My primary blog has 4 posts that were on the front page of Digg between September and November of 2007. Digg obviously sends a significant rush of traffic to popular posts, and for that reason many bloggers place most of their social media optimization and marketing efforts on reaching the front page of Digg.
StumbleUpon is of course known for sending traffic over a longer period of time, whereas the Digg traffic dries up pretty quickly. I thought it would be interesting to compare the traffic from Digg to the traffic from StumbleUpon 6 months after the posts appeared on Digg. Overall, StumbleUpon has been a much larger source of traffic for me than Digg, because these are the only 4 posts that have ever had decent results with Digg. So this test is ignoring a number of posts that have done very well with StumbleUpon and not even been submitted to Digg, as well as those that only got a few Diggs.
The four posts are listed below with some relevant stats.
77 Resources to Simplify Your Life as a Web Designer
Total pageviews: 161,198
Visitors from Digg: 31,112
Visitors from StumbleUpon: 53,354
69 Tools to Monitor, Measure, and Track Your Website
Total pageviews: 29,169
Visitors from Digg: 14,934
Visitors from StumbleUpon: 4,734
25 Beautiful Minimalistic Website Designs
Total pageviews: 62,807
Visitors from Digg: 19,320
Visitors from StumbleUpon: 13,636
99 Resources for Web 2.0 Design
Total pageviews: 123,970
Visitors from Digg: 26,828
Visitors from StumbleUpon: 39,016
Total from these four posts:
Total pageviews: 377,144
Visitors from Digg: 92,194
Visitors from SU: 110,740
Overall, from these four posts StumbleUpon has sent 20% more visitors than Digg has. I think it’s interesting to see that StumbleUpon has the potential to outdo even the posts that make the front page of Digg. Making the front page of Digg will send a rush of traffic, but there are also some negatives to Digg traffic. I experience hosting issues, plenty of negativity and criticism (some justified and some not), and since the last experience on the Digg front page I really haven’t gone after that traffic. Personally, I prefer StumbleUpon and Delicious to Digg.
Admittedly this post takes a look at limited information. Numbers of visitors really mean next to nothing, while the impact and response from these visitors are far more important. A more detailed look may be a topic for another day, but I simply want to look at what so many bloggers are chasing (Digg) and see how it stacks up in the long-run.
What’s Your Experience?
Which social media site do you get the best results from? Would you rather have a quick rush of traffic or a slower, steadier amount of traffic that is spread out over a period of time?
Posted in SMM | 9 Comments »
It seems like every day I see more and more being written about Twitter. I have to admit that I don’t really get the fascination with micro blogging, but it’s becoming more and more common, and many bloggers find the services to be extremely useful for connecting with their audience. With all of the information that I’ve been seeing on Twitter, I decided to put together this collection of resources.
Getting Started:
The Big Juicy Twitter Guide - An in-depth look at Twitter.
Twictionary - A dictionary for Twitter.
TwitDir - Another Twitter directory.
The Twitter Blog - Follow their official blog.
Explore Twitter - Learn more about Twitter.
Interacting with Friends:
FriendFeed - Discover what your friends are sharing.
Twitter Karma - View your friends.
TweetWheel - Find out which of your Twitter friends know each other.
Who Should I Follow? - Twitter Friend Recommendations.
Intwition - What’s being linked to on Twitter?
CrowdStatus - Create a crowd.
My Tweeple - Manage your following and followers.
GroupTweet - Group message broadcasting for Twitter.
Twitter 100 - See your followers at a glance.
Quotably - Follow Twitter conversations.
TwitterLocal - Follow tweets from a certain area.
TwitterVerse - What is Twitter doing lately?
Twemes - Twitter memes.
Tweetmeme - Twitter meme.
TwitterWho - Batch people search.
Protecting Yourself:
The Twitter Blacklist - Identify the spammers.
Twitter Twerp Scan - Find users who are following too many people in attempt to get followers.
Twitter Snooze - Hit the snooze button on your verbose friends.
Organization:
Socialthing - Get your digital life together.
Twittercal - Tweet your Google calendar.
Twitter Digest - Read updates in a more manageable fashion.
Twitku - Read posts on Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce.
Twitter Timer - Set an alarm for things you need to remember.
Twitt.icio.us - Send links from Twitter to del.icio.us.
Twitter Where - Subscribe to Twitter feeds around a certain geographical location.
Stats & Tracking:
TweetBurner - Track what happens with the links you share.
Twitt(url)y - Tracks what URLs Twitter users are talking about.
Twitter Charts - View the number of tweets by a user according to time of day and day of the week.
Twitstat - Real time Twitter analytics.
TweetStats - Graphin’ your stats.
TwitterBuzz - What people are linking to.
Twittermeter - Monitor word frequency.
Tweet Volume - Enter words or phrases and see how often they appear on Twitter.
Twitter Vision - A real-time geographic visualization of posts to Twitter.
Twitterholic - Shows popular Twitter feeds.
Search:
Summize - Search Twitter in real time.
Twitter Search - A customized search engine for Twitter.
Maps:
YouTwit - Put Twitter status on Google maps.
TwittEarth - Live Twitts all over the world.
Desktop Clients:
Twhirl - A desktop client for Twitter.
Snitter - Desktop client for Mac and Windows.
Twitterific - Desktop client for Mac.
gTwitter - Desktop client for Linux.
Witty - Desktop client for Vista.
Twitteroo - Desktop client for the PC.
TwitterPod - Desktop client for Mac.
Twitux - Desktop client for Gnome.
Mobile Clients:
Twitterberry - Mobile client for Blackberry.
Email Twitter - Mobile client.
Twoble - Mobile client for Windows Mobile Pocket PCs.
Email:
TwitterMail - Tweet via email.
OutTwit - Use Twitter from Outlook.
IM:
TwitterIM - Tweet via IM.
Widgets:
Twitter Opera Widget - Widget for Opera.
Twitter Widget - From Widgetbox.
Twadget - The Twitter Vista sidebar gadget.
Voice:
TwitterFone - Send messages to Twitter with voice.
Development:
Twitter Development Talk - Google group.
Twitter Bots - Google code.
Blogging:
Twitter Feed - Feed your blog to Twitter.
Photos and File Sharing:
TweetPic - Share photos.
Twitxr - Share photos.
Twittershare - Share files.
SnapTweet - Send Flickr photos to Twitter.
Audio & Video:
Twiddeo - Twitter plus video.
TwitterGram - Share audio.
TwitSay - Give your Twitter account a voice.
Other Resources:
Twibler - Automatically post your new eBay listings on Twitter.
Tweet Clouds - Make word clouds from public streams.
BBC News - Get BBC headlines via Twitter.
Articles About Twitter
Twitter 101: Clarifying the Rules for Newbies - SheGeeks
Posting and Replying with Images and Links with Twitter - Etienne Teo
5 Tips to Grow Your Twitter Presence - ProBlogger
13 Odd Ways to Use Twitter - Social Media Trader
Get Into Twitter or Get Outta Public Relations - PR Squared
Twitter Feeds Made Simple - ClickPopMedia
Video: Twitter in Plain English - Common Craft
Twitter: What’s the Point? - Newsvine
Tweeting for Companies 101 - HorsePigCow
How to Use Twitter to Build Brand Integrity - Marketing Vox
Twitter and Business: The Conclusion - Business and Blogging
How We Use Twitter for Journalism - ReadWriteWeb
10 Things Twitter Users Should Not Do - Valley Wag
Twitter Hashtags and Groups - American Pai
8 Awesome Firefox Plugins for Twitter - Mashable
10 Ways Twitter Can Boost Your Social News Profile - ReadWriteWeb
Copyright and Twitter - Blog Herald
My Essential Twitter Tools - Web-Strategist.com
Twitter Can Be Liberated - Here’s How - TechCrunch
Twitter May Not Have to Worry About Uptime Anymore - TechCrunch
RFC: OpenTweets - Why is MicroBlogging Centralized? - Scott Hanselman
Why Decentralizing Twitter is so Important - Scripting.com
Decentralized Twitter’s Time Has Come - BroadbandMechanics.com
Home Tweet Home: Energy-Savvy House Broadcasts on Twitter - Wired.com
If you’re a Twitter user feel free to leave your username or a link to your profile below. Mine is stevensnell.
Posted in Resources | 15 Comments »
The reader profile is a regular series where I attempt to give something back to one of my readers. It typically includes some information about his/her online projects as well as a mini interview.
Today we’re featuring Maria Reyes-McDavis from WebSuccessDiva.com. Maria offers a variety of services to help online entrepreneurs achieve greater success with their business. Her site of course covers all of the details about her services, plus she also posts to her blog. Some noteworthy posts that you should check out: Blog Design and Layout - Keep it Simple! (video post), Is Your Blog Ready for Your Social Media Marketing Strategies?, and Your Social Media Marketing Audience is Different, Treat Them Accordingly.
Now you can get to know more about Maria through this mini interview.
1. You provide consulting services to clients, including social media marketing. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do as a consultant and how you’re able to help website owners?
My clients typically come to me burned out from what I call the “chase-the-gurus-tail” syndrome. They’ve typically spent a ton of money on the latest “it” thing in online marketing, they’ve likely been to all the seminars, they’ve read a ton of blogs, and now they are just exhausted from chaos of it all. My job, in a nut shell, is to help my clients learn to navigate and leverage what works for their business objectives and market. Every social media tactic has a purpose and we set them out on a plan that gets them results. From online business automation (auto-responders, etc) to branding and visibility, to the bigger goal of increased ROI and revenues. Social media is a huge chunk of what we integrate into each custom plan for our clients. We either manage the entire process, it’s like outsourcing your entire online marketing department, because we do it all — or, we provide training and mentoring for the ambitious do-it-yourself’er.
We use social media (including social networking, viral marketing, blogging, social media optimization, micro-blogging, and anything else you can find in this category), as leverage - because it brings benefits across all other areas of marketing. Social media, when used appropriately, has a tremendous power to increase the ROI on all major marketing areas (it benefits SEO, SEM, online branding, etc) and ultimately increase revenues (for too many reasons to list). At the end of the day, our job is to make our clients money, social media has been a huge part of our success.
2. How have you been able to use social media to promote yourself?
As far as marketing my company, social media is the only tool we use online, and we currently have a standing wait list of clients. Social media has enabled my team to manage every aspect of our online reputation; build strategic relationships across the world; research and draw information directly from our audience to better serve them; and a host of other benefits — which ultimately benefit our bottom line.
We’ve been able to auto-communicate and synchronize a ton of technical tasks by simply getting creative with the technology. Connecting our Twitter to the blog, to the Facebook, and with a little custom scripting to our entire network of websites, has allowed us to blast out content/marketing across a much bigger potential audience than before. We’ve been able to use social media for search engine optimization - like using Squidoo, our Twitter tweets, and more - to get excellent rankings we couldn’t have reached before. We’ve been able to create systems, that over time have given us huge jumps in rankings, traffic, and profits.
And most importantly, we’ve been able to really connect with our market - at their level, in their comfort zone - socially. This gives us valuable marketing information, preferences knowledge, and ease into sales opportunities. Simply engaging in social media, at a meaningful, consistent level - has helped us grow faster in 3 years than ever before.
3. You have links in your sidebar to your profile on many different social media sites. Which ones do you use most actively and which ones do you enjoy the most?
Facebook and Twitter are our key tools used for branding, visibility, and networking. Twitter, in particular, is great. Twitter tweets come up in search engines, you can use it to “feed” content to various places, and it’s a great way to build a good rapport with my market. Recently, I’ve found another use for Twitter is to get instant feedback - once you tweet a question you can get a tremendous response.
We also love social media sites like Squidoo and HubPages. Both are great avenues for pushing optimized content in the search engines. For our purposes, search engines are still one of the largest sources of traffic we target. We’re also big on using sites like Flickr, YouTube, and Udderz for pushing optimized multimedia into the search engine mix.
Posted in Reader Profiles | 5 Comments »
There are at least a few sensitive issues involving social media marketing. Submitting your own posts is one of them, and asking friends for votes is definitely another. If you’ve been around social media and blogging for a while, you’ve probably received a request from someone at some point to digg a submission or give a thumbs up on StumbleUpon.
Most social media sites provide an official feature to allow sharing of links (such as Digg’s shout system or StumbleUpon’s share feature). Those features certainly do get used, but many bloggers prefer to send an email (or IM) to a friend rather than using a share feature. The share functions are not always the most user-friendly, and legitimate requests can sometimes get lost in the spam. Plus, social media sites can track what links are shared this way, and they can adjust the algorithm, which makes a vote for a shared link less significant.
Some bloggers are hesitant to ask friends for a vote through an official share feature or by email. Some others will use one approach but not the other. Those who don’t share their own links with friends typically don’t do so because they feel like they’ll be annoying others, and in some cases this is true.
Through my first few months of blogging I never asked anyone for a social media vote, partly because I didn’t have much of a network at that point, and partly because I didn’t want to bother anyone. As I started building a network I also started getting emails from other bloggers requesting a vote. I realized that I was actually happy to help those who I liked and the content that I felt was worthy, so I figured that other bloggers may also feel the same way. Now I do request votes from friends (using official share features and email), and I regularly get requests from friends.
5 Tips for Sharing Links with Friends
1 - Don’t overkill
This can be difficult because we all have a different opinion of how much is too much. My rule of thumb is don’t send more requests to anyone than you would like to receive from them. Obviously, sending too many requests will hurt those friendships that you’ve developed and you’ll seem like you’re only interested in your own gain.
2 - Send to those that you have a real relationship with
With most social media sites it’s pretty easy to build up a big list of “friends” that don’t really know you, and you don’t know them. From my experience, your requests will be more effective and more welcome if you have a genuine relationship with others. I’m not saying you should never send a shout on Digg to all of your friends, but think about who you’re making requests to, and evaluate the relationship. Maybe they also send you links and you’re both fine with not having a real connection, but this won’t be the case with every social media user.
3 - Offer to return the favor
If you’re going to request votes from others, you should also be willing to vote for them when their content is worthy. If you’re requesting links and not willing to return the favor when it is justified, you will not be making too many long-term friends.
4 - Do it when it will make a difference
My advice is to save your requests for when they will have a significant impact. If getting 2 or 3 diggs to a submission isn’t going to make a real difference, wait until you have a submission that just needs a little final push. With this approach your requests will be more effective and it will keep you from going overboard requesting votes to every post.
5 - Promote only quality content
This should go without saying, but don’t ask others to vote for something that isn’t worthy of a vote. Most of us take some pride in what we vote for, so don’t put your friends in an awkward position where they want to help you, but they don’t want to vote for something that is sub-par. If you follow tip #4, this should be automatic.
What’s Your Opinion?
Do you get requests from your friends? If so, what’s your feeling on the situation, and do you also ask for votes on your own submissions? Do you prefer to use the official features on social media sites, or do you like to use email or IM?
Posted in SMM | 9 Comments »
Relying too heavily on social media traffic is pretty easy for bloggers to do. If you have some time to work on your blog you can go after social media and maybe see a few thousand visitors within 24 hours, or you can work on developing some other types of traffic that might lead to a trickle of 10-25 visitors per day in the short-term. That’s a pretty convincing reason for most of us to concentrate our efforts on social media optimization. However, despite the potential to get a quick rush of visitors, that’s not a good reason to ignore the need to build other sources of traffic as well.
The Costs of Over Reliance On Social Media Traffic
1 - It’s not reliable
Sure, you may be able to get to the front page of Digg or generate a bunch of traffic from StumbleUpon, but can you count on that happening next week? Next month? Next year? No, you really can’t. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that I do believe that social media traffic can be very valuable to a blogger, but it’s simply not a traffic source that you can count on for the future. It might lead to thousands of visitors, but it also might lead to none. If you abandon other sources of traffic in order to concentrate on getting huge results from social media, you could find yourself facing a huge drop when your blog is suddenly no longer popular with social media sites.
2 - It’s short-term
Most bloggers would love to land on the front page of Digg, and many spend hours on Digg adding “friends” to try and help their chances. While Digg will send an amount of traffic that is almost unbelievable to most of us, it will be gone within a few days. Say you do get to the front page of Digg and it sends 15,000 visitors over the course of a few days. That’s one-time traffic. If you’re able to build some links and optimize your pages to get an extra 50 visitors per day from search engines, that totals over 17,000 visitors over the course of a year, and it will probably continue or even increase beyond one year (not to mention the fact that search engine traffic is generally targeted more effectively than social media traffic).
3 - Social media visitors are generally not responsive
When compared to other types of traffic, social media produces visitors that don’t click on as many ads, are less likely to subscribe, and less likely to purchase anything. That certainly doesn’t mean that all visitors from social media are unresponsive, but as a whole if you compare 1,000 visitors from social media to 1,000 visitors from just about any other traffic source there will be a noticeable difference in response levels. In my opinion you can make up for this by having higher volumes of traffic from social media, but it’s undeniable that in general, visitors from social media sites are less responsive.
4 - Social media traffic may not be highly targeted
If your blog gets thousands of visitors from social media sites, chances are many of them are not targeted very well and are probably not that interested in your blog as a whole. Some traffic from social media can be very well targeted, such as visitors from niche social media sites or visitors who come from a specific category page on a major social media site. However, in general you will find that traffic from Digg or StumbleUpon is not targeted as well as many other traffic sources.
5 - Social media traffic requires constant effort
Because traffic from social media is so short-term, in order to consistently drive traffic from these sites you’ll need to continually add new content to your blog that will attract votes on social media sites. With search engine traffic you may be able to sit back and watch traffic flow in to posts that you published a year ago, but that’s not likely with social media. StumbleUpon is about the only social media site that will still send traffic months after a submission, but even then it is typically just a small trickle.
What Should You Do To Build Traffic Diversity?
If relying too heavily on social media is bad for the long-term health of your blog, what do you need to do to build some diversity?
1 - Start with a search engine-friendly site
Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process that will never really end, but the first step is to build a website or a blog that is search engine-friendly. By that I mean it should contain nothing that will give search engine spiders difficulty crawling through the site, internal linking should be done effectively, unique and descriptive titles on every page, heading tags used effectively, etc. While SEO requires much more than building the site a specific way, your efforts down the road will be hurt if the site is not build properly to begin with.
2 - Build links
Inbound links are critical for search engine rankings and for click-through traffic. Click-through traffic also gets a boost from the added trust that comes with a link. As an example, I’ve recently written two guest posts for Darren at ProBlogger. The links to my blog from both of those posts have brought a nice amount of visitors, but nothing close to what I might get from StumbleUpon on a good day. However, I’ve had much, much better jumps in my subscriber count on those days than I ever get from StumbleUpon. Why? The links from ProBlogger send visitors that have already gained some trust for me because they trust Darren. Whatever method you use to build links, you should see an increase in traffic that will be a bit more long-term than social media traffic.
3 - Work on getting more direct traffic
One of the pleasant surprises I’ve had over the last year of working on my primary blog is the increase in direct traffic that it receives. So much attention goes to every other source of traffic that direct traffic really gets badly overlooked. Direct traffic is when someone types in your URL directly into their browser and comes straight to your site rather than using a search engine. Direct traffic can also be from bookmarks, emails, and feed readers.
You shouldn’t neglect direct traffic because it shows that others are recognizing you and they’re turning to you rather than doing a search to find something. As you work on branding your site, direct traffic should increase.
4- Build subscribers
If you have enough subscribers to your blog you should always be able to get a reasonable amount of traffic just from click-throughs in RSS readers and emails. Subscribers are critical to a blogger’s long-term success.
5 - Network with other bloggers
A network can help you in so many ways that I can’t possibly cover everything here. You’ll find that a strong network will lead to more readers, more loyal readers, more comments, more links, more social media votes, and more of just about anything else that’s good for a blogger.
When I started blogging I had no idea how valuable a network truly is, but it becomes evident pretty quickly. To work on building your network, start commenting more at other blogs, use networking aspects of social media sites, link out to others, email others when appropriate, use forums or any other type of site that is home to others who are similar to you.
What’s Your Experience?
Do you struggle with relying on social media traffic? What steps do you take to establish diversity?
Posted in Traffic Building | 10 Comments »
Del.icio.us is not only a great resource for internet users to keep track of bookmarks, but it is also one of the best ways for website owners to market their site. Everyday pages that are on the front page of del.icio.us receive a few thousand visitors and gain a number of bookmarks from users. Throughout this article we’ll take a look at how del.icio.us works and what you can do to use it to promote your website.
Introduction to del.icio.us
If you are not familiar with del.icio.us or other bookmark managers, it is basically a place to store all of your favorite pages. You have probably used the bookmarks or favorites feature of your internet browser. Del.icio.us provides the same benefits but in a much more efficient manner.
To start with, new users will need to create an account with del.icio.us (which is free). Once you have an account you can download a toolbar for your browser of choice. The toolbar will allow you to easily bookmark any page that you are on. So, when you visit a page that you think you may want at some point in the future, you can “tag” it to save it. Del.icio.us will then prompt you to add several descriptive one-word tags to categorize the page. The tagging system is a key to del.icio.us, as you will find when you want to retrieve a page.
Now, in the future when you want to find a page that you bookmarked, you will go to your del.icio.us page, mine is http://del.icio.us/vandelaydesign. On the right side of the screen you’ll see a listing of all the tags that you have used to save pages. By clicking on the tags you’ll be sorting the bookmarks to find only those that have that particular tag. So as you can see, accurately tagging bookmarks is key. Del.icio.us also has a search feature that you can use.
If you are using your browser to keep track of your bookmarks you probably struggling with the folders and keeping the number of bookmarks to a manageable number. With del.icio.us’ tagging system you can keep track of a huge number of pages without any problems. Also, your bookmarks are available in any browser on any computer.
Ok, so this covers the basics of how del.icio.us works, but how can it be beneficial for marketing a website ? The front page of del.icio.us shows 12 pages that are popular with users, based on the number of bookmarks that they have received. If a page from your website makes it to the front page it will stay there for a few hours, receive about a thousand visitors or more, rack up even more bookmarks, and gain exposure in front of a lot of del.icio.us users. In addition, the more bookmarks you get, the more repeat traffic you are likely to get when del.icio.us users return to their bookmarks.
Marketing a Website with del.icio.us
First of all, why should you use del.icio.us to market your site instead of some other method? One of the biggest strengths of del.icio.us when compared to other social media websites is the amount of repeat traffic that you can generate. Many social media sites create a quick rush of traffic and then it ends. With del.icio.us you should always be receiving a small flow of repeat traffic as users return to the pages that they have bookmarked. Additionally, the volume of traffic that popular items receive can be very significant.
Another strength of del.icio.us is that it leads to more inbound links than other social media websites. While the links that come directly from del.icio.us use nofollow tags, many popular pages will get a lot of links from other websites and blogs as a result of being found on del.icio.us. Del.icio.us offers users the option to post their bookmarks each day to their blog. So every time one of these users bookmarks one of your pages you will be getting a link from their blog. When one of your pages becomes popular you’ll probably see it getting links from several of these users. Of course inbound links are beneficial for click-through traffic and for improved search engine rankings.
If one of your pages becomes popular with del.icio.us it will also be listed on popurls.com, which will also send a few hundred visitors. Popurls provides links to the top items on del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit and several other popular social media sites.
Traffic and links aren’t the only reason to strive for popularity on del.icio.us. Being shown as one of the popular items on the front page can serve to build name recognition and build your reputation as an authority in your field.
In order to get substantial results you will need to strive to reach the front page by getting a significant number of users to bookmark your page. It is possible to get some exposure and repeat traffic without reaching the front page, but the results will be much less substantial than if you had reached the front page.
What Works Well?
Del.icio.us users tend to be very tech-savvy, and as a result you’ll see a high percentage of pages that make the front page focus on some aspect of technology. If your website or blog covers anything tech-related you will have an advantage. If you cover topics that have nothing to do with technology you may have a harder time, but it is certainly still possible to reach the front page. Most sites that target non-tech audiences will have a very small percentage of readers that are del.icio.us users.
Resource lists are very popular with del.icio.us users. People bookmark pages that they think may be useful in the future. If you can put a number of valuable resources all on one page that will save them time, you’ll be likely to get a lot of bookmarks. One of the most successful resource lists I’ve created was 77 Resources to Simplify Your Life as a Web Designer, which has almost 3,000 bookmarks. This post is really only links to other resources that can save time on web design projects. People like saving time, and as a result the post has drawn a lot of bookmarks.
Typical blog posts and other articles tend to not draw enough bookmarks to make it to the front page. Like I said earlier, people bookmark things that they will want to come back to in the future and things that will save them time. As a result, traditional articles will usually not get enough bookmarks. Of course there are some exceptions. The best way to get a lot of bookmarks to an article is to get the article to become popular on another social media site like Digg, which will send thousands of visitors and increase the number of people that see the article.
Strong, attention-grabbing titles are also important. Pages and blog posts with great titles tend to attract more bookmarks. Once an item has made it to the front page, the title is one of the most important factors in determining how many additional bookmarks it will receive. A strong title will increase the amount of click-throughs, which will also increase the number of bookmarks.
Keys to Making the Front Page of del.icio.us
The key to making the front page can be broken down quite simply: create something that people will want to use in the future and get enough del.icio.us users to the page to receive the necessary amount of bookmarks. Of course this isn’t always easy.
I mentioned earlier that resource lists tend to do very well on del.icio.us. If you want to market with del.icio.us this should be great news. One of the advantages to using resource lists is that they are easy to create. They may take a lot of time to gather together, but they do not necessarily require a lot of knowledge or experience. Writing a great blog post is more difficult than creating a popular resource list. For this reason anyone can have success with del.icio.us, even brand new bloggers.
The amount of traffic that comes to a page will affect its chances of popularity on del.icio.us. The more traffic it gets, the more potential bookmarks it can receive. Likewise, if a page only gets a few visitors, how is it going to get enough bookmarks to reach the front page? Equally as important as the number of visitors is the number of del.icio.us users that visit the page. A page can get 10,000 visitors in a day, but it none of them are del.icio.us users it won’t be getting any bookmarks.
Methods for Success
1 - Funnel traffic
Because the amount of traffic that comes to a page will influence how many bookmarks it gets, you’ll want to focus on funneling traffic from other sources in hopes that it will lead to bookmarks and popularity with del.icio.us. For example, submitting a page to other social media sites may result in increased traffic from those other sites that will lead to more bookmarks. If your page is tech-related, focus on submitting it to niche social media sites that also target tech-savvy users as you will get more visitors that use del.icio.us. If you already have a huge amount of traffic to your site this may not be an issue, but for 99% of us it is an issue.
2 - Show the number of bookmarks on the page
One of the best resources that I have found for increasing bookmarks is the Tagometer Badge from del.icio.us. Del.icio.us will provide you with the code, and all you have to do is insert it in your page where you want the badge to appear. The badge will then give visitors an easy way to bookmark the page, and more importantly it will show how many people have already bookmarked. If a visitor sees that 50 other people have already bookmarked the page it may encourage them to do the same. FeedBurner provides a similar feature with their FeedFlare that can be implemented into your pages.
3 - Cater to the masses
Give del.icio.us users what they want. Rather than trying to get something to the front page that doesn’t fit with the interests of del.icio.us users, try using something like a tech-related resource list. Especially if you haven’t had much experience with del.icio.us, study what types of content are becoming popular and come up with some ideas of your own that would fit.
4 - Share with friends in your network
Although the networking aspect of del.icio.us has less impact on what becomes popular than the networking system on many other social media sites, you can still gain some bookmarks by sharing your pages with your network. When your are looking at your del.icio.us page you will see those users who are in your network on the right side of the screen. When you are bookmarking your page and creating tags you can send it you those in your network. For example, if you wanted to share it with me you would use the tag “for:vandelaydesign”. Just like any other social media site, you can have more success by leveraging your network from time-to-time.
What’s Your Experience?
Have you had good results with del.icio.us? What has or hasn’t worked for you?
Posted in delicious | 7 Comments »
With social media marketing, numbers get thrown around a lot. How many visitors did you get to a particular post? How many visitors were sent from which social media sites? How many inbound links were gained? While these are some of the reasons that most of us are involved in social media marketing, it’s easy to get distracted by the numbers an lose focus of what you’re really trying to accomplish.
Ways that numbers can be deceiving:
1 – Visitors from social media can’t accurately be compared to other types of traffic sources
Getting 1,000 visitors from StumbleUpon is much different than getting 1,000 visitors from search engines. It’s also different than getting 1,000 visitors from online advertising. It’s very difficult to compare social media traffic stats to other sources because it is so much different. The standard answer is that social media traffic is less valuable than other types of traffic, but this isn’t always the case. Niche social media sites can send highly-targeted visitors, and there are plenty of other traffic sources that aren’t the highest quality. Try to avoid comparing apples to oranges.
2 – Visitors from one social media site can’t be compared to another
Each social media site has it’s own unique audience. It’s very difficult to compare the the traffic you get from two different social media sites. Digg may send 20,000 visitors to a post, but the 1,000 you received from a niche social media site may have been more valuable. Because each site is different, try not to judge one audience simply because it doesn’t compare favorably to another social media site in terms of numbers.
3 – Social media can be manipulated
Social media marketing sometimes blurs the line between optimizing a site for social media and manipulating the results. A website that draws huge numbers of traffic to genuinely high quality content will have better long-term results than one that gains an advantage in order to send traffic to content that isn’t of the highest quality. Essentially, manipulating the results may produce impressive numbers, but the results will be disappointing if the content isn’t worth the attention that it got.
4 – Return on investment is difficult to calculate
With other types of marketing and advertising, return on investment is going to determine the success of the campaign and future efforts will be built around these results. With social media it’s difficult, if not impossible, to calculate ROI accurately. There are so many elements that are involved with social media marketing that don’t produce results that can be measured with specific numbers.
5 – You can’t rely on traffic from social media
If you have 50,000 visitors from social media to your blog in one month, the next month you could have 200 or you could have 200,000. It simply is not consistent and predictable. This can make it difficult for selling or buying ads if the site relies heavily on social media. One big month unfortunately doesn’t mean that the blog has turned the corner and that traffic will be lasting. It may or it may not. Of course, if you learn throughout the process, your chances will be much better of maintaining or improving traffic levels.
6 – CPM can be thrown off
If you are trying to calculate the value of your visitors, this can greatly vary depending on what percentage of your visitors are from social media. Visitors that come from social media tend to ignore advertisements, so your click-through rates on AdSense will be lower.
7 – Subscriber numbers may be inflated
If you reach a larger number of visitors in a day with a site like Digg or StumbleUpon, you may see that the next day your subscriber count experienced a big jump. Frequently, it will drop a bit the next day. I’ve learned through experience to expect a percentage of those new subscribers to be gone quickly. This doesn’t always happen, but it can be very disappointing if you’re not prepared for it.
8 – Numbers can’t show impact
Just because a post receives a lot of traffic through social media doesn’t mean that anything has really been accomplished. Hopefully it does have an impact, but visitors alone do not mean much if they never come back, they don’t subscribe, they don’t click on an ad, etc,
What Does This Mean?
1 – You need to know what you want to get out of social media
If you’re using social media to gain exposure and grow your blog, you need to know specifically what it is that you want to accomplish. Without a plan you’ll be left with nothing but some number that really don’t mean anything.
2 – Don’t rely too heavily on social media traffic
Because it’s not consistent, you shouldn’t rely too much on social media. I’m all for optimizing your website or blog for social media and doing what you can to help your chances, but sometimes it just won’t happen. Focus on building diversity in traffic.
3 – Keep trying to improve the results and effectiveness
The learning curve with social media marketing is pretty sharp. By that I mean that you can quickly learn a lot of things that you can immediately put into practice to improve your results. Analyze your results and find the methods that work the best for you in terms of achieving your goals.
4 – Don’t be too quick to judge
Because the numbers can be so deceiving, don’t judge a particular social media site or method of marketing before you’ve given it a fair chance. Don’t give up on a specific social media site because you didn’t become popular the first week you were using the site.
What’s Your Opinion?
How do you feel about the numbers that are involved with social media? Do you agree that they can be very misleading? Why or why not?
Posted in SMM | 6 Comments »
Posted in Resources | 10 Comments »
If you’re a WordPress blogger and you’re looking to use social media to reach more readers, there are plenty plugins to enhance your blog’s optimization for social media. Here are 10 of the best.
Share This - Choose which sites you want to target and let your readers vote for you with this plugin. Share This even allws you to change the colors to match your website. Unlike most plugins, it also provide tracking reports.
Sociable - One of the more popular WordPress plugins for social media, Sociable will place buttons to several social bookmarking sites on each of your posts for users to easily submit and vote for you. With sociable you can also choose which buttons you want to include.
Antisocial - Antisocial is simply a different version of Sociable that adds nofollow tags to the links pointing towards the social media sites. The nofollow tags keep the link juice on your pages, which is better for SEO purposes.
Gregarious - Promote your blog posts on Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us and more with Gregarious. There are several different options that you can customize to suit your needs.
Notable - Similar to Sociable, Notable will place buttons on your blog posts to different social media sites.
Add to Any Bookmark Button - This plugin creates a simple bookmark button that allows users to bookmark the page with any bookmark manager they choose.
I Love Social Bookmarking - Looking for a slightly different alternative to some of the others on this list? I Love Social Bookmarking allows users to vote for your blog posts by using a drop down menu to select a social media site at which to vote, which keeps less icons on your blog.
Digg This - Digg has the potential to send more traffic in a short period of time than any other social media site. You can make it easy for your readers to digg your posts by placing the button directly on your pages with this plugin.
SphinnIt Button - Sphinn is a social media site that targets internet marketing and search-related topics, and with this plugin your readers can easily Sphinn your posts.
WP Super Cache - Now that you’ll be getting floods of traffic thanks in part to these plugins, you’ll need to help your server handle the traffic. WP Super Cache reduces the load on your server by delivering pages without accessing the database, essentially serving them up as if they were static pages.
What’s Your Opinion?
Which plugins do you use to optimize your blog for social media?
Posted in Resources | 13 Comments »
When I look at the statistics for my primary blog, it’s pretty obvious that the posts with the most overall pageviews are the posts that have done well with social media. That’s no surprise because of the high numbers of visitors that have been sent to those posts from sites like StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Digg. What may be more surprising is the lasting effect on search engine traffic.
When looking at the posts on my blog that have drawn the most search engine traffic from Google since January 1st of this year, 8 out of the top 10 posts have been on the front page of Delicious, and most have also been successful with other social media sites like StumbleUpon.
While Delicious doesn’t send nearly as many visitors as a Digg front page appearance, it does do a good job of leading to inbound links for popular items. Some Delicious users automatically post their bookmarks to their blogs, which leads to a few easy links if your posts get to the front page.
Of course Social Media Marketing and Social Media Optimization get plenty of attention due to the quick bursts of traffic that can result from a successful post, but the lasting effect of ongoing search engine traffic is sometimes overlooked. The idea behind linkbaiting is that social media will lead to links and links will lead to search engine traffic. I think this is supported by the statistics at my primary blog.
The Down Side
While this search engine traffic is great, most of these posts are resource lists or similar collections that are not a typical article. As a result, I think this traffic is a bit more difficult to convert into repeat traffic because these posts don’t really sell the blogger (in this case, me) to the search engine visitors like an informative article would.
In order to improve this, I think I could go back and make some additions to those posts and include some more internal links that might steer visitors to other parts of the blog.
The Up Side
By looking at this data it’s clear that you can create specific posts to target certain keywords and search phrases. By getting that post to the front page of Delicious and having some success with other social media sites, you may be able to earn a decent search engine ranking for your targeted phrase.
What’s Your Experience?
Do you draw significant search engine traffic to your posts that have done well with social media?
Posted in Traffic Building | 6 Comments »
