The Wikipedia says,

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, YouTube, Dailymotion, Hi5, Gather.com, social web applications (webapps) such as reddit, Digg, Stumbleupon, Flickr, iLike, Wikipedia, Squidoo, Last.fm, Twitter, Eventful, ePinions and others as well as within 3D virtual worlds such as Second Life, ActiveWorlds, Moove and There.com.
The goals of each SMM program or campaign will differ for every
business or organization, however most will involve some form of
building an idea or brand awareness, increasing visibility, encouraging
brand feedback and dialogue as well as to possibly sell a product or
service.

Now, whether you are a social media enthusiast or not, I know for sure that you’ve been using either Twitter or Orkut or Facebook or Linked In just to name a few. So essentialy all of us are hooked to social media one way or the other.
Now, who are the guys who really benefit from social media marketing? Of course, the big guys who are successful in marketing their ideas, their products or their brands (and mad some fortune on it).

Let me be honest with you my friend, I really don’t think the so called A-Listers are worthy enough to be in the social media networks. I mean they shouldn’t be included.

Because,

1. They are mostly confined to a small group of like minders who have vested interests in selling their products and services.
2. They never are honest to so called “no-vices”/common blogger.
   You have to pay them to get a consultation, damn it !
3. They never reveal.
   I understand when Mandrake says - “Magicians never tell”, but over here?? C’mon this is no magic. We are here for sharing information and having fun (I’ve no clue how, but yet, that’s the whole concept).
4. They don’t approve you as friends, while you keep trying.
   Ever heard of someone being invited by an A-Lister into his network? I bet never.
5. They are not here to participate but sell their stuff.
   While the whole idea of social media is about building communities to share knowledge, here is a guy who comes in to sell his e-book !
6. They belong to their own mafia. LOL
7. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer while they are here.
   Not blaming it on them, but yes it’s a fact.
8. A-Listers have a heavy attitude.
   None of them thumbs up or Digg your article, do they? While you might be doing it on their articles daily, to get their appreciation, lol you silly boy !

So there you have it. All the reasons you need to know that the real losers in Social Media are the A-Listers. The Social Media as such belongs to the masses and the crowd, and there’s no stopping them. We belong to the bigger chunk of the population on the Internet, and not the group of A-Listers who are here to sell their products and make you buy their e-books.

Three cheers to the true spirit of social media !! Down with the A-Listers !

Image Courtesy istockphoto

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But why?

Indexing frequency can be explained as the count or the number of times Google or the other search engines, visit your website to index your content.

And, the higher the frequency, the better you chances for a better rank or your importance in the SERPs.

Can’t believe? Neither did I, once upon a time.

Well, do you know that the best and the top blogs on the internet gets the best indexing frequencies? That is the content published on them gets indexed quicker that anyone else and gets more importance on the SERPs. Examples are TechCrunch.com and Problogger.net.

Content published on TechCrunch and Problogger gets indexed in minutes. The closest we have measured is like around 8 minutes or so. Yeah that’s right, when a content is published on Problogger, it is very likely that the next moment it is on the SERP’s.

At DailySEOblog, I’ve seen content indexed in 30 minutes or so, which is good.

Now the point here is that, if you are writing the same content as the above blogs, like for say example a movie review or so, it is highly likely that even if you have better content, TechCrunch like blogs are likely to get higher on the SERPs.

So they clearly have an edge of having the crawlers index them faster.

Now, how can you get this edge? How can you make crawlers index your content quicker as well?

Several factors.

1. Rapidly changing content.

2. A good sitemap structure.

3. Good pinging tools.

4. Good meta tags that tell the crawlers to visit more often.

5. Easy navigation structure.

Well, so many other factors as well. But these are the best of them I’d say.

Essentially, if you have rapidly changing content, that is made available to the crawlers through a well maintained and updated sitemap, that itself should take care of the problem.

For maintaining the sitemap, of course you’d be using the AllinOne SEO plugin right? That’s a good one.

Also, make sure that you have a regularity in posting. If the crawlers find that your content is being updated on a regular basis, like daily or  hourly, then they will set their crawl frequency(if not manipulated by META tags) to hourly or daily basis, however it is followed on your site.

This is exactly the same reason why blogs have an edge over static websites. It is easy for crawlers to find a pattern in your posts and hence they find it easy to follow the pattern.

You can find more information about this concept over here and here.

I’m unsure how by metrics am I going to depict this, but it is surely a remarkable reference. Some would agree and some ould not, just as it should be. What are the things that you’d take into consideration before linking to a site?

If we were to dissect out the essentials of blogging, links play a vital role. Links as many calls it are votes given by one person for the credibility of another. Every time someone want to link to a site, he things twice. There are many thoughts that goes through your head. Some bloggers are voracious linkers like John TP, some are selective like Darren and many are in between.

Now, if we all know that links are the building blocks of the internet and the blogging world, why do we hesitate to link?

After all, a link is important to another person as it is to you. So why do you not be proactive and link to others?

What are your mental blocks?
Few of the things that keep you from linking to a person are these questions.

Is extensive linking good?

Many a times, people ask me, Mani why do you keep linking to Google , AdSense and such sites often, Is it good for SEO?

Well, not really. I link to them because it helps as a reference to even novice readers who might be new to a product like AdSense. It might help me in SEO in very little amounts, but that’s not my interest first.

And, I’ve never recommended anyone not to link too much. It all depends on how many incoming links you’ve got. If the ratio of incoming to out going links is fat, you are in good shape, if it’s thinner then you might not want to link too much. That’s the point.

So provided you have a healthy number of incoming links to fight the competition, you can go ahead link to various resources and content relted websites, that’s not a problem at all. Having said that, make sure that you dont go about inserting stand alone links on the sidebar and the footers as non contextual links. When Google spiders a page, it can easily make out the contextual links and the non contextual links.

If there are 10 links within an article write up, referring to content related websites, it is perfectly fine. But at the same time, if there are 10 links on the sidebar referring to websites (which cannot be determined if it’s contextual or not), it may not be ahealthy situation.

So please expel your doubts on linking and number of links. If it’s all well withing the article and it supports the article, Google sees no harm in them.

Does the guy who’s linked deserve the link?

This is yet another popular factor. Before linking to (mostly personal sites) a site, it is normal for someone to think as to whether the person being linked to is actually deserving the credit. Well, the choice is your’s. If it’s not a relevant content you better not link. Keep in mind that you are not linking to a person to make him happy. You should be linking to a site because the content in the website is interesting and you like to refer it to someone else. Simple as that.

When you think in that sense, you might link to a person boldly than otherwise.

Will he reciprocate?

Again, here are two situations. 1 - If you are linking to a person to make him happy, then chances are that he would just be happy with your link and never link back to you.

2- If you are genuinely linking to a person because you think the content is interesting and you agree/disagrre to it, then he sees some value in your link and is more likely to reciprocate.

So, when you link, let the question be as to whether your link is passing on value or not rather than it is to make someone happy.

Will he acknowledge it?

This is interesting. There is no thumbrule to this, but from experience I’ve found that genuine and gentlemen bloggers do acknowledge links. Some of them I can name are Nate Whitehill, Michael Martine and Kevin Muldoon. They are big names in the blogosphere but rarely miss a chance to acknowledge genuine links. I’ve experieinced it over the years.

So if your link is genuine and passes on value, people are likely to acknowledge it. Again, it depends on whom you are linking.

Will he just enjoy the link or will he return it back?

This might be of interest to all those link-exchange freaks out there. My sincere apologies to all of you. But this practice is something that I don’t recommend. If you are linking to someone assuming (or even nudgin him on chat) that he will link you back, then I’m sorry even if they link back, it is not going to give you any value. It just becomes an excercise that is not going to help in long time.

So essentially speaking, when you realy have to link to someone, because an article he wrote is interesting or you’d like to refer it to your reader, please do go ahead and link to him even if you don’t like his hairstyle.

But never link to someone in the hope that tommorow he will link back to you or send you some money over paypal.

Before writing this article, I had two thoughts. Should I be really telling this out to the world? The trade secrets that is. As a matter of fact, off-site optimization is the trump card up every SEO’s sleeve and so is mine.

It is my favourite tool, and experience has proved that out of all the weapons in my armour, off-site optimization works best that anything else. But, I thought I should let you guys know some of the secrets in off-site optimization, after all information and knowledge is to be shared. So here I go, hope you enjoy it and make good use of it.

So what is off-site optimization?

Off-site optimization includes all the strategies an SEO implements other than on the website, to increase the chances of ranking higher.

So that means everything except title tags, meta tags, keyword density, internal links, layout/design etc fall into the brackets of off-site optimization.

What are the factors in off-site optimization?

Off-site optimization consists of many factors that directly and indirectly affect your rankings. Having said that, they are not non comprehensive.

The Incoming links

I’m sure all of you are already aware of this. The incoming links to your website is the biggest offsite optimization factor that directly affect your rankings. Incoming links are of various types based on their relevance and importance in SEO. Though they are all essentially the same in code, based on where they are located, their weightage and placement, each of them carry a different weightage.

1-A sitewide incoming link,
2-A contextual incoming link
3-A homepage icoming link

A sitewide incoming link, is one in which an incoming link is repeated in every page of a website with the same anchor text. Examples are links placed in teh sidebar of a blog, footer of a website, navigation bar of a website etc. Essentially, a sitewide link will carry more importance than any other type of incoming link, as the link is more relevant. But there are problems with it as well.

When the link is placed at areas like the sidebar/navigation bar/frames, there is no textual content near the links most of the time, since the code is seperate for the sidebar or frame. But yes, if you can manage to get a couple of authority sites giving you sitewide links, nothing else like it.

A contextual incoming link, is the one that is placed in a relevant link, among all the other textual content on a webpage. Examples are the normal links a blogger would place in an article. Even though such links carries a good amount of weightage, and increases the relevancy of your webpage, it will not help you beat your competition, if you have a few of those. You need to have a healthy (not huge) number of contextual links to prove your point on the SERPs. But Google gives much importance to a relevant, contextual link than a sitewide link. When considering competition, it all comes down to numbers and equations.

A homepage incoming link, is obviously the link that is placed at the homepage. It carries a certain level of importance and when combined with other factors of the link provider can work wonders. But again the number factor will play a huge role when deciding your ranks, as a single homepage link from a single site may only give you a push of two-three positions.

So mostly, though the different types of incoming links carries their own importance levels, it’s ultimately a mix and match of these factors that gives you the results. Like when sometimes several single homepage links fail to give you the desired result, a single sitewide link may do the trick! Again, the competition is the factor that decides what is the equation that has to go into it.

The nxt most important factor in off-site optimization is the quality of the site that links to you.

A true quality website is not always the one with a high PR. Clear that mis conception off your head first off. Many a times, SEOs refer to sites as “authority websites”. Well, authority websites are the ones that have already managed to get into the Googles good books basically. One peculiar feature of authority websites are that they are listed at the DMOZ directory. Of course, that is not the litmus test for an authority website. Every website cannot find it’s way to the DMOZ directory after all. But yes, many of the top authority websites would be there on the human edited directory - DMOZ.

But I have a different take on the authority websites theory altogether. I don’t think that authority websites are those that are on the DMOZ or those that have a high PR.

To me, authority websites (in the context that they will be a sure shot way to boost rankings), are the ones that have quality backlinks, and have been around on the internet for quite some time. Sadly, all the authority websites in my list are not on the DMOZ.

Some factors that may be taken into account when deciding authority of a website are the number of incoming links to that website, the number of outgoing links, the amount of information rich pages, the number of pages listed on google, the number of supplementary pages, the age of domain etc.

The moral of the story is that, out of all the seo methods, on-site optimization may fail, but if there’s one thing that will give you an edge over others, it is indeed off-site optimization. So forget the header tags, and H1 tags go for some serious link building my friend, that’s were the soul is.

I think the Social Media Optimization strategies are a bit overdone these days. Honestly, I don’t enjoy the typical “24 steps to make you famous” articles at all. They lack the quality factor in them. Everybody is too focused on numbers and the overall quality of your work is just ripped off for the sake of getting a stumble or that pinch effect on your traffic.

My favorite tool in Social Media is undoubtedly Stumble Upon. I just love the tool and is quite an experience using it.
I started using the tool earlier this year and it’s been a very enjoyable experience overall. I normally stumble blogs and articles along with interesting funny photos etc. The beauty about the tool is that it gives you surprises, all the time!

You get so absorbed with the tool that your number of stumbles automatically goes up and you never keep track of it until one fine day someone alerts you about it. You go on adding friends and one day you reach the 200 friends limit.

When do I use Stumble Upon?

Normally, I use stumbleupon when I want to get surprised! I know that there are lot of information available on the Internet about anything and everything, but where is all this catalogued? A directory? Come on, scrolling through a directory and finding content is the last thing I’d do to get surprised! LOL

Stumble Upon comes in handy at these times. I think it is the most disciplined human edited database of ONLY the most interesting webpages on the internet everyone has access to.

It also comes in handy when I’m running out of ideas. When I’m using it I’m pretty sure that the next stumble that I’d have is going to be better than the one I’m on right now. It takes me to the best pages every single time.

Why do I use Stumble Upon?

I prefer Stumble Upon to any other social bookmarking sites because of it’s quality. I think the SU community is very quick to respond to junk, than in any other social bookmarking site, so finding unworthy information is a rare possibility. The SU community itself is a factor that makes SU a great place to be.

Tips to make your Stumble Upon experience pleasurable

So, have you been using SU recently? If not, I strongly recommend you to go about it right now. You can find my profile here, don’t forget to add me as your friend.

If you have been using SU, I have the following tips to you to making it a pleasurable experience.

- Don’t do it for numbers please
One grave mistake we all tend to do (especially marketers out there) is to use SU for generating traffic alone.
Agreed, that SU is a great place to get traffic but please understand that it’s quality first. If you focus only on numbers, the SU experience is going to be painful for you. Instead, use the tool in it’s true sense. To share and to enjoy the internet.

- Network widely
Stumble Upon is a social networking tool combined with social bookmarking, so the more the networking the more pleasurable the experience! From my experience I understood that being an island on SU is like being a dumbass, it works well only if you network well. So appreciate others talk to them and review their stumbles. It’s fun believe me!

- Don’t self promote
Never ever do this. Well, I don’t think it’s against the TOS, but it definitely does not give a good picture about you to others. It’s other’s job to decide if you are good. You cannot self proclaim it can you? I’ve seen quite some webmasters do this for the sake of getting popularity, and sometimes if it’s a real good article the SU community will forgive you, but it’s really stupid for someone to ONLY submit his content. This normally happens wit marketers who use SU for only marketing purposes. You can easily make out these guys from their profile. They’d probably have 5 stumbles out of which 4 will be theirs and they’d only have joined a few months back, plus no reviews, no fans what so ever.

- Promote quality, avoid junk
Being a SU user, it’s your duty to promote quality by “thumbing up” a good article and it’s equally important to thumbs down a bad article. Because you don’t want your friends to see terrible webpages, but interesting ones. SO use the tool sensibly, thumbs down what you don’t like. There’s nothing wrong in it, it’s for the good of the community.

- Share and review
The most interesting factor about SU is that it helps you to share and review right within the tool. It may be available on other tools too, but I don’t think people get involved with it as on SU. So do share your thoughts on the stumbles, say your mind in the profile page about a stumbler or his stumbles, review people, it all helps in the betterment of the community.

- Stumble daily, make it a routine
Beginners would find it bizzare. But at least a month old stumbler would agree wit me on this that the more the stumbles the better the experience. So stumble daily and uniformly, make it a routine. It helps you in the long run. 

- Enjoy the small things in life like funny pictures
SU is a great place to find funny pictures on the internet. I mean, we all get those email forwards that we never really check, but imaging when you have an entire list of those pictures and you find it yourself? Interesting isn’t it? SU helps you to enjoy the small things like this, a picture, a video that will make your day.

- Stumble through your friends
This is a personal favorite of mine. I have a group of friends who are probably the best I found on SU. And there’s an option on SU to stumble only through your friends stumble. It’s highly possible that whatever they have stumbled would be of interest to me. So rather than doing a general stumble, do a stumble through your friends (or anyone of them) and it helps you to share things.

- Explore all categories and types
There are some interesting categories on SU like videos,pics,blogs etc that will help you to stumble pages by category. Rather than doing a general stumble, do stumbles in categories for example, stumble pics only. This will enrich your SU overall experience.

What you should not do at SU

- Never self promote
- Never spam
- Use pseudo ID’s

That’s about it. Have a great Stumble Upon experience !

Some of you might have already spotted it.. for those who have not, here’s the news.

I have a new website directory launched at DaiySEOblog. You can find it here.

It is a simple directory which enables you to add your site with the Title, Description and URL to the appropriate category. No link back required ;)!

There are some interesting categories at the moment, and many of them are technology, blogging and internet related. I’ll be expanding it soon to at least 50 in number soon. My idea is to keep the listings close while focusing on the content.

Does it make any sense having two categories - Web 2.0, Internet, Blogging and Weblogs? No Isn’t it?
So I may stick with one category Internet. But it’s not that horrible as it sounds I have some really nice categories for you there.

I will be manually moderating the submissions to the directory, and ONLY quality websites will be added, just because I want to keep out spam and low-quality websites.

By quality, I mean sites with original content and good quality articles. If you have a young site with no incoming links at all, don’t fret, provided you have good articles and a decent post frequency, you’ll be included.

Why should you include your blog in the directory?

Good question. Here goes -

- It’ll fetch you some quality  google juice.
- Get indexed on Google and other major search engines in less than hours.
- Also some decent traffic (you may have to get creative on the description.)
- Get noticed by other DailySEOblog readers.
- You don’t have to copy paste a code to link back!
- It takes only less than a minute to submit a site.

Who is the directory for?

Yet another good question. Popular bloggers might find it irrelevant because, they already have submissions at various directories.
But this directory is for the young bloggers, the budding bloggers who have great content in their blogs but cannot find a place to show it off.

I have gone through this earlier when I started blogging. When I had a month old blog, I found it difficult to get people’s attention. And honestly speaking, even some of my friends today were not willing to link to me, they would simply avoid my request.

So this directory aims at taking young bloggers out of that frustration.

Here, we give free incoming links to all the quality bloggers out there who is looking for some attention and some google juice the next google update.

Having said that, I’m extremely concerned about the quality.

If you are still not convinced whether to submit your site or not, read this and this and this.
Meanwhile, if you have suggestions, forward them my way.

Gokul Rajaram, was the Product Manager at Google handling a number of it’s advertising products. At this role, Mr. Rajaram’s duties included defining new features and enhancements to Google’s advertising programs and working with engineering on implementation. So, many of the features you see on the Google AdSense is the result of this man’s brainwork.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Rajaram was a Technical Lead at Juno Online, an early internet service provider that is now part of United Online, the second largest ISP in the US. At Juno, he was part of the team that developed Juno’s online advertising platform. Mr. Rajaram has also worked as a Software Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and as a Product Manager at Onetta, a telecom hardware company.

Mr. Rajaram earned his M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Management, his M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, and his B.Tech in Computer Science from the Indian institute of Technology, Kanpur, where he was awarded the President of India’s Gold Medal for being class valedictorian.

He is believed to be one of the “Godfather’s of AdSense”, one of the most successful products at Google.

Now the sad news is that Gokul is leaving Google (he has already) to be on his own. He has not revealed what his future plans are but it’s believed that he’s going to start on his own. Would that be a competitor to Google’s AdSense? No idea.But to us bloggers, that would be music to ears, wouldn’t it ?

It is a trend now that many Googlers are leaving company either to start up companies of their own or to join smaller but upcoming and fast growing companies like Facebook. 

Resources: 1, 2, 3, 4 Photo Courtesy: Webguild

Running out of space on your PC or lappy? Worry not. There is a cool service that offers you to store your audio files, videos, office documents or just about anything online, at your personal space and use them online as well, from anywhere in the world (sounds too big eh?).

You can stream the audio and video files, online and the speed and consistency is really good. I also love the drag and drop feature, it’s just like transferring the file to any other storage media on your PC. It’s a very reliable service from my experience. At a standard free registration you get 1GB of storage space, where you can store all your mp3’s, movies and stuff. Another good feature is that you can send the files to your friends, by sending them a download link. They don’t have to register at Steekr to listen to the audio or see the video. So, you no longer have to carry them around on your thumbdrive. That’s too old fashion man!

The service is Steekr and you can register here for a free 1GB storage space, and yes its personal, “The Internet too is personal again”!

Update - I just found another cool service that let’s you upload files and even allow others to have a look at it. I’m unsure if it allows you to stream, but the catch is that the service is quick to register, you don’t have to give even your email id. Just give a name, select the file and select the other users permission settings. Presto! Very good if you are in a hurry and want to share a file with your buddy. Check it out here.

I agree that the Internet is an enormous ocean of knowledge and any information is just a click away. But even with such a potential sometime you end up being nothing at one point of time or the other. Have you felt like that? Like having nothing to talk about, nothing to share and nothing to blog. Difficult situation eh?

I’m sure that you’d get over the block one way or the other in no time. But, that triggers one question. How do you manage to write a post? Or what makes you to? I believe it would different for everyone, and it would be interesting to know.

For me, everything happens instantaneously. I mean, I am not the kind who plan about something that I should write the next month and create a draft for it. It never happens for me even if I try. I like being impulsive. But I know there are disadvantages to it. Sometimes you run out of topic and there’s nothing anyone can do to help me. Not even me.In that case the “planners” are at an advantage, even if they have nothing to write about on one day, they would still be publishing what they planned last month. Hmm, pretty smart eh?

Well guess what? I’ve got news for the  “planners”.

- You guys can’t write on a current issue.
- Or even when you plan to, I’d (or some other impulsive blogger) have already blogged about it.
- You guys aren’t up to date, you are one month (or whatever old date you saved the draft) old.
- You miss the “spice” in your articles. I’d gather it form the latest post I read on the RSS reader.

Well, obviously I wouldn’t be talking about the negatives of impulsive blogging here.

But I think, bloggers should be a mix of both. Sometimes impulsive and sometimes planned. The planned ones can be articles like  a “top 10 list of the most infamous seo blogs” while you can be impulsive with the current trends and happenings. What is your opinion? Do you write articles impulsively or plan them well in advance?

UPDATE—-
This article got a thumbs down from one of the very senior SU members. Reason - The article is more focused on getting the numbers and does not really throw light on ensuring quality in your stumbles.
I agree on that , but I’ve taken care to ensure that the tips should not be mis interpreted for evil purposes. Readers, please note that SU is a place where quality weighs over quantity, and do not use any method that you think will corrupt the system. The blog deals with search engine marketing so naturally, I’m inclined towards the numbers part. But that is not an excuse to cut down on quality while stumbling pages.

Taken aback by the title? Well, I mean it. (And mind you, this is not the usual s**** where you get to read what you already knew. This is the untold stuff!)

Stumble Upon is the new social media bug that bit me recently! Ouch! That did hurt but seems like I’m enjoying every bit(e) of it.

Stumble Upon is a great way to boost traffic to your site,in fact, I prefer it to any other social media site.

 The reason - it gets me on a high when I receive 1000plus visitors to my site overnight.

Well, the relevancy of this enormous traffic is doubtful. Out of the 1000 odd visitors, probably only a few of them would actually subscribe to your feed or show interest in visiting your blog the next time. But it’ a good amount of traffic however.

Now, how can you make it to the top on SU? Is it really possible?
Indeed yes. If you see the top stumblers list on SU, each of them have some unique features that will give you some pointers.

(Update- I found out that this page is a mere listing of who stumbled the most on SU, it does not give you an idea of who are the real passionate stumblers who live the SU experience. Here is a better ranking based on the number of stumbles/thumbs, combined with the number of reviews , pics and videos. I think this makes more sense.)

And this is not the “usual stuff” article where you get to read the very same things again and again. Things that everyone knew. No this is not it.
If you do a googling on “How to get to the top of stumble upon”, you’ll probably get a couple of site that will give you ideas like, keep stumbling more pages, get reviewed by people, get connected with all, and stuff like that.

But hey, didn’t you already know it? All of us know that if you stumble maximum number of pages, under various categories, you probably will end up the top list of stumblers.

But is there a shortcut way? You came late to SU. Now, is there something you can do about it?

Let’s see. I’ll take my example.
Three weeks earlier, I was not using SU that frequently and I had stumbles less than 10 sites. Today I have stumbled 1,368 pages, 350 videos, 203 photos and 46 fans. See the difference? Huge isn’t it?

Now, I’m not trying to say that I’ve got into the top 50 stumbler’s list on SU. But it’s an example, to show that even if you came late to stumble, you can still make it big. Provided you know some tips and tricks. Let’s see what they are.

To increase the number of stumbles.

Stumbling is more a enjoyable experience to me and I enjoy every bit of it. It’s the perfect exercise if you are running out of ideas. So rather than seeing this as a method to just increase your number of stumbles, take this as a method to enjoy stumbling more than you ever did.

1. So enjoy stumbling, get into it deep and you’ll never regret it. 
2. Stumble using every possible channel like videos, blogs and news. It values more.
3. Rather than just stumbling, write reviews about sites that you stumbled.

Those were anybody’s guesses. Let me discuss with you some of my personal tips and tricks.

How to make it to the top on Stumble Upon in less than a week

1. Short cuts

In the stumble upon toolbar, you have the option to use short cuts to stumble and do the thumbs up.(See screenshot)

Change the shortcut to an easily accessible one, like 1 for stumbling and 2 for thumbs up. By default this is ALT+’ and ALT+1 respectively.

Now with the new short cut, you can quickly stumble a page and thumbs up or thumbs down a page. Earlier you had to do it manually and it becomes a lot easier now. Please don’t mis-use this option.

2. Reviews

Another way to get popular on Stumble upon is to write reviews. Actually, in order to rank high on Stumble upon you have to get reviewed by others. I’ve noticed that many of the top stumblers do have lot of reviews from other stumblers. And the only way to get people review is to review them first. It doesn’t mean that all of the people you have reviewed will review you back, but the more reviews you have the better.

3. Stumble more videos

Another point I noted among top stumblers is that they have lot of videos stumbled. There may not be any thumb rule to it, but yes, I think it makes more sense if you’d stumble more content, like say videos and photos, rather than just use the default option of stumbling whatever comes your way. This way you look more focussed and organized.

4.  Stumble frequently

Stumbling needs to be your daily routine. Just like you’d open your google reader, the first time you logon to the internet, make it a habit to stumble a few pages every day and write honest reviews about it.

5. Connect with the upcoming stumblers

Now, I could’ve easily said - connect with the top stumblers who have a very high stumble rate. But this is not going to help you in anyway. Because, all stumblers have a limit to add friends. After 200 friends (or so I think), you cannot add friends, but they can become your fans. In order to develop your network, you need to add friends. Top stumblers cannot add you as friend so there is no use in you adding them, instead hunt for the upcoming ones.

The upcoming ones are the guys with a good stumble ratio, and who have a good frequency of stumbles. They are most likely looking for friends who are interested in making it to the top, just like you.

6. Third party help

I really am doubtful about this point, but since it makes some sense, I thought I’ll mention it here.

There are third party stumbling helpers like SUexchange.com, which is a service that will list you guys who are interested in exchanging stumble. That is more like a link exchange, if you stumble them, they’ll stumble you.

Now, I am unaware if this is against the SU terms and service, if it is, you know what to do. Get the hell out of there.

I tried it a few times and the sites that are listed there weren’t genuine all the time. But if you need some initial help, this is the place to be.

So there you go. All the tips and tricks you need to make it to the top of stumble list. If you’d like to add me to your network, you can do it here.