Be Social

Many of the same rules for an effective Digg marketing plan apply to StumbleUpon. While simply signing up for the service and submitting your pages may get you some lucky traffic, being an active stumbler significantly increases your chances of success.

The key word in Social Bookmarking is Social, and StumbleUpon's recommendation engine takes into consideration network-membership and friendships. As a result, to increase your exposure, you should attempt to be as active in the StumbleUpon community as possible.

But with StumbleUpon, as compared to most social networking sites, you will find the community much less interested in promiscuously friending strangers. For every 20 friend requests you randomly send out to people, you can expect to maybe get 1 accept. Bad news considering StumbleUpon cuts off friend-add sprees at about 25 per day.

The strategies you use to get tons of followers on Twitter won't work well for StumbleUpon. Instead, you need to actively participate in StumbleUpon's community. Below are some tips to being an active stumbler. Don't worry though; you'll find after some time that it's more difficult to stop stumbling than it was to start.

Infiltrating StumbleUpon

• Stumble when bored at home or at work - You'll find that you can spend hours on end unproductively stumbling the internet. As you click Thumbs-Up and Thumbs-Down, you'll begin to notice websites becoming more targeted to your particular interests. And if you can convince yourself that it's productive to stumble on (it is), you might never stop!
• Don't just Thumbs-up, review! - Write reviews of website you stumble. Save reviews for the more reviewed sites to ensure the most exposure.
• Customize your profile - Upload a cool picture for yourself, insert some information about who you are and what you like. The more personal it is, the more interested people will be.
• Join relevant groups - The groups feature of StumbleUpon offers Stumblers with similar interests the chance to share links and have discussions. Not only can groups be a great way to meet friends, it can also be an effective way to give new links a boost.
• Subscribe to power-stumblers - You'll recognize power stumblers by numerous favorites and several subscribers. Subscribe to people's links before asking them outright to become friends. You'll find many people will subscribe right back.

Unlike most social networking sites, StumbleUpon actually limits the number of friends you can have to either 200 or 250. This being said, quality is more important than quantity. Find Stumblers with similar interests and encourage them to boost your links by actively engaging them throughout StumbleUpon's many social features.