Help Elements Grow with StumbleUpon

[Scaredgirl]

Ok, everyone, it's time to help Elements grow (and improve your internet experience in the process).

We have had many people join Elements because they found it using StumbleUpon (http://www.stumbleupon.com/). I'm one of those people. Now it's time to help more people find this great game.

What is StumbleUpon?
StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 8 million+ other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend. (quoted from official site http://www.stumbleupon.com/aboutus/ (http://www.stumbleupon.com/aboutus/))

Here is more information to anyone interested: http://www.doshdosh.com/a-comprehensive-guide-to-stumbleupon-how-to-build-massive-traffic-to-your-website-and-monetize-it/ (http://www.doshdosh.com/a-comprehensive-guide-to-stumbleupon-how-to-build-massive-traffic-to-your-website-and-monetize-it/)


Now that you know what it is, it's time to start using it.

STEP 1 - Create an account
Go to http://www.stumbleupon.com/signup/ (http://www.stumbleupon.com/signup/) and create an account

STEP 2 - Download StumbleUpon Toolbar (optional but highly recommended!!!)
You can skip this step but I recommend you don't. This toolbar is the best thing ever happened to me and I cannot live without it anymore.

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/138 (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/138)
Internet Explorer: http://download.cnet.com/StumbleUpon-for-Internet-Explorer/3000-12512_4-10563493.html (http://download.cnet.com/StumbleUpon-for-Internet-Explorer/3000-12512_4-10563493.html)

This next part is important:
Once you've installed the toolbar, go to TOOLS -> TOOLBAR OPTIONS -> SEARCH & TAGGING, and choose Highlight recommended search results and Show StumbleUpon logo on recommended results

What this does is that it shows these cool stars when you search with Google. Stars represent the times other people have given thumbs up for that particular site. Trust me, it will make your internet searching 100 times more efficient because you can find the best sites among all the useless crap.

Here's an example of google search done with the toolbar installed:


Ok, back to Elements..

STEP 3 - Rate Elements the Game

Go to http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.elementsthegame.com/ (http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.elementsthegame.com/), give Elements a thumbs up and write a short comment where you tell everyone how great the game is.

STEP 4 - Rate Elements the Game Official Forums

Go to http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/elementscommunity.com/forum/ (http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/elementscommunity.com/forum/), give these forums a thumbs up and write a short comment where you tell everyone how great our community is.


Done.

StumbleUpon is extremely popular and extremely effective social networking tool. If most of the community participate in this little project we will get THOUSANDS of new players.

So please spend a few minutes of your time to help Elements grow. You will get the awesome StumbleUpon toolbar in the process. I can guarantee that you will love it. I personally use it every single day.

I will add some other social networking sites later and anyone who rates/adds Elements in all of them will get a cool award icon.

Thanks!

[Kamietsu]

I got me one of them SU accounts. such a lovely site and toolbar. I'll do this as soon as i can.

[Essence]

Good stuff.  StumbleUpon is only the beginning if you're actually going to organize some serious promotion, though.

Start with social bookmarking: put together instructions similar to this for Digg, Redditt, Delicious...heck, just give everyone AddThis (http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php) and tell them to sign up for and bookmark Elements on every social-bookmarking site on there.

Then, organize a minipage fest.  Build a Squidoo page about how awesome Elements is (Here is a sample (http://www.squidoo.com/tactics_arena_online) that I built about the last game I was obsessive over), and have everyone build smaller fanpages on Squidoo, Weebly, Hubpages, and Terapad, all linking to the Squidoo page.  It sounds weird, but the traffic to the game will actually be better if you have the smaller pages link to the main Squidoo page than if you link straight to the game's site.

Finally, get some people to go to the big forums that have gamer orientations or subsections, and post.  The IGN boards, OffTopic.com, SomethingAwful, ZenHex, GameFAQs, DigitalSpy, NeoGAF, GameSpot, File Front, and so on.   Register, make a sig about Elements, and just plain post in hot topics to maximize the number of people that see your sig.

Those are about the most effective free marketing techniques out there.

[Scaredgirl]

Good stuff.  StumbleUpon is only the beginning if you're actually going to organize some serious promotion, though.

Start with social bookmarking: put together instructions similar to this for Digg, Redditt, Delicious...heck, just give everyone AddThis (http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php) and tell them to sign up for and bookmark Elements on every social-bookmarking site on there.

Then, organize a minipage fest.  Build a Squidoo page about how awesome Elements is (Here is a sample (http://www.squidoo.com/tactics_arena_online) that I built about the last game I was obsessive over), and have everyone build smaller fanpages on Squidoo, Weebly, Hubpages, and Terapad, all linking to the Squidoo page.  It sounds weird, but the traffic to the game will actually be better if you have the smaller pages link to the main Squidoo page than if you link straight to the game's site.

Finally, get some people to go to the big forums that have gamer orientations or subsections, and post.  The IGN boards, OffTopic.com, SomethingAwful, ZenHex, GameFAQs, DigitalSpy, NeoGAF, GameSpot, File Front, and so on.   Register, make a sig about Elements, and just plain post in hot topics to maximize the number of people that see your sig.

Those are about the most effective free marketing techniques out there.

Lol, that's some serious viral marketing.

Very interesting, thanks for the info. Now all we need to do is quit our day jobs and start marketing Elements.

[Cisco]

Made a search on google elements now has 3 stars nice.

[Scaredgirl]

Made a search on google elements now has 3 stars nice.

Too bad nobody uses those keywords when they are searching for a new game.

A search with "free online ccg" puts Elements on the top of the second page which is not bad but it would be nice to have Elements on the first page.

[plastiqe]

I just watched a random video on underwater life (

) with my new stumble button, fantastic.

[TheMadEvil]

Great idea, I've actually not heard about Stumble except for the name...thought it was like Dig, etc.

...sorry, not trying to troll. I actually wanted to mark this post for later viewing, to make sure I don't forget to do this (on a school computer now, gotta install this stuff when I get home)

Thanks for the info

[Reasoner]

Il be doing this, sounds great, too bad i came from kong