This is a guest post by Skellie. She writes tips and tutorials on creating better blog content at Skelliewag.org.

StumbleUpon is my favorite social media. Unlike Digg, or del.icio.us, you don’t need hundreds of votes to start getting some serious traffic to your blog. In fact, only two or three votes can result in hundreds of visitors to your blog or a single blog post.

While it’s always lovely to have one of your posts stumbled, I want to suggest some ways bloggers can get the most out of their StumbleUpon profiles. You do have one, don’t you?

1. Browse for ideas

StumbleUpon is host to a lot of great content and it can often be quite inspiring. When you’re running short of ideas, a quick series of stumbles can be a good way to get your creative juices flowing. If you want to view results only from the topic you blog about, you can select this in your profile.

2. Locate great links

Connecting with other SU users with similar interests can open up a large collection of great links for you to explore. The SU profiles of like-minded people are great places to find source material for link posts.

3. Connect with readers

Some of your loyal readers will have SU profiles. If you notice the same users repeatedly stumbling your articles then take the time to add them as friends, or message them to show your appreciation.

4. Connect with other bloggers

This works like the above step, but in reverse. You interact with other blogs as readers interact with yours, voting for pages on blogs you admire. The more traffic you send to them via SU the more likely they’ll be to investigate your profile and discover the face behind all that extra traffic.

5. Build your personal brand

When you ‘discover’ a site (in other words, when you’re the first SU user to vote for it), a link to your profile image and details will appear on the vote page for that item. If your item goes viral then you’ll receive a lot of exposure as the person who ‘discovered’ the site.

Over to you

• How do you get the most out of StumbleUpon?