When introducing a few friends to StumbleUpon recently, I realized something. I was just as confused with the interface of the site as each and every one of my friends is. It’s hard to learn how to use the different functions, and I didn’t know where to start. Obviously, if you’ve been using this for over a week, you probably won’t find this much help. If you are just beginning, you will welcome this help.

First things first, you now have the tool bar downloaded, and your account started. Head on over to your preferences and select ‘my interests’. From here you will see a bunch of categories that cover just about anything you can think of. Put a check mark in the subjects you would be interested in reading about.

Now that you’ve got your interests set up you can learn how the site actually works. Open a new tab, because you wouldn’t want to leave my blog, and click the ‘Stumble!’ button on your tool bar. This will automatically forward you to a site. The page will almost always be something direcetly related to one of your interests you selected. So if you selected sports, adult humor, and video games as your only interests, you will always receive pages submitted under one of those three interests. You can find interesting content in these interests very easily.

You know how the people who use this get views. Now that you know where the views come from, it will make more sense. Obviously, if you signed up for this because of my blog you are looking to use it for traffic. To keep things right, I do not approve of nor suggest spamming StumbleUpon. I am all for adding quality content, so if you believe your content is quality, it’s fine to submit.

How does it work? Like all bookmarking sites, the content that is more widely enjoyed by the community is shared with more users. There are two ways in which you can affect an article. Positively, by giving it a thumbs up, or negatively by giving it a thumbs down. You could also not rate it if you prefer. The more thumbs ups your content receives, the better quality it tells the StumbleUpon site which in return sends it to more users. Then if you’d like to take it a step further you could also write a review, good or bad. To test this out, why not go to my home page. Give it a thumbs up, and write a good review

Ok, so you know how to rate sites, good or bad. The last major idea would of course be submitting your content. This is rather easy actually. Simply go to your post you’d like to submit. Give it a thumbs up. If nobody has yet to submit the site, a pop up will show up. Simply fill in the information and click submit. You should start to receive traffic shortly. The more people who give it a good rating, the more traffic it will bring. Different categories have different success levels. Try submitting blog content into several relevant categories as you go to see which is the best for your blog.

Any questions feel free to comment as I can edit the guide to answer questions other beginners may be asking that I missed.

Ok, I’ve got some 125×125’s that obviously aren’t going to be selling themselves anytime soon. Why not give those away? I also wouldn’t mind putting up a sponsored post or two depending upon number of entries. Last but not least, I’ll throw in a few blogroll links.

Bloggernoob has concluded that your contests will receive much more interest if you require very little of the visitors to enter the contest. I like that idea, and will go with that for my first contest. So here is what is up for grabs.

First Prize: 1 Sponsored post, 1 125×125 ad, and 1 blogroll link

Second Prize: 1 125×125 ad and 1 blogroll link

Third Place: 1 blogroll link and a backlink in an upcoming post, pointing a key idea to one of your posts

Forth Place: 1 blogroll link

What do you have to do to get in on this? All you have to do is leave me a comment. A simple comment will get you an entry into this contest. I will randomely pick the winners on July 11th. You then simply have to respond in that post to claim your prize. It’s that simple. Comment here, add me to your RSS feed, and wait to win. I have very few subscribers so it’s a great chance that you will win something by entering.

I am also accepting sponsored prizes for future contests. If you are interested in sponsoring a future contest with prizes, gift cards, ad space, or anything else feel free to comment me with a way to contact you. There would be exposure to your site guaranteed if you sponsored a contest.

The picture isn’t working at the current time. Click here to view it.

I just got home late tonight and realized, I scheduled half my posts wrong. Instead of clicking publish I clicked save. So even though I had them written and edited to publish on a certain date, they didn’t publish. I got a few of them up while I was gone which was good.

Another surprise came up while I was gone. I received my package in the mail from Bloggernoob.com. It was a package worth around $200 from Market Leverage who sponsored the contest. I thought I’d take a chance to share the picture for several reasons.

Like I said in the post where I talked about entering this contest, the blogger is almost always the winner. I mean, including this post, this is the second backlink he will get from my site. They are free. He didn’t have to pay for the backlinks, he didn’t have to pay to get traffic to his contests, and he got a few free posts to go with it.

Another reason was simply for the reason of thanking the Noob. There is no way you can become successful with your first self hosted blog without a bit of guidence. He’s given that and more. If my posts are not helping you, his probably will.

Anyways, as you notice I did receive a video camera that just plugs into my computers USB slot. This will make it very easy for me to upload videos so I will highly be considering popping up a few podcasts or videos or something of the sort. There are fewer blogs in the niche that provide this technique of learning that is should most definitely give me a small boost in the long run.