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.

These are three of the top social bookmarking sites out there. Personally, I couldn’t really recommend one over the other without knowing many different things about you, your website, and your viewers. I suggest you experiment a little bit with each of these to discover which one is of real benefit to your site, and worth spending some of your valuable time mastering.

As you will learn by reading my blog over time, that I spent months as a freelance writer. I got paid per view, so it made me realize the importance of social bookmarking. You learned so much by experimenting with the many different bookmarking sites. Everything from time of submission to who submits it. There are so many variables that can affect your content that you submit, the biggest of which is obviously quality and interest, but many other things can affect it as well.

StumbleUpon was the first social bookmarking site I truly had success with receiving mass traffic from. My friends and fans from the freelance writing site I was a member of got together, added one another as friends on StumbleUpon and started to submit our daily content. We would send links to our articles to their Stumble bar and get some thumbs up votes from each other. As you may know, it only takes about fifteen or so thumbs up votes to actually start seeing numbers in the thousands for views. If you get one thousand views, you can only assume you will get way more than fifteen thumbs ups, and the increasing number of thumbs up will also increase how many people see your page.

StumbleUpon is a site for a few different kind of people. This is probably the most targeted traffic bookmarking site of them all. Users select what topics they are interested in and just continue to search for sites in that interest. They don’t pick and choose which websites to visit as the tool bar brings them to the site and they can either move on or rate the content. It is also for bloggers in just about any niche. You can establish a decent sized group of friends and you’ll get off to a quick start.

Digg is and always will be a techie site at heart. It has strayed away from computer related content, but the majority of the categories, and a large percentage of the users, are still there for the computer content. You can have great success publishing content that techies would like to read. You will be showing them content they want to read, and that they want to see on the front page. The users who will like this content are people who have high reputation on the site and will most likely be users whos Diggs count for more than an average Digg.

Reddit is a spin off of Digg. They focus their site on quality content by allowing you to only publish one new article on the site per hour. That way there aren’t as many people spamming up multiple links to their own sites in the same half hour. While it is not totally effective, it works. This is probably not a site for a blogger. It takes more time to get established into the community, and honestly, it’s not as effective even when you do get established. The site also focuses on high quality content. Your blog posts that you write, mostly from your head, in one sitting, and without proofreading, are not the high quality posts that will make it front page.

I’ve said it before, but when your blog is just starting out, even the artificial bookmarking traffic can be beneficial in picking up a few subscribers. I’m not really into submitting my own articles to these sites, and usually wait for one of my readers if possible, but that doesn’t always happen. If you are in desperate need of traffic and subscribers you may want to look into these social bookmarking site.

Digg is one of the biggest out there. It started off as more of a techie computer geek site, but has since turned into a place for users to submit all kinds of content. If your blog is more of a computer oriented site you will have great success here. That, or sites with pretty amazing posts. Honestly, the posts on this blog aren’t really suited for Digg simply because it is regaurded as simply another spam addition to the site about getting rich. Not a surprise.

StumbleUpon is probably the easiest to use for several reasons. The biggest of which is, they don’t have to be caught by your title to be sent to your site. They only have to have the content area you submit it to in their interests to be sent to your page. This will have deadly effects on your bounce rate, but traffic is traffic. Basically any kind of content is suitable for StumbleUpon as long as you submit it in the correct category.

Reddit is a site very similar to Digg except they have a very strict limitation. You can only submit one page per hour last I checked. It is impossible to get to the front page without being a more recognized member on Reddit, or having killer content. Nonetheless, it’s good for capturing a few views, and depending upon your niche you may find great success with Reddit.

There are many negatives that come with adding your sites to social bookmarking sites, but you can outweight these with the possitives. All of these sites will become more effective as your account status is raised by constant quality additions to the site, as well as careful critiquing of content submitted by others.

This is a unique little application I discovered when going over a friends blog a few months ago. I really like this tool because it will show me which of my StumbleUpon friends are giving my articles thumbs up votes. It’s a good thing to know because I can’t realistically keep track of who I see giving articles thumbs up and who I don’t. An article or more a day added to StumbleUpon and that would get challenging. It is not fair to expect every single one of my articles to be given a thumbs up by everyone on my friends list, but when your friend count nears 200 it may determine who stays and who goes (unless of course you’re a long time friend).

StumbleUpon limiting it’s users to having 200 friends is a rather pointless but understandable limitation. With this tool I will be able to weed out the users no longer active on StumbleUpon, or the ones who simply have no interest in my articles. This will leave room to add new friends to StumbleUpon that actually like my content and are able to help me out with thumbs up votes.

Anyways this is a 100% safe application that I recommend to anybody using Social Bookmarking to drive traffic to their site.

It shows which friends have viewed the article, and how many times. It also lists all the reviews for the page. This is a very handy little tool that I plan to make use of greatly over the next few months. As a new blog owner it is crucial to receive large amounts of traffic from StumbleUpon and this tool will be indirectly related to me achieving the mass amounts of views.

Ok to download this go to Adament’s site and download it. Post comments with your thoughts on this application. Happy Stumbling.