Traffikd Social Media Blog

Throughout a number of posts on this blog I've written about niche social media sites and their potential to be an excellent source of traffic for blogs. The idea behind niche sites as opposed to major social media sites like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon is that the visitors you receive from niche sites will be far more targeted, and generally higher quality traffic. Because the niche sites focus on content that relates to a particular topic, the visitors that arrive at your site should have more of an interest in your blog and will be more likely to come back in the future. Read More »

Bloggers and theme designers are always in search of ways to maximize the potential of screen space and improve the effectiveness of the blog as a result. Whether you're working to improve your sidebar in effort to increase pageviews, adding related links at the end of your posts to build internal links, or improving your blog footer, there is an almost constant effort to get more out of the blog. One area that is commonly overlooked is the feed. Much like the blog itself, the feed can be enhanced to make a blog more profitable or effective for subscribers. In particular, this post will look at the subject of the feed footer and how it can be used for something beneficial. If you're like me you may have installed one of a handful of WordPress plugins to work with the feed footer, but neglected to keep this up-to-date and useful for subscribers. Read More »

About six months ago I published a post here called Search Engine Traffic and New Blogs, which basically laid out my approach for building organic search traffic at Vandelay Design. At that time the blog was roughly a year old (although only "active" for about 8 months) and it had just drawn 17,000 search visitors in one month, which was by far a record month for the site. Since then the amount of search traffic has continued to rise steadily and it's helped me to observe some things about blogging along the way. Read More »

If you're looking to boost the social media traffic that your blog receives, you may want to consider adding a few icons to your favorite social media sites (or more accurately, to those that are relevant to your blog). Here is a brief collection of ten icons sets that feature a number of social media-related icons for your own use. Web 2.0 Social Bookmark Icons from IconsPedia Read More »

Social media voting buttons are commonly found on blogs, especially buttons for sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and recently for Yahoo Buzz. While these buttons can help to increase the number of votes with these sites, and number of visitors as a result, the effectiveness of voting buttons from niche social media sites is generally underappreciated. Read More »

If you spend much time on social media sites I'm sure you're already familiar with Shana Albert, although you may know her as TheNanny. Shana is a "power user" at sites like StumbleUpon and Sphinn. She also shares her extensive knowledge at her blog Social Desire. Thankfully, Shana was willing to answer some questions for this interview. Read More »

New bloggers have a lot of resources at their disposal and they have a need to determine which ones are worth their time and which ones aren't. Many new bloggers get caught up in spending their time on activities that they think will be productive only to find later that they've been wasting their time. StumbleUpon is one of the best resources available for new bloggers for both finding new content in their areas of interest and for promoting their new blog and getting the exposure that they need. Let's take a look at 7 specific reasons that StumbleUpon is a great resource for new bloggers. Read More »

Towards the end of July I launched my third blog, DesignM.ag. My goal with DesignM.ag is to build on the things that I have learned through Vandelay Design and to develop a site that will become an excellent resource for the web design community. I thought it may be helpful for some readers of Traffikd to learn more about the process I took with the launch, and to share some things that worked well and some things that could have been improved. Hopefully this will give you some insight and will be an aid for you in your next blog launch. Read More »

It's been said many times, including by me, that one of the flaws of social media marketing is that the resulting traffic is short-lived. That short-term nature of social media traffic is one of the biggest reasons that social media marketing is often overlooked or disregarded by bloggers and website owners. However, an effective social media plan will result in significant and long-lasting growth, with effects that can be visible long after the rush of traffic has died down. Read More »

As you build your blog's readership and you have some success with social media, you may find that some of your most popular posts are continuing to draw visitors long after they have been published. A few months down the road they are unlikely to still be seeing considerable traffic from social media (although StumbleUpon will sometimes continue to send traffic), but these posts tend to draw a stream of visitors from:

• Inbound links from other websites and blogs
• Search engines
• Bookmarks
• Internal links (popular posts lists for example)

While the number of daily pageviews may be overshadowed by your most recent posts, if you look at your stats over a longer period of time you may be surprised to see how many visitors are coming to your old posts that were big hits with social media. This presents a great opportunity that most of us don't maximize. Read More »