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StumbleUpon vs Digg - Stumble Upon the Right Answer and Dig Out the Truth! by Nathalie Fiset

Any traffic is good traffic for most Internet marketers, but what if you only get to choose one between StumbleUpon and Digg? It’s a hypothetical question that could yield valuable information later on so just in case you’re wondering the same thing, here’s how results tally up when the comparisons began between the two sites.

TRAFFIC

Digg can give you a huge rise in traffic when your post is up in the first page. The figure, however, will usually suffer a steep setback once your post is delegated to the second or subsequent pages in the social news service site.

StumbleUpon, on the other hand, can’t completely compare with the initial traffic generating results of Digg but it definitely posts better figures for long-term traffic. With StumbleUpon, it’s not at all unusual to see your traffic enjoying a gradual but steady increase over the weeks. Another positive thing to count in StumbleUpon’s favor is how well-written posts or entries can continuously receive traffic since users of the social bookmarking site are quick to recommend them.

Overall, using Digg would be a strategic move if one required a huge but short-term improvement on website traffic, such as when you have a new product to launch. For overall improvement, however, StumbleUpon is arguably the better choice.

COMMENTING

There are a lot of Internet marketing benefits to enjoy when your website receives a higher count of comments. As far as both social bookmarking sites are concerned, however, you shouldn’t expect much improvement in this particular category. Users from both Digg and StumbleUpon are not generally inclined to make comments. In most cases, Digg users prefer commenting on the social news service site itself. Those who do take time out to comment on the original site either write deliberately negative comments or participate only in the hopes of receiving something in return. Those from StumbleUpon, however, are even more passive, and they usually tend to post a comment when they find a strong personal connection to the post.

ADVERTISEMENT

Digg and StumbleUpon can both promise an increase in the revenue you receive from the ads you’re hosting on your website. At the end of the day, however, the promise is barely fulfilled by either website. As far as Digg users are concerned, the advertisements don’t exist unless they’re located inline and they’ve very interesting taglines. You face better chances of getting revenue increases with StumbleUpon, and interestingly enough, they seem to prefer interesting inline advertising as well, but the revenues can only help you achieve break-even profits in general.

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

Can Digg or StumbleUpon help increase the number of people bookmarking your website through Del.Icio.Us? Can they help increase the number of people using your RSS feeds? Considering the results most Internet marketers have from Digg, the users of the social news service site seem uninclined to bookmark websites who had generated the posts they liked. Digg users appear wiling enough to subscribe to RSS feeds but not willing enough to check them afterwards for updates. Lastly, Digg users seem to have a minor dislike to feed with adverts in them.

Fortunately, the results are much better with StumbleUpon. Users of the website don’t just bookmark the main page of the website but the page of the entry they like as well. As such, in terms of social bookmarking, StumbleUpon is the obvious choice!

DURATION OF STAY

Naturally, one of your Internet marketing goals is to get people to stay longer on your website - enough to convince them to subscribe to your newsletter, or better yet, avail of your products or services. Digg users are likely to stay longer on your website if the articles or entries you post tend to be short but sweet. They rarely, however, go far beyond your homepage. StumbleUpon users are surprisingly more demanding but promise greater rewards: if you don’t get them at the first try, you’re out. But if you do manage to catch their attention right away, they’re likely to stay far longer on your website and be willing enough to explore other pages in it.

LINKING

Will readers link to your website? If they’re coming from Digg, they’ll only do that if they catch sight of your article on Digg’s front page. And for users of StumbleUpon, their condition is easy: prove a direct connection between their website and yours and they’ll be more than happy to link to you.

Now it’s your turn to choose. StumbleUpon or Digg?

About the Author

For more information on internet marketing for beginners please visit: http://www.thebiginternetmarketinggame.com/myspaceandothersites.html

http://www.thebiginternetmarketinggame.com

http://www.drnathaliefiset.com

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Promote content and Social bookmarking by sas_auctionsdir

Social bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Technorati, Del.icio.us, and others, are online communities. These sites didn’t start out that way. The community of friends was a case of serendipity. Social Bookmarking didn’t start out as an internet traffic generating strategy. It started out as, well, an online book marker. But now it has become a powerful tool for generating internet traffic. But, you have to have good content and equally important, you have to have friends.

Social bookmarking sites were designed to help log, file, and catagorize favorite sites by “marking” them. Otherwise how would we find them again. After a while we would have too many to remember. Then the practice of sharing your bookmarked favorites with your friends began and the rest is history. Now if we really “dig” a website or an article online and want to share it with, say, the whole Digg community of friends we have there, we can. And presto! We’ve just added internet traffic to that site.

A word of caution, there’s a right way and a wrong way to get involved in social bookmarking. The last thing to do, is to “share” an article of yours that you posted on, say on Squidoo, that has nothing but hype. Don’t bookmark anything for others to review if it is not quality content. Even the search engines hate that. And real people will take you off their friends list.

Also, be sure to promote content other than just your own. That’s being sociable. Being sociable online is the same as business networking meeting. Pretend you are visiting at a fundraiser dinner or at the Chamber of Commerce meeting, sharing and getting to know real people. Whether online or not, networks made up of real people tend to ignore those who are not socially acceptable. Online, hype and ongoing self-promotion is considered spamming.

You can bookmark your own site and share your own articles but not exclusively. For example at Digg you can digg your own articles, your own blog, etc. creating a link to your content elsewhere on the Internet. Asking your friends there to visit a recent blog article is fine. Almost everyone who uses social bookmarking now uses it to generate internet traffic. And high traffic to your content from a high traffic site like Digg and others will definitely get search engine attention. It is a great way to help build your prospect list and ultimately it helps build your business.

Also, add all the bookmark widgets, the icons, to your websites. Most social bookmarking sites have cute little icons that you can copy the code for in raw HTML and then put it on your websites. That way, people can bookmark your work by clicking on the icon If they are a member of Digg, or Stumbleupon, etc. When people do that, now you have an outgoing link from your site to a hgh traffic site. We need both, incoming and outgoing links to high ranking sites, in order to show up on the front page of search engine sites like google. Join bookmarking sites, socialize, bookmark sites including the work of others, and networking will build your business just like it always has.

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Social Network Marketing Etiquette
by LaTease Rikard

When you’ve got a friend, that friend will sing your praises for all to know if necessary. That is one of the values of friendship. And the more friends you have just means they value your company and you theirs.

In social network marketing groups no one blog can stand alone. If you are without friends in a group such as StumbleUpon or even Facebook, you probably aren’t marketing your blog very well and the traffic you get or aren’t getting is a direct relation to that.

I believe networking with only those blogs in which we share like blog-o-torial (new word I just created) behaviors. This strategy, will result in higher traffic numbers for myself as well as those bloggers who trade links with me. As a cohesive unit we will stand a better chance of benefiting from a pool of shared, like-minded readers as opposed to small crumbs or chunks here and there.

For those marketers who were deeply into list building, StumbleUpon is a variation of that, but without the spam. However, etiquette plays a big part in the level of success you achieve when maximizing the friendships you foster there. Here are some rules to follow when you are Stumbling.

1. Review a stumbler’s post. It doesn’t hurt to look at and read what the community is doing. This helps when you request friendship.

2. Use the Connect With Friends option. This always helps when you invite friends to stumble with you.

3. Utilize the Browse People button to discover other like minded bloggers and stumblers. It’s like introducing yourself to strangers at a party.

4. Share popular, blog relevant videos you find. Click the link for this stumblers’ video submission. It is a video of a robot drawing a human face. Kind of weird and offbeat, the kind of information you’re going to find on this blog. Click For the Video.
Reviewing other stumblers is a show of professional courtesy. Be careful in requesting reciprocal reviews, some stumblers frown upon this (oh by the way I forgot to mention, this particular video is a recently popular one.)

5. Be patient. Building relationships with people takes time. Be willing to invest the most precious thing you have, time.

6. Dedicate a specific amount of time to cultivating those friendships. I’m learning to spend less time on multiple submissions, and more on a few key submissions per week, and then spend the rest of my time exchanging blog posts with my friends. I’m going to treat friend time like a few friends chillin’ and having a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

I figure the less I focus on magnitude and more on qualitude (another word I created), then the target audience will follow.

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SEO for Web 2.0 by Michael Small

In 2004 Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, coined a phrase that would change the way we look at the Internet forever; Web 2.0. Since that day rumors about Web 2.0 have flown fast and furious. Within a few weeks there were over 100 guesstimated definitions for Web 2.0. Today there are thousands! So what is Web 2.0, really? It’s a concept of what could be and what already is. It’s the idea of using the Internet for greater business purposes than simple Websites and less than personal communication. It encompasses many technologies and Web methods including shared multi media, social networking, online collaboration and adding the human factor back to the Web.

Primary tools of Web 2.0 include video sharing sites such as YouTube; Wiki sites like Wikipedia; blogs and various “live face” technologies. We will cover 3 of the quickest, easiest ways to optimize for Web 2.0, beginning with blogs.

1.) SEO for Blogs

Optimizing a blog is one of the absolute best ways to capture Google’s most coveted top spots very quickly. You can hit number 1 on Google in a matter of days. Here’s how you do it…

a.) First, find a good blogging tool. There are plenty out there. I use WordPress (http://www.WordPress.org.) I originally picked it because it was so quick and easy to setup. And soon I realized the platform does 50% of SEO by its very nature. It’s free and you can get thousands of themes, to fit any style you wish, also for free.

b.) Next, make sure your hosting provider can support your blog. I’ve never seen one that can’t. If you are starting fresh, do a Google search for “WordPress blog hosting” and you’ll find great packages that only cost $25 for a whole year. Just avoid the freebie hosts since you are almost guaranteed to be sharing server space (and likely an IP range) with sites banned by Google, which can cost you your ranking.

c.) Once your blog app is installed, turn on the “permalink” option from the control panel. This way each posting you enter will also get its own URL. Finally, begin entering posts of 200 or more words, focusing on only 1 or 2 keywords per post. Try to begin each post title with the primary keyword for that topic.

d.) To best optimize your keywords and content follow the steps outlined in SEO cbt’s release “Google Domination” (http://www.SEOcbt.com). This is a free computer based training module for SEO do it yourselfers that works extremely well. It was not written specifically for blogs but all the information is perfectly suited to them.

Inside Tip: Register your domain name for a five year period or longer. Just extend it if needed. Google has been known to check “whois” records and assumes the longer the domain is registered in advance, the more “real” the site is.

2.) SEO for YouTube Videos

YouTube accounts for more than 60% of ALL online videos watched in the US. And your YouTube videos can be found in Google’s search results just like any normal Web page. This means they can rank number 1 in just days, with the right SEO.

If you’re looking to capitalize on SEO for Web 2.0, this is a fast and free way to do it. I won’t get into how to upload the videos and optimize the frame size, etc. That said; let’s assume you have signed up for your free account at YouTube.com and are ready to upload your first video using their easy to follow instructions. This is all the SEO you need to know…

a.) When forming your title, think in terms of “long tail” keywords, meaning keyword phrases of three or more words. Be sure these are in the same order people would search for them (eg/ “long tail keywords” not “keywords long tail.”) Also try to anticipate what the user will type in his search. “How to” is one of the most common search phrases people use in Google and YouTube to get answers quick.

b.) Think of “tags” as keywords and enter them like you would the Meta keyword tag of a web page. Select only the most likely search terms people are using and keep the words in the order people use them. Don’t just use random words separated by commas. Use full length search phrases exactly how people search for them. And don’t go too crazy here. Excessive tags tend to confuse the YouTube engine. Incidentally, if you have “how to” as a tag, also add “howto” (without the space.) If “how to” returns a bunch of unrelated junk your “howto” tag can better cut to the chase in YouTube’s search engine.

c.) The description is where you have the most freedom. It’s best to begin the description with your main keyword (and title) as close to the beginning as possible. Something like this works well… “Learn how to…” then follow up with several sentences rich in long tail keywords (the same ones from your tags.) Good grammar isn’t the biggest deal but try to make it friendly for people who might actually read the description before they decide to watch the video. Also remember that Google uses a natural text algorithm that can spot unnatural keyword spamming a mile away.

Real Life Example: I just saw a commercial on TV for a spy movie and someone threw a knife. I went to Google and entered “how to throw a knife” (without quotes.) The top three matches include a YouTube video and Wiki entry. Wow! Welcome to Web 2.0!

3.) SEO Using “Live Face” Technology

One of the biggest reasons for the dot com crash of ‘01 was that Websites became way too impersonal. One of Web 2.0’s strengths is the ability to help people relate to people once again. One of the most successful technologies leading the way is “Live Face.”

Live Face allows a video spokesperson to meet, greet and inform your Web page visitors. As far as SEO benefits, any sort of video has usually involved heavy RealTime or Flash files that block search engine spiders and hurt rankings. Now however, there are services like Live Face for Web (http://www.LivefaceForWeb.com) that can add full length videos to your site without it interfering with onsite SEO one bit (due to the file’s location) while greatly enhancing offsite efforts such as acquiring the highest quality one way and reciprocal links.

Most sites employing this technology report conversion increases of up to 5x. This means they are converting up to five times the number of sales they did before using Live Face technology.

Real Life Example: The SEOcbt.com site mentioned earlier uses Live Face for Web and they hit number one on Google for all of their major keywords within two weeks of site launch.

That’s a good start to SEO for Web 2.0. Good luck!

About the Author

SEO professional Mike Small is the author of seven SEO books and founder of http://www.SEOpartner.com .

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Social Aggregation: The Next Logical Step In Social Networking by Mihaela Lica

Social media is already an obsolete term - on the web you are either social or dust. No one pays attention to the “me, me, me” tune. The “you, you, you” is losing ground too. What matters today is “us” and how we “share data”, communicate and interact.

The first steps towards a more social Web were made by bookmarking services like reddit, digg, and del.icio.us and by social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and others. The problem with so many bookmarking and networking sites is that the users lose track of their data sooner or later. Today more and more people are looking for solutions for the storm clouds of data and services cluttering their minds.

Social aggregators and social media aggregation services have been designed to organize this chaos. They’ll pull content from different bookmarking and networking sites and organize this data into a single location, creating a “meta profile” page for each user.

Because the systems are somewhat complex, the users are often unable to understand what social aggregators are all about. Some use them as “traffic boosters” believing that being part of such a community and submitting content will somehow boost the Alexa traffic ranks. Other users exploit the linking functionality of the social aggregators believing that the strategy will benefit their search engine positioning or even boost the Google PageRanks of their sites. While these advantages are obviously there, social aggregation has a more in-depth meaning and functionality, but there’s still a long way to go for an aggregation service to truly become a complete platform.

The biggest problem with some of the social sites is that they too are full of “stuff”. Facebook is not an aggregator, as there is no real way to store data - only integrate or communicate with services.

Social aggregation sites like FriendFeed and Profilactic offer still more Twitter like utility that allows us to share our “stuff” with other people, but the stuff we share is not really data so much as snippets of a lifestream. Here we sit, stuffed with meaningless pieces of stuff in most cases, and wondering what or where to put our upcoming stuff.

There is perhaps only one true social aggregation library out there: Secondbrain (currently running in beta 2.0). This service has both lifestreaming and content management tools. The social networking aspect is still incomplete, but as the service develops further we can expect more improvement every day.

What many web users still need to understand is that social aggregation is not just a “trend” but a logical step towards Web 3.0. This is the time to join such services and start building authority within the community. Authority will eventually lead to a broader reach and higher social media equity. As to how to build authority… well, that’s another story, but for now just remember: join a social aggregator (my recommendation is Secondbrain, which even has a contest where you could win a MacBook Air), connect with other users and start contributing with quality content.

About the Author

Mihaela Lica, public relations and SEO expert, is the managing partner at Pamil Visions PR. She writes for several popular blogs and represents a number of Silicon Valley and other international startup companies. You can read Mihaela’s personal blog at eWritings.

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Building a Network: How to make your social network popular by Konsort

One of the main concerns of a social network owner is how to make the site popular and successful through user activity. A social networking site will die if there are no members who will make use of the functionalities of the site and who will encourage visitors to join in on the activities.

So how does one turn a seemingly generic social networking site into a bustling community full of active participants? Here are some ways on just how to achieve that:

1. Offer something that other social networks don’t have Or at the very least, make an existing function better. We see a lot of social networking sites that have practically the same content; the only difference lies in the number of users and usually, their interface. Try to compare the different successful sites that you can find and determine whether they’re lacking something that you, as a user, would like to see in those kinds of sites. If you can’t find anything, try to see if there’s anything that you can improve to make the users’ browsing and activity better.

2. Judge your site the way a normal user would Forget the lines of codes, the costs, the time it takes to develop and all those other technical stuff. Put yourself in the shoes of a normal, average user and criticize your layout, functions, interface and other add-ons to see if they would work well even for those who aren’t computer-savvy. I’m guessing that this will be one of the hardest tasks that you have to do since you know your site like the back of your hand so if you get stuck on this one, ask a friend or a family member to do the judging for you.

3. User bases helps in spreading the word Offer privileges to the first ten or 50 users who sign up to your site and in return, you can ask them to help you in promoting your site. This promotion can be in the form of inviting their friends and family through email or by posting you networking site’s link on their personal sites or simply by word of mouth. This is actually how the successful social networking sites started out â€” if it worked for them, it can work for you.

4. Listen and take time to consider the users’ feedbacks If they know that you personally take time to address their concerns, your users will be more loyal to you. It isn’t everyday that a webmaster actually responds to his site’s users’ feedbacks. Explain to them if what they want is possible or not. Consider the feedbacks as constructive criticism on how to make your social networking site more enjoyable for them and for future members.

This is just the start, mind you. It takes a lot more to continually pursue the road to popularity and success with a social networking site. It’s the start but it can definitely help. The social networking site’s owner and users must cooperate with each other to ensure that the site can and will make it big despite the many rivals today.

Source: http://php-fox.blogspot.com/

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Konsort.org offers Premium phpfox modifications with free online support and updates in an instant download. 100% satisfaction or your money back within 48 hours of purchase. Hosting and consultation services are also available.

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