragraph as a concise statement of every important detail that’s in your article … and then be sure the rest of your article fulfills that promise.
6. StumbleUpon users have a “horse’s mouth” fetish. You can certainly use someone else’s ideas, but make everything uniquely your own, in your own voice. Include bulleted lists, advice, links, and graphics that clarify and support your point.
7. The social bookmarking crowd gets ecstatic over lists (especially resource lists), detailed step-by-step “How-To”s.
8. Think “unique insight.” StumbleUpon users compete with each other to find and share the newest, most valuable guide, discussion, approach, or evaluation – especially if it’s easy-to-use – of whatever their #1 focus is. That’s a tall order, but filling it can give you a big payoff.
9. Start your article with a clear, related, magnetic, eyeball-sucking impact image.
10. Be an active Stumbler. Every day when YOU come on sites that fulfill most or all of these criteria, take a moment to give a StumbleUpon “Thumbs up” and a clear review of what is so valuable to you. You will gain credibility and make social bookmarking friends this way, and you’ll have a head-start toward bringing your own articles to the attention of a wider, friendlier audience.