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?

In a recent discussion with someone trying to make money on the internet, he told me something really interesting that made me think if it’s true. The guy is almost sure that Digg.com was created mostly for blogs. The next thing I did was to access the site and to get me some statistics.

Really nice. There were 12 blogs featured on the front page of Digg.com, 7 blogs on the 2nd page, 10 blogs on the 3rd page and finally 10 blogs on the 4th page. I considered that 60 headlines would be a pretty good base to start with. So the math says that : out of 60 news, 39 are blogs which means that 65% of the news on Digg.com are usually from blogs.

Blogs are great resource for everyone because of their fresh content, which is why the search engines love them so much. So, going back to my question, were the social bookmarking websites intended for blogs? NO, I don’t think so, but since there are lots and lots of content on blogs, they cannot be neglected.

I know I have talked about being on Digg or not, therefore I’ve visited Digg more than I usually do for the last week. I found some interesting things the most important being that I don’t think it’s just me that thinks Digg is getting more and more baiting content.What does it mean to bait the Digg users? Writing content that will trigger the little monsters inside. You incite them with something. Articles starting with “5 reasons to …” or “Eleven ways to …” are going to attract the Digg user and will get your story dugg. That is because the human being is always much more interested in getting the information from someone else rather than making their own judgement that will create the same or probably a better analysis. Why should I make a list of my top preferred gadgets launched in the first quarter of 2007, when someone can do that for me? For me this is what Made For Digg (MFD) websites mean.

Write for your audience. If it’s Digg they want, give it to them.

However though it may seem like I presented you the whole situation in a negative way this is not fully correct. Creating Digg content is not bad because this is what web2.0 means. To make the user act with it’s feelings, passions and opinions. The comments on the story are, for me, much more important than the story itself. You get to see what people think. Muhammad Saleem wrote a post at CopyBlogger a few days ago and it looks like he is going to give tips on writing for the social bookmarking websites from now on over there.

So for those that wait for the “MFD sites : good or bad” answer I am saying it can be good but it can also be bad. Whenever you launch a website you need to decide who will you be writing for? What kind of people? Also need to see what kind of articles you are going to create. Because if you plan to target RSS readers but once in a while you write MFD content they may not like it. Problogger says that many bloggers are tricked by thousands and thousands of visitors and they start to blog about stuff which is not really a good part of their community. Use Digg to “expand your horizons and grow your audience – but keep your core readers right in your focus” he said.

My audience is not Digg therefore I don’t have a Digg button right now. You think it’s worth it? I bet you can do it manually.