No questions about it, Digg, StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites deliver great traffic. Depending on how viral your post may be, you can expect either a handful of visits or if the content proves to be viral or even controversial enough, tons of it.
I have been doing a lot of experimenting with both Digg and StumbleUpon for the past few months, submitting the best articles that I could find and also voting for other people’s submitted posts. In recent weeks I have received thousands (in some cases tens-of-thousands of visitors a day) swarming to view a particular post of mine if it grew in popularity. Some of these posts have been truly newsworthy, while admittedly, others have been a bit more on the informational and “tips” related side, which still works to a certain degree. The fact is, regardless of how many people you have visiting your sites, by simply submitting your latest posts or articles to social sites, you will see an increase in backlinks coming from these sites and others. These backlinks are quickly spotted in Yahoo! and other search engines and helps establish your site as an authority on a particular subject.
Getting Greedy: Greed is good, right? Well, like any popular site or search engine, there are aggressive marketers and 
spammers, whether white or black hat that will naturally either try to toe the line for increased results, or downright spam the hell out of what they might consider a loop hole in the system. We’ve seen it in the past with SEO, in the beginning, the basic white-on-white text on HTML pages stuffed with important keywords, that eventually led to more sophisticated cloaking/doorway pages to actually feed search engines a neatly “stuffed” page of content, while showing a visitor something else that looked less spammy. That was all fun until you realize that it really isn’t worth it. Creating the best user experience is what will ultimately get a user to keep coming back to your site.
The same greed is encountered with Digg, where marketers, jerks, spammers (and myself, I guess I fit into one of these categories, maybe all three?) are looking for a way to get their posts to appear on Digg’s valuable homepage for optimal traffic. Digg introduced a “Share” button where you converse with “friends” and “shout” out stories that are of interest. Well, if you have a good amount of friends associated to your Digg account, it is only natural and instinctual for a beast like myself to start wondering what would happen if I shouted out to 500 people everyday to check out my latest post. This will work for a little while, but eventually, people get annoyed, and more importantly to someone like myself, Digg does too. The bastahds actually seemed to take away my ability to “shout” to other Digg users for a few hours, until finally giving back the capability to shout again. Warning sign? Maybe, which is comedy in itself, but a lesson learned. I still receive the Diggs and traffic that I believe I deserve, but I am being extra careful with the way I approach it.
Overall, the moral of this story is that in a time of always pushing the envelope, having beloved football coaches caught cheating (just a little bit though, but no one was/will be stopping the Patriots this year anyways), and having familiar phrases like ”if you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying” being all too familiar, when dealing with social sites, it’s best to remember the consequences and truly concentrate on what matters most with a website: delivering the best and most relevant content possible for qualified visits.
I still think that shouting out to 500 people was fun while it lasted though.
November 20th, 2007
Posted by
Frank Antonellis |
Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Social Networking, Social Media Optimization, Digg, StumbleUpon, Spam |
one comment
Two things: one Search, one Sopranos. We’ll start with the most important:
According to ‘Sopranos’ creator David Chase just now, after breaking his long silence after the controversial ending that gave most Americans “agita,” he is now saying that Tony Soprano was never murdered on the hit cable tv show. He also sticks up for the fictional mob boss after seeing how all of America was outraged that he never got whacked.
According to Chase, the people ”had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie and cheat. They had cheered him on. And 
then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted ‘justice’… The pathetic thing — to me — was how much they wanted HIS blood, after cheering him on for eight years.”
I think David Chase is getting a little excited here over something that people aren’t talking about anymore, and who cares what people thought about it then. I thought it was brilliant to leave the whole country hanging and banging their TV sets because of the black screen. Though I will say, Tony Soprano could have used a guy like Chase in his own crew, come to think about it.
Search - Been doing a lot of aggressive social media optimization with sites, and I have seen some significant results. My conclusion at this point is that a social media campaign can generate relevant traffic, create backlinks, and should co-exist with your existing SEO strategy. Producing Digg-worthy content and optimizing it is a lot more fun than setting good 301 Redirects and all of the technical things that a good SEO needs to do, but this is definitely one of the next phases after cleaning up a site and creating relevant content that adds a lot more fun to the never-ending process.
If you have a blog (add one to your site if you don’t), and are not sure how to begin, I would recommend choosing two social networking sites to focus on, and it would be Digg and StumbleUpon to submit to. There are other ways to boost the amount of votes and diggs as you go along, and creating “Digg-worthy” copy is just one of them. Testing and monitoring results can show you a lot of data and significant results. Feel free to drop a line if I can help with any tips.
As Journey best said, “Don’t Stop Believin”. Okay, that was lame.
October 23rd, 2007
Posted by
Frank Antonellis |
Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engines, Social Media Optimization, The Sopranos |
one comment
Neil Patel is turning into quite an interesting character with his latest blog. I think the guy is only like 22 (fascinating when a guy can “earn his bones” at such an early age, gotta love the Web) but has gained much attention with his networking skills and social media ideas that he has made quite a name for himself in the Search world. I found his latest blog entry to be great on how being shy doesn’t pay off and how he makes a point to “meet one new person everyday.” It’s a great attitude and I absolutely can see how he has made this work for him. Although I work from home, I guess it’s a great enough reason to convince my wife why I need to drive to the local Hooters this upcoming weekend. Right? ;-)
May 11th, 2007
Posted by
Frank Antonellis |
Social Media Marketing |
3 comments
I was talking to a good friend of mine this morning who told me a funny story about this Christian youth site/forum he recently bought from some random guy. This guy had unknowingly blocked off all search engine crawlers with his robots.txt file and wasn’t getting the traffic he thought he should. I guess praying didn’t work well with Google, so he decided to sell this site at a very reasonable rate to my friend.
I don’t know what’s funnier to my sick mind, the thought of this person losing faith and bailing on his Christian community website at the first chance he had to my Jewish friend, or the fact that an affiliate marketer would buy something so removed from their belief, making me wonder if he would buy a devil worshiping website if he thought it would convert with the new Satan credit card offer. Gotta love it!
May 4th, 2007
Posted by
Frank Antonellis |
Social Media Marketing, Affiliate Marketing |
one comment
