There are thousands of MMO, SEO and Internet marketing blogs drifting around out there that will tell you Stumbleupon and other social networks is the way to get your work out there and find some traffic.

It makes me angry to read that, it really does. Stumbleupon is not just there for webmasters to abuse for their own, extremely temporary benefit. It’s there for people to network (hence social networking),  to discover new websites and to rate them based on whether they’re good or not.

If you constantly submit every page of yours to stumbleupon, each of your stumbles is going to lose potency because not enough other people will like it. You will have less and less credibility until eventually each of your stumbles will drive a mere handful of visitors each time, not the hundreds you may have hoped for.

That’s not to say you can’t use stumbleupon to plug your own occasional article, so long as it’s a good one. However, it does need to be a truly shining example of your work, and your own sites must NOT under ANY circumstances be the only think you submit to stumbleupon. It’s just bad manners to push yourself forward all the time without acknowledging others around you who may deserve some attention.

‘Self-centred’ springs to mind.

Actually, ‘Self-centred’ seems to fit most blogs about making a few dollars from the Internet. But if you want your stumbles to mean anything in terms of the traffic they drive, you have to play the system the way it’s meant be played. It’s really very simple-

1. Discover and thumbs-up the websites that are good and actually worthwhile visiting.
2. Don’t trade away your stumbles for reciprocals, especially those that are a bit dodgy, or wouldn’t have been stumbled any other way.

If you want stumble to be good to you, you have to be a decent person in the first place. Discover other people’sblogs, your mates will appreciate the favour and remember it. If you don’t like anybody else on the Internet (you scrooge) then go stumble some lolcats. Lots of people love animal photos and will agree that your discovery is worthy of a thumbs-up. The more people who agree that your submissions are worthy, the more fans you earn, the more each of your stumbles will be worth.

In short, be a good Stumbler, and your Stumbles will be good.