No business building tool is truly effective without a strategy. With a strategy in place, you are able to not only create a plan of action, but also assess your success. And just like with any other business building tool, when using StumbleUpon to build your business, drive traffic and increase awareness, it is imperative to start with a strategy.

Here are five steps for effectively creating your StumbleUpon Strategy:

#1 What are your StumbleUpon goals?

Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook have quantifiable measurements. You can track how many followers you have. You can track posts and retweets. StumbleUpon also provides a number of quantifiable data points including how many times a page has been Stumbled.

However, hopefully your StumbleUpon goals exceed the limited data points that StumbleUpon provides. They might look something like, I want to increase website traffic by 10% using StumbleUpon, or they might be more broad profit goals or opt-in list numbers. Before you start using StumbleUpon decide why you are using it. What are your goals?

#2 How are you going to effectively communicate your brand personality?

StumbleUpon gives users the ability to create a profile and to interact and connect with other users. This is powerful stuff! However, it is also important to make sure you are representing a cohesive brand personality or image throughout all of your business building tactics. The image you present your blog followers therefore, or your Facebook followers, must be consistent with your StumbleUpon image. Before you begin participating, decide what that image is if you do not already know, and plan how you are going to remain consistent.

#3 How are you going to interact on StumbleUpon?

StumbleUpon users, like many other social networking users, bloggers and even content creators, sometimes are naive about the commitment involved to generate success. In order for StumbleUpon to work effectively, you must participate in the community. You must interact. Plan how often you are going to interact before you start using this tool. For example, I am going to spend 20 minutes each evening/morning rating sites and interacting on StumbleUpon.

#4 What content will you Stumble?

Stumbling some of your own content is part of the process and benefit of StumbleUpon. However, you do not want to stumble or submit all of your content. Before you get started Stumbling, decide which top quality pages you want to submit or make a plan to create them.

#5 How are you going to test and track results?

No strategy is ultimately effective unless you are able to test and track your results. Determine what your goals are and how you are going to measure them. For example, if your goal is to increase traffic by 10% using StumbleUpon make sure you have the analytic software or code in place to track that.

StumbleUpon is a powerful business building tool. To use it to its full potential, it is essential to have a strategy in place before you begin using it!