How to Build a Great Blog Learning from Stumblers

I tried a small exercise with StumbleUpon. I tried to find out the kind of things that I liked after giving thumbs up to 10 random sites. I was a blogger wearing a Stumbler’s hat.

StumbleUpon is my favorite Social Network Site. StumbleUpon helps us discover and share great websites. We have no clue as to what site is going to load.. so in a way I like the thrills that I get.

Here are my topics of interest, so that you can gauge the sites that might pop up :

Before starting to Stumble, I opened Notepad to note the sites that I gave thumbs up and why I liked them.

So here we go:

1. simple, useful & get things done - http://myspacemp3.org/

2. i always wanted to do something like this and I liked the photos - http://www.offbeathomes.com/the-teenage-dream-pad/

3.useful tips and tricks, also subscribed to the blog! - http://www.firefoxfacts.com/

4.good list post, bias as i’m a gmail fan - http://www.reviewsaurus.com/2007/07/05/10-reasons-why-i-like-gmail/

5.a great way to tell a story! with movie stills! - http://www.shakethatbrain.com/church-fairytales-vertical/tips.html

6. great photos, made me laugh - http://www.charchaa.com/mostviewedpictures

7.great photos and slides, about love, i love mushy and emotional stuffs - http://www.thelovemovie.com/

8. stories told in a single sentence, i liked the site and concept - http://www.onesentence.org/stories/696/

9. stories of many genres, good read in future if i have time - http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/indexframe.html

10. liked the tips and my kind of topic that i like to read - http://community.gaiam.com/gaiam/p/8WaystoStrengthenYourRelationship.html

What Stumblers Like?

1. Brief and to the point articles. I’m stumbling because that I have some free time and want to pass time productively. Even though I like reading essay type articles, I was time challenged and preferred to read brief articles only.

2. A Picture tells 1000 words. I generally tend to like articles with photos/images. As pointed out, I don’t have time to spend in the site reading.

3. Useful Tips. Offer useful tips that help me improve the way I look up on things.

4. Design Matters. Even though I might read your blog in Google Reader however well it’s designed, I will read and proceed ONLY if the design is OK. Design is critical in my first impression about your site.

5. Tag your Article Correctly. As you see from my 10 thumbs up, I love to read ‘my-kind-of-articles/topics’. I don’t care about articles however terrific if the tags are improper.

Stats

1. 2 blogs subscribed for RSS feeds
2. 2 sites bookmarked
3. Not a single site given thumbs down (I give thumbs now only if the site is really bad, otherwise I move on)
4. 4 blocked sites [How to access blocked sites]
5. I forgot to track the number of sites that I stumbled. It must be nearly 75.

Lessons Stumbled

A word about stumbling our own articles (sometimes I do). I don’t care who stumbled the article and also how popular the article is in stumbled. I stumble from my Firefox toolbar so I’ve no clue about the article thats going to load.

I give thumbs up to the articles/sites which I’ve never knew before. Not that I want to give thumbs up to popular sites, but as I know the site (or read the article) I didn’t like repetition. I want to stumble and discover cool sites.

Only if article is good enough, I visited the home page. As I don’t trust your site (as yet), it’s better that I see one of your article before before I see other article and eventually subscribing/bookmarking (if I like) your site.

Just because I have nothing to do, don’t think I’m Stumbling to kill time. Respect my time.

P.S.: Nice tips there. I got to follow them henceforth in this blog. Fellow Stumbler and Blogger Shankar Ganesh also shares the lessons learnt using StumbleUpon.

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