How to Create a StumbleUpon Account

Stumble Articles to Promote Writing

Sep 7, 2009 Michelle Schusterman

StumbleUpon is a great network for writers to share articles and content. It's quick and easy to set up an account and start stumbling.

With the vast amount of content available on the Interent growing exponentially every day, it's important that freelance writers have the ability to find their target audience on the web.

Setting up an account with StumbleUpon is a great way to meet other writers and readers interested in similar topics. Here are a few tips on setting up and maintaining a StumbleUpon account.

StumbleUpon: A Brief Overview

Like other forms of social media- Facebook, YouTube- StumbleUpon allows users to set up a personal profile and page and befriend other users. Once a user has a StumbleUpon account, he/she can begin adding any form of content, like links, articles, web pages, blogs, video, or audio files, and sort them with tags and labels.

This content is automatically visible to other Stumblers, who can rate and share, causing a viral effect. Because StumbleUpon "learns" what categories each user prefers, it automatically begins to find a target audience for writers.

For example, a travel writer who stumbles his articles under the label "travel" will make his content visible to other stumblers interested in travel.

How to Set up a StumbleUpon Account

Creating a StumbleUpon Account and getting started is simple.

To begin, go to the sign up page on StumbleUpon.com. Signing up will require the user's email address, a permanent user name, and a password. Membership is completely free.
StumbleUpon will send an email to the provided email address that the user must open to confirm membership. The user will then receive a confirmation email that the account is ready.
Members have the option of installing the StumbleUpon toolbar, which is highly recommended. Installing the toolbar takes just one click and requires restarting the browser.
Once the toolbar is installed, users can customize their preferences by selecting the topics that interest them most (food, education, religion, politics, etc.). The toolbar offers several icons:

SU: Stumble! Clicking this automatically generates a new page that StumbleUpon believes will interest the user based on their preferences. Click this icon over and over to constantly refresh and see a new page.
I like it! Click this to give the content a thumbs up and recommend it to other stumblers.
Thumbs down: Click this to give the content a poor rating, report spam, report duplicate content, or block the website.
Other icons allow the user to quickly share with other stumblers and friends, bookmark favorites, look up info, and more.

Maintaining a StumbleUpon Account

To be a successful stumbler, users must stay fairly active on the site. Writers should never only stumble their own content. Part of the fun of this community is meeting other writers and readers with the same interests who want to share exciting new content and promote one another's work.

Simply put, writers would do well to stumble two or three articles for every personal article they stumble.

More About Social Media for Writers

To learn more about what stumbling can do for freelance writers, check out How StumbleUpon Can Benefit Writers.

The copyright of the article How to Create a StumbleUpon Account in Resources for Writers is owned by Michelle Schusterman. Permission to republish How to Create a StumbleUpon Account in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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Creating a StumbleUpon Account is Easy	Freelance Writers Benefit from StumbleUpon