I enjoy Stumbleupon, but I also use it to build traffic to some of my site

Yes, I do Stumble my own sites, but only if they’re related to the theme of my Stumble blog pages, and I don’t Stumble any site more than once a month. A typical stumble in niches related to my blog will bring 200 - 400 visits, and far more if some of those visitors review the page as well.

The good thing is that many Stumblers look at more than one page, and my Adsense income is definitely going up on the sites that I Stumble regularly. - It looks like some Stumblers are bookmarking the site, and returning later to browse.

My goal is to have 200 mutual Stumble friends, and a large number of fans, who enjoy my Stumbleupon pages. This will help to increase the traffic to the pages I Stumble.

Although I reached 200 friends relatively early, they’re not all mutual friends. So I make a point of culling my friends regularly. If I’ve friended someone, and after a few weeks they have not reciprocated, and especially if its been a month or more since they’ve been online, I’m going to delete them off my friends list, to make room for someone else. And of course, the first place I’ll look is on my fans list.

I also like to give my friends a review. I didn’t really think of that when I started. I have noticed that most people have more Stumble fans than reviews. But I figure if a blog is worth friending, its worth a review. I try to review my fans blogs as well. Of course, when you review someone, there’s a good chance they’ll reciprocate, which will bring more people to your Stumble pages.

I’ve actually set up an Excel spreadsheet for my friends and fans reviews, with one tab for mutual friends, one for friends and one for fans. Each tab has 4 columns - Needs Review, Reviewed, Not Now, and Notes. The Not Now column is mainly for fans whose pages don’t have any content that relates to my Stumble bog.

Every week, I add my new friends and fans to the spreadsheet, and then check out the blogs in the Needs Review column. Depending on what I find, I either review them and move them to the reviewed column, or decide not to review them now, and move them to the Not Now column, and add a very brief note about why I haven’t reviewed them yet.

If I have time, after I’ve cleared out the Needs Review column, I’ll revisit the Not Now column.

Maybe this sounds like a lot of work, but its really quite quick to maintain, and I spread the work out, and only review one or two sites from the spreadsheet, most days - that way, it stays enjoyable and doesn’t feel like work.

More on Stumbleupon Frends:

Understanding the Value of ‘Friends’ in Social Media Websites - Let’s use StumbleUpon as an example. Some have suggested that it’s important to only have mutual friends on StumbleUpon since there’sa friend limit of 200 users. I think that’s just a really limited perspective on how to develop …

Visualizing the StumbleUpon Friends Network - The folks over at SocialMediaTrader put together a great visualization of the StumbleUpon friends network. They did something similar to what I did with my Last.fm visualization, but because they used IBM’s Many Eyes, the visualization …

10 Ways to Be a Good StumbleUpon Friend - StumbleUpon seems to be everyone’s favorite social media site these days. One of the reasons to love SU is its active community of users. As a part of that community, being a great “friend” to other users can enhance everyone’s …

How To Treat Your Friends At StumbleUpon - I have also met a lot of great people via StumbleUpon, with many of my same interests. Some of those people are my StumbleUpon friends. Because they take me to so many interesting places, I want to treat them well. Here’s how I do it. …

How To Boost Your StumbleUpon Friends List - This is arguably one of the best and fastest ways to build up a new StumbleUpon account friends list. One set-back that may occur using this method though is that you stumble some pretty ridiculous sites. …