One of the most asked questions about blogging is “how can I drive more traffic to my posts?” There are a lot of answers, but they usually fall into one of two camps: 1) answers that promote a specific content promotion strategy; 2) answers that talk about quality content and SEO.
These are good things, don’t get me wrong! But if you’re already doing them and you aren’t getting noticed, it’s probably because thousands of others are doing the exact same thing. There are just so many bloggers out there. And readers only have so much time to devote to reading blogs in a given day. Doing all the right things is pretty much the bare minimum now. It’s going to take something more to get noticed and build a following.
Enter this post from Susie Lindau, which gives advice about how to get just one specific audience to notice you: the WordPress editors. Being featured on WordPress has helped Susie grow her blog following, and it can help you too! Find out more by clicking through to her original post.
As always, comments are turned off for reblogged content. If you want to comment on the post, please leave your remarks on the original post. Thanks!
Featured on Discover is the blog award given by the WordPress editors. I’ve been honored to win five of these awards. They have brought thousands of views and lots of new followers to the Wild Ride. Today, I’ll let you in a little secret how you can be Discovered on WordPress too!
Editor’s Picks, Freshly Pressed, and Discover
My first Editor’s Pick was out of 375,000 other posts blogged on a day in October of 2011. I stayed on the editors’ radar and received two more in 2012. Back then, the WordPress awards were called Freshly Pressed. Now they are called, Featured on Discover.
Cue the sound of crickets.
One year almost to the day after I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I won another Freshly Pressed for An Open Letter to My Boobs. That was in April of 2014.
This list was a lot of fun to read through! I have to admit I picked up most of my UK vocabulary watching Coronation Street (originally, and later a whole list of other great British TV series.) I knew many of the words in the list, but a few didn’t match the usage I was familiar with.
The differences between British and American English are an endless source of—well, pretty much anything you can name: confusion, fascination, amusement, bad temper, accusations (subtle and otherwise) of either ignorance or stuffiness, depending on which side of the Atlantic taught you your rash assumptions.
I’ve written about the differences between British and American English before, which means I’m supposed to slip in a link or ten to tempt newcomers deeper into the blog. That sounds ominous—step deeper into the dark and trackless blog, my dears. But I have to do it anyway. Who am I to defy the rules of the blogosphere? (Note: I already do with my irrelevant photos, and I’m not likely to stop, but once in a while I should behave like a serious blogger.) So here’s the link: This will connect you to a whole category of posts. You can pick through and see what…
StumbleUpon is one of the most powerful social networks you can use to promote your blog content. It’s much less used than social media sites like Facebook or Twitter but according to TechCrunch, it was outstripping Facebook for social media traffic referrals as early as 2011. KissMetrics calls StumbleUpon “one of the best traffic generators among the top seven social media sites, referring more than other social bookmarking and voting sites such as Digg and Reddit.”
Having a StumbleUpon sharing button on your blog will help remind your readers to take advantage of this lesser-known social media site. But if you have a WordPress blog, you may have noticed that a StumbleUpon button isn’t included in the standard set of social media sharing buttons.
StumbleUpon sharing buttons are available in a number of social sharing widgets for different blogging platforms. You can also create a StumbleUpon badge in one of several styles, using an easy utility on their website. This works just great if you happen to be blogging on a platform like Blogger, but you probably already know that it’s not so easy to add many widgets and services on WordPress. Anything that requires you to use JavaScript probably won’t work. So you have to go the extra mile if you want to add a sharing button for StumbleUpon to your WordPress blogs.
StumbleUpon refers more traffic to blogs than Facebook (Image from a public domain photo by geralt/Pixabay)
How to Add a StumbleUpon Button to Your Blog
It isn’t hard at all to create a StumbleUpon button and add it to your blog with the rest of the sharing buttons. But it’s not always easy to find the instructions that tell you how to do it! If you follow these three simple steps you can easily create your own StumbleUpon sharing button in just minutes. So bookmark this page for future reference, in case you need to do it again in the future!
1) Find a StumbleUpon Icon
You will need a 16×16 pixel icon for your sharing button. StumbleUpon icons are available for download from the company, but you’ll find these ones are a fair bit larger than what you want. You could resize a suitable logo, or you can simply do a web search for a 16 x 16 px StumbleUpon icon or save one from a blog that already has a button.
Save the icon to your computer, and then upload it to the Media Gallery on your WordPress blog. Copy the URL of the icon from your blog. You’ll need this later.
2) Open the Sharing Settings in Your WordPress Blog
Go to the dashboard of your WordPress blog: now select Settings and then Sharing. You should see a text link for “Add a new service” just beneath the available social media sharing buttons. Click this link to open the form where you’ll create your StumbleUpon button.
How to access the sharing settings on your WordPress blog
Click “Add a new service”
3) Fill in the Form
The form asks you to supply the service name, a link to the icon, and the “sharing URL.” I just enter “StumbleUpon” for the service name. The icon URL is the one you saved above when you uploaded your StumbleUpon logo. And for the sharing URL you need to enter the following URL for the StumbleUpon site:
Now just click “Create Share Button” and your new StumbleUpon button should now appear under Available Services. (N.B. If your button doesn’t look right at first, don’t panic! When I created my StumbleUpon button, it looked as if the button didn’t have an icon on it at first. When I dragged the button to Enabled Services, the logo showed up in the preview.)
Fill in the form to create a new StumbleUpon button
Concerned About Trademark Issues?
Are you worried that creating your own sharing button might be considered an inappropriate use of a trademarked logo? I’m not a lawyer, but it’s my understanding that StumbleUpon wants us to have sharing buttons, just as other social networks do. They provide the site logo for download in larger sizes. They also provide a tool that allows you to select one of several sharing buttons to add to your website.
The problem is simply that their button creator uses a JavaScript that won’t work on a WordPress blog. We can’t expect StumbleUpon to offer badges that will work on 100% of sites, nor to keep up with changes on every blogging platform. They try to offer buttons that work for most people and to point you to alternative resources where those exist.
As long as you’re not using the logo to generate profit (as on a t-shirt or coffee mug that you sell) or to imply a relationship with or endorsement by StumbleUpon, you should be able to make use of the logo for legitimate purposes – such as creating social media sharing buttons or blogging about the site. So feel free to go ahead and create a StumbleUpon button for your WordPress site, and reap the benefits of encouraging your readers to Stumble your content. It won’t be long before you see it pay off with increased traffic from the social network!
Follow these 3 easy steps to add a StumbleUpon button to your WordPress blog (Image from a public domain photo by Eukalyptus/Pixabay)
This article was published on my writing blog, RubyWriter. If you are reading this content anywhere else, it has probably been stolen. Please report it to me so I can address any copyright infringements. Thank you!
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