whydowork.com

Probably because it’s the only social media site where content is truly king. With Digg and other similar sites you have a much better shot if you have friends to send shouts to, if you submit your articles at certain times during the day, if you’re a top digger and so on. With StumbleUpon, all you need is a good article and the traffic will follow (if you submit to the correct category).

The screenshot below is the traffic from a new blog I started on October 28 I think.

One of the articles was submitted to StumbleUpon on October 31st. It was very successful with the StumbleUpon users, and in the last 16 days it brought me 45,000 visitors and 76,000 page views to that article, 30+ comments, the first 20-25 subscribers of the blog, and ~$14.

The money is irrelevant here, the CTR was absolutely horrible, the subscriber number is what interests me. Yesterday, more then two weeks since it was submitted, it brought 1,000 visitors to that article. And that’s without having a powerful account or taking into consideration the time of day for the submission.

True, a top stumbler can boost your initial number of visitors, but ultimately you need good content to be successful, and I think that’s where Digg is losing the battle.

A good start if you want to use StumbleUpon is an article from The Lost Art Of Blogging, called A Guide To StumbleUpon: Understanding And Beating The System. It’s well worth the read, and if you’re new to social media, you can also take a look at his article, Introduction To Social Media And Social Media Marketing.

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I didn’t jump the BlogRush bandwagon when it came to town, and I’m not going to start promoting it now, but I feel like this announcement might be worth a mention.

Well, the points that I felt in the first phase that they needed work on:

- Improved Security & Abuse Measures (We’ve already squashed 95% of the cheaters!)

- 100% Manual Review & New Quality Guidelines

- More Categories! (A lot more)

- Bonus Syndication For All Users, But Weighted Towards Low-Traffic Members

- Widget Performance Monitoring

If they work like they say, it should be an improvement. I’ve removed their widget a long time ago from the only blog where I was testing it, but I might consider bringing it back now.

The widget performance monitoring especially I like how it sounds. It should help a lot with the CTR of the widget, and together with the more detailed stats, the manual review, the exclusion of the non-english and the spam blogs, it might make BlogRush actually worth it.

It will take about a week to roll-out these changes, but I’ll be waiting with interest reactions from other bloggers on how big are the improvements in traffic from the widget.

PS: for some reason, I always feel like I’m reading a sales letter when John Reese makes a BlogRush announcement. Anothere example here. Anyone else got that feeling?

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According to the StumbleUpon page that says how to become a top stumbler, in order to grow your profile you need to be a regular user of the toolbar, stumbling and submitting good content on a regular basis. However, this isn’t as easy as it might seem, considering that there are 3.5 million other stumblers submitting content. Chances are that unless you’re one of the first ones to see that article/video/photo, someone else has already seen it and submitted it.

Below are the places where I go looking for interesting content to stumble:

1) Upcoming page of Digg

There is a lot of content to come through here but you can find some real nice gems to submit. If you refresh the page every couple of minutes and scan quickly the titles there is a chance you might find something interesting to submit.

2) The New page of Reddit

Look for pages submitted not too long ago, since Reddit has a different way of keeping stuff on the first page of the New section.

3) Most recent photos on Flickr

Everyone loves a good photo, and this is the place to be if you want the latest additions to Flickr. You might get lucky from time to time, finding some good ones among all the personal stuff that is submitted.

4) Most recent videos on YouTube

Again, quite a bit of videos that wouldn’t interest Stumblers, but some can be good.

5) Deviantart

Needless to say, Deviantart can be a great source of photos to submit. Great stuff there. Any other community like this can be a great source for StumbleUpon.

6) Your Own Feed Reader

If your feed reader updates and you see some great articles, stumble them. Chances are that others would be interested as well if you are. The lists that Mashable or Smashing Magazine compile for example can be great to stumble.

7) Browse sites with stumbled pages

Just by using the StumbleUpon toolbar you can find great sites. When you find something that you give the thumbs up, look around instead of leaving, and see if they have any other good pages to Stumble.

Video sites, other then YouTube

MetaCafe, StupidVideos or any other site with funny videos works and you have a better shot at finding good videos that haven’t been stumbled yet.

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This issue has been discussed by SEOmoz in the past, in their Guide to Traffic from Digg comments, however they didn’t cover what I’m about to say.

I’m not a heavy Digg user, but I do follow the news there from time to time, and I’ve noticed a nice tactic used by a user there to get traffic to their blog.

This one works best for PICS that get to the front page of Digg. Many times, the blogs hosting the pics will go down due to heavy traffic, but if you follow the comments, you might see someone posting a link to a mirror of that page, with the pics in question available there.

Here’s how one of those comments looks like:

You’ll have to click on the image to see some details. First, observe the simple message. Second, observe the number of thumbs up received by the commenter. 102!

If you would go to that page, you would see a simple white page with 2 large ads above the fold, and below them the photo in question. Also, a skyscraper on the right side. The image is surrounded by ads. I’m not linking to that page or showing the details of the user because I don’t want to cause him/her any problems on Digg.

As you can see, a simple message with the original pic reposted somewhere else, got 102 thumbs up and probably quite a few visitors, since the original page was down for a while.

I’m not saying this is cool. They are taking advantage of someone else’s work and they do have the StumbleUpon button on the page so they’re getting both Digg and Stumble traffic at the same time for a pic. I imagine they have quite a bit of traffic from these two sources.

Do keep in mind a few things though. Too many people using this tactic would wear it out fast. If someone already posted a mirror, stay of the topic. If you’re going to use this tactic become a regular of the place. Vote stories, comment for other reasons besides posting mirrors, just be a normal Digg user. A user that has no stories voted and posts only comments with links in them would look a bit suspicious :).

Then again, you never know if this tactic will not bite you on the ass and get your site banned on Digg or your account deleted, so be careful. Once this gets out, diggers will be on the lookout, so you’ll have to decide if its worth the risk.

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