StumbleRush Course is Critic’s Choice
August 9th, 2008 | by Mitchell Allen |
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links
I just finished Lesson #20 in Caroline Middlebrook’s StumbleRush Course, which teaches you how to use StumbleUpon, a wildly popular website discovery tool.
The course is split, with the first ten lessons being offered free of charge.
This review focuses on these free lessons.
Service
Caroline is an Internet Marketing professional.
In August, 2007, she began blogging and quickly displayed a flair for clearly explaining complex subjects.
She attracted a lot of attention with her free, seven-part Big Juicy Twitter Guide.
A few months later, she decided to tackle StumbleUpon.
The Menu
Here are the first ten lessons:
- Introduction to StumbleUpon
- Creating Content That Gets Stumbled
- Getting More Thumbs Up Votes
- The Mechanics and Ethics of StumbleUpon Submission
- Pimp My (Stumble Upon) Profile
- The Basics of Networking with StumbleUpon
- Good Etiquette and How To Handle Abuse
- Traffic Boosting Tip #1
- Traffic Boosting Tip #2
- Troubleshooting: Avoiding and Correcting Mistakes
Caroline uses permission-based email to deliver the free lessons. Once you’ve signed up and verified your email address, you’ll begin receiving your lessons every three days.
For each lesson, you receive an email containing a link to a protected webpage, along with the password you need to access it.
This is one of the best ways to serve lessons that are chock full of meaty text and videos.
Appetizers
From the first detailed introductory lesson, Caroline covers all the bases in explaining the fundamentals of StumbleUpon. While many users treat StumbleUpon simply as a cool way to discover new websites, you will learn more about the benefits of networking with other Stumblers.
One of those benefits is increased traffic to your own website or blog.
The most important point Caroline makes throughout the course is that StumbleUpon and its users (affectionately called Stumblers) thrive on great content. There is no way to trick the system to your advantage. Driving traffic to low quality content is a recipe for disaster.
Even if you’ve used StumbleUpon for awhile, there are some juicy bits of information in the free section that may surprise you:
- Caution Against Over Self-Promotion
- Feed Flare for Bloggers
- Certain Polite Behavior that will Earn You the Wrath of Other Stumblers
- An Innocent Button that is LOADED Dynamite
Salad
The lessons are lightly seasoned with links to related articles on Caroline’s blog.
To get the most from the course, you’ll want to take the time to study these articles within the context of the current lesson. Caroline alludes to the articles throughout the lessons but, if you skip them, you’ll be missing vital pieces of the puzzle.
Intermezzo
Right from the beginning, Caroline puts you to work with her Action Items.
Since each free lesson is delivered three days after the last one, you’ll have plenty of time to do your homework.
The one action you should be doing from day one is actively using StumbleUpon.
Like any social media community site, givers gain and the selfish suffer.
I got this part wrong and wondered why I received almost non-existent StumbleUpon traffic to my blog. After two weeks of doing just that one action, my blog subscriber number went from twelve to 88!
The only other social media that I use actively is Twitter and I only have a couple of dozen followers.
Once you’ve gotten into the habit of stumbling as often as you can and building a network of Stumblers, Lessons 8 and 9 give you two traffic-boosting tips that leverage your consistent actions.
The final free lesson is a palate-cleaning of sorts. Caroline gives you some valuable preventative and troubleshooting tips to ensure that your StumbleUpon account and stumbling experience are as pristine as possible.
Main Course
The ten advanced lessons are hearty fare. The good news is that, even though your payment grants you instant access to the entire course, you don’t have to digest it all at once.
Here are the ten advanced lessons for the StumbleUpon Course:
- ‘Power’ Stumbling - The What, Why & How
- Optimising Your Submissions For Maximum Results
- The Proper Way To Use Tags & Categories
- How to Build a Massive, Loyal Fan Base on StumbleUpon
- How to Ask For Stumbles Without Being a Jerk!
- Using StumbleUpon to Build Backlinks to Your Site
- Using Images to Tap Into a Little Known Source of Traffic
- Another Three Advanced Stumble Tricks
- Monetizing StumbleUpon Traffic
- Putting It All Together: A Complete Action Plan
Dessert
After completing this course, I feel that I’ve chosen one of the more useful social media tools and have begun to see some tangible results.
I also know that I don’t have to use every single technique to benefit from StumbleUpon.
If you’re going to invest time learning a particular social media service, you’d do well to learn from Caroline’s experiences.
The Gratuity
Download your first free lesson, today.
Stumble It!
6 Responses to “StumbleRush Course is Critic’s Choice”
By Pinhole on Aug 10, 2008 | Reply
Sounds very useful. I’ve not done much with StumbleUpon, but might give this a try.
By Mitchell Allen on Aug 11, 2008 | Reply
Hey, Pinhole!
I do a bit more with StumbleUpon. These social media sites simply overwhelm me.
My personal goal is to work only with Twitter and StumbleUpon. There are folks who say you should join more, but I’ll stick with these two. See where it takes me.
Too bad there is no easy way to see how many networks one has abandoned, LOL!
I get odd emails from time to time and then I go to the site and get welcomed back!
Cheers,
Mitch
By Bobby Revell on Sep 15, 2008 | Reply
Personally, I think SU is the best of all the social sites. As you gain more fans (having your stumbleupon profile stumbled and reviewed) the sites you stumble receive more power.
If your articles or home page is stumbled by someone with power, you will get a huge traffic surge for 24 or so hours. I have had over 3000 people reading my site simultaneously. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s awesome when it does.
Also, you should give thumbs up and a review to everything you stumble, otherwise the algorithm doesn’t gain as much traction. I wasn’t sure if you knew that already, but I shared anyway. Have a great day Mitch!
By Mitchell Allen on Sep 15, 2008 | Reply
Hi Bobby,
It’s seductive and, yes, awesome!
The first I saw that surge was actually on a client’s site. That made me a believer.
Like many stumblers, though, I didn’t have a clue about effective stumbling. Hence the StumbleRush purchase.
As for leaving a review, I learned that through the course, as well. In fact, for a long time, I thought only the person who discovered a site got to do a review
You have a great day, too!
Cheers,
Mitch
By Clarky on Nov 4, 2008 | Reply
Ive recently been building myspace, twitter, facebook and youtube in an attempt to get traffic!
Stumbleupon seems like a logical next step.
How often do you guys spend per day looking after your social networking site?
By Mitchell Allen on Nov 4, 2008 | Reply
Hi, Clarky!
Personally, I’ve gone from one extreme to the other.
At first, I wasn’t sure how to use social media, so I ignored it. After taking the StumbleRush course and reading Caroline’s other great tutorial, Big Juicy Twitter Guide, I had a better understanding. I signed up for a bunch of different media sites, only to realize that I was spending way too much time on them.
Now, I spend less than two hours a day online. Sort of … LOL … Twhirl has helped with twitter, but it is so addictive.
Cheers,
Mitch