I started blogging over a year ago and a common question most folks have (me too) is how to drive traffic to your blog so people will read what’s being posted. If you’re writing to market your business, one of the great tools I’ve found to get known is StumbleUpon.
Are you familiar with Stumbleupon groups?
Up until 8 months ago, I hadn’t a clue about them until I was invited to join one. Bloggers get together to stumble each others articles each week.
Right now I’m in three Stumble groups. The rules for each one vary slightly.
Here’s how it works depending upon the rules of the organizer:
1. The organizer creates the master email list of everyone in the group. The size of the group might be small or larger with a mix of blogging topics or a more focused group like one of mine with all personal development bloggers.
2. The post is either submitted to Stumbleupon first (by you) before sending it to the group, or a person in the group discovers it (writes a review) for you. The amount of Stumble requests might be limited to two per week so stumbling requests are minimized.
3. You might be asked to include your Stumbleupon ID, the category to submit the thumbs up to, with a brief description of the post and suggested keyword tags.
4. You choose which articles you’ll stumble and you may elect not to Stumble them all. If you are expected to stumble posts you don’t really like, feel offended by, don’t relate to, you might want to rethink joining that specific group if stumbling them all is a member requirement. Yup – some may have that expectation.
5. Stumbling other people’s posts is key to being able to continue having your own articles stumbled.
That’s pretty much it! I often ask folks to leave a comment and write a review to open up the conversation. I LOVE when they become subscribers!
How to find a group? Ask around your blogging community.
Can’t find one? Start one!
Look around at the bloggers you like and form your own group. It’s a great way to increase your visibility and create a supportive circle of friends.
Last week there were four of us in one on my groups that wrote on a common theme of lifting a negative mood. It was pretty cool to see we were all on the same wave length!
While things have leveled out a bit, I definitely think the groups help to increase the unique visitors to blog on my website each month.
Have fun with it!
