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StumbleUpon is one of the best and easiest to use social distribution tools there is.  StumbleUpon community is a great channel to get viral exposure and people naturally talking amongst themselves about your cool stories and blog posts.

In this 2 part tutorial I’ll give you an inside look at how to best use this tool and maximize the value you gain from it. And it’ll be fun too. To demonstrate and prove its power to you take a look at this.

Here’s a look at parentinghelpme’s stats. Take note of the top performing one (hint: StumbleUpon):

Stumbleupon stats for parenting help me

Over 3 times as many visitors from StumbleUpon compared to our next largest referring site…Google. In case the picture is too small for you Stumble sent us 17165 visitors and Google.com sent us 5745.

This should be proof positive to you how much StumbleUpon can mean to your blog. And how powerful it is. So you’re convinced now it needs to be a big part of your blog promotion. “But how” you ask?

The beauty of stumbling is the absolute simplicity and ease of use.  All you do is install the stumblers toolbar into your browser which has a number of cool features. The main power is that over 7 million members of the stumble community use the toolbar and it’s thumbs up or thumbs down button.

Stumbleupon thumbs up, thumbs down

Obviously, thumbs up means they like your story. Thumbs down means they don’t.

There’s also reviews which are like Digg comments or comments in any other social community which are more heavily weighted than just the simple “thumbs up, thumbs down” vote.  But you can easily get 40 to 50 stumbles once you have a tightknit group because you just send your link out to people and if they like it all each stumbler has to do is click the thumbs up button.

Stumbleupon Reviews

This is very quick and easy to do so lots of them will do it. Just make sure you’re publishing quality stuff or this strategy is neutered. It actually hurts you if you’re publishing junk.

As long as you’re providing value, teaching them something, or answering a question your readers have you’ll be fine.

So the biggest thing to gaining traction and getting this 40-50 stumbles is again to make friends and connections to stumblers within the stumble community. You’ll be surprised how willing they’ll be to vote up your stuff and then other random community members will also vote up your stuff. The snowball efffect has begun and you’ll be getting more visitors.

It’s quite similar to Digg in this way.  As well as any other social community the biggest thing is going to be your activity level.

Build more activity and you’ll build more followers who will in turn stumble your stuff with the thumbs up which will give your stuff more exposure within the community.

Part 2 of the StumbleUpon for Twitter Moms and Beginners tutorial is here.

I’ll look forward to your comments or questions. Also, if you have a story to tell regarding a stumbleupon success or spectacular failure that’s interesting too so tell us about it.