Promote Your Business Blog with Social Networking Sites: StumbleUpon

April 19, 2007

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Over the next several days we are going to be talking about some of the different social networking sites out there and how we might be able to effectively use them to promote our businesses.

Today we are going to be exploring one of my favorites

StumbleUpon

The first social networking site I’d recommend for just about any blogger is StumbleUpon.

The way this site works is that you open a free account with them and then download their tool bar for your browser. They’ve got versions for both FireFox and Internet Explorer. This tool bar has a “Stumble” button which will take you to a “random” site of interest.

I put random in quotes because the sites StumbleUpon will show you are based on your own interest. One critical step in the process is to fill out your profile as completely as possible. That way their system knows what kind of sites you’d like to see.

Then whenever you see a good web page (or a good blog post) you can click their thumbs up button to vote the page up. If you especially don’t like a site you can give it a thumbs down.

Over time StumbleUpon learns what you like and don’t like and shows you more of what you like.

StumbleUpon friends also play an important role in what you see and don’t see. By selecting someone as a friend you are saying that you’d like to see the web pages they think are good. When they select you as a friend they will see the pages you like.

The beauty of the system is that you can just be yourself, express your interests honestly. With over 2 million folks in their network Stumbling around the internet you are bound to find some who share your interests. Read more

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