A while ago I have written a post about how you should treat the people who visit your blog. My point was that treating them like an amorphous mass of “traffic” is wrong and that you have to think about each and every person visiting your blog or site as an actual human being and guest.

Today I want to elaborate on the topic of traffic vs visitors and show you an example.

I’ve just read a case study on StumbleUpon traffic on The Next Corner. Also StumbleUpon has been boasting recently that they have surpassed Facebook as number one source of social media traffic.

These numbers are questionable but I don’t want to argue with themhere, I already have on Twitter and in the comments on some posts about the stats.

Let’s take a look at the actual “traffic” coming from StumbleUpon.

I have been a staunch suppoter of StumbleUpon and its traffic a few year back and there is still one article on SEO 2.0 arguing that SU traffic is the best social media traffic around. It’s still true in a sense but in a group of serial killers the simple one time murderer is best as well.

One way to determine the quality of traffic is considering the bounce rate but it’s a fuzzy metric you can’t compare from sie to site really. Another way of finding out whther the traffic actually makes sense for you is the the average time on site as Google Analytics calls it. So how long do your visitors actually stay on your site?

Well visitors from StumbleUpon stay 11 seconds on SEO 2.0 according to Google Analytics. I think the number is even lower as there is at least one user counted a 12 of times in there so the number is artificially blown up.

You could argue it’s my fault and SU users don’t care for SEO but I have several still popular posts on SU and some of them are not even dealing with SEO. Many of them recently got updated.

Waht we see here is that these visitors are indeed traffic not guests, they don’t even drop in, they just move on. They pass your website while moving somewhere else. 11 seconds are indeed abysmal, even on a blog like mine which gets lots of off topic traffic (Google Image search for instance). Other users, aka real visitors stay 10 times as long.

You should aim to get these real visitors not traffic that moves on.

People who stay in their car and just slow down without even leaving their car are not the perfect clients, unless you have a McDrive type of business. I’d prefer to be a restaurant, not because my name is Chef but because I want to offer my guest more and a better service instead of just getting the stink of the trafic exhausts and a few bucks.

So I ask you again: Are you after traffic or visitors?

Related posts:

1. Mob vs Smart Mob: 7 Reasons Why StumbleUpon Traffic Is the Best Social Media Traffic
2. StumbleUpon Traffic Stopped
3. Stop Link Building, Links != Traffic

1. Mob vs Smart Mob: 7 Reasons Why StumbleUpon Traffic Is the Best Social Media Traffic
2. StumbleUpon Traffic Stopped
3. Stop Link Building, Links != Traffic

Three years ago I boldly predicted that social browsing services like StumbleUpon will kill Digg and SEO 1.0. Did they? No. I was wrong. Social networking did though. Let me explain.

StumbleUpon was the first and only to succeed big time with social browsing. Nevertheless it still is a mix of conventional social bookmarking and real social browsing services: Services that monitor your online activity and match it with your own and others’ patterns automatically. With StumbleUpon you still have to “stumble” manually.

There were other more automated services that just watched your moves. They guessed and suggested the next website you might like based on what you like. They worked like Last FM but for websites not music. Most of them did not succeed though. Instead

social networking and link sharing sites like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr succeed.

They have replaced SEO 1.0 known for keyword rich but poorly readable copy with high quality SEO 2.0 flagship content.

StumbleUpon, a “missing link” service and the new wave of social networking sites rendered both old school SEO “1.0″ and first wave social news media like Digg useless. At Digg you still have to sift through piles of irrelevant and untartegeted information to find something. The “top news” are still the lowest common denominator (crap). In version 4 Digg got better by following the lead of Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr but it’s still difficult to get the right stuff in “my news”. You have to find decent people to follow an there aren’t enough on Digg.

Conventional SEO 1.0 that sticks to link building using links that barely anyone clicks fail in an environment where social networking is the benchmark of popularity. Digg dies as there are many and more effective ways to find what you look after without being served the same type of main stream low value content geared towards a mass audience.

Social networking works for all niches and at the same time is better at reflecting overall trends. So you do both: You can communicate with your community on Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr and still use services like Topsy to find out what most people deem worthy to be shared. It’s not one size fit all. It’s a collection of all sizes and colors where each one of them has a chance to become popular.

On Digg V4 this still doesn’t work. The obsolete frontpage metaphor only allows content to succeed that offers what the predominantly disgruntled, male, geeky and white middle class aka the average Digg user wants. That’s why I’m on Twitter most of the time. Here every niche can thrive and sometimes you can get traction even outside of it depending on the circumstances.

So I was right about Digg and SEO being replaced by something better but it wasn’t social browsing. I erred here almost completely.

SEO 2.0 is today almost the norm though. It’s still called SEO but it’s something quite different these days. It’s social media outreach, blogger relations and killer content creation.

There is still SEO 1.0 out there but it’s more and more spammy while the real SEO has evolved and is social to the core by now. StumbleUpon is still around but it’s stagnating for years, in spite of the PR the company propagates. Just watch the Google Trends for Websites stats to see how Tumblr has outpaced SU and Digg. Facebook and Twitter are another league altogether. They are huge in contrast to the tiny SU and Digg.

I have removed the list of 7 social browsing services this post contained originally. I admit I was wrong. I’m glad the the more advanced model of personalized social networking and link sharing with followers and friends has taken over. The one size fits all social news model has never really worked in the first place. Also SEO today is much better than the SEO of the old days before Twitter and Facebook went prime time. Your followers won’t retweet crap and even if they will people won’t follow them in future as much.

First published on August 14th, 2007. Republished an last updated on October 5th, 2010.

Related posts:

1. Top 10 Social Media Sites + Lists [Meta-List]
2. Social Browsing Can Make the Web a Better Place
3. Mob vs Smart Mob: 7 Reasons Why StumbleUpon Traffic Is the Best Social Media Traffic

1. Top 10 Social Media Sites + Lists [Meta-List]
2. Social Browsing Can Make the Web a Better Place
3. Mob vs Smart Mob: 7 Reasons Why StumbleUpon Traffic Is the Best Social Media Traffic

This is an updated post. To enhance your StumbleUpon experience there are great third party StumbleUpon resources. Resources made not by or outside of StumbleUpon itself. Here are the best:

• StumbleUpon Search is a Google Custom search engine that allows you to search StumbleUpon
• StumbleUpon Add-ons is a site that collects SU add ons, plug ins and scripts
• Userscripts.org offers more than 20 different user scripts for the popular GreaseMonkey Firefox plug in. These scripts allow you to customize any web page, here the StumbleUpon site ;-)

I’ve explained the ins and outs of StumbleUpon optimization numerous times. More such resources can be found here:

• StumbleUpon Etiquette Faux Pas, Tips & Resources – Kikolani

Does it still make sense to use StumbleUpon in 2010 from a SEO or social media optimization point of view? Not really. It’s OK for wasting time stumbling random sites privately but business users are better off with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn which encourage business usage.

StumbleUpon does not allow using its platform for business purposes.

Promoting your own content on a blog is even forbidden. So it does not make sense to use SU for that purpose because sooner or later your account gets banned.

It’s OK to offer ways to stumble your site for SU users though. You may still get some traffic from the site.

Trying to become a part of the SU community is useless though. That’s not the way StumbleUpon works. Bizarrely the votes of your friends don’t count so it’s better to not have any friends there.

For inspiration I’d recommend Tumblr and image bookmarking sites. SU is just like a US TV station on the Web, you get only the American main stream there.

Originally published on October 1, 2007. Last updated on June 19, 2010.

Related posts:

1. Classic StumbleUpon Traffic Optimization Articles
2. Mob vs Smart Mob: 7 Reasons Why StumbleUpon Traffic Is the Best Social Media Traffic
3. How to Use StumbleUpon Without the Toolbar

1. Classic StumbleUpon Traffic Optimization Articles
2. Mob vs Smart Mob: 7 Reasons Why StumbleUpon Traffic Is the Best Social Media Traffic
3. How to Use StumbleUpon Without the Toolbar

Social Media: Paradise or prison?

Are you social media hopping? Have you been on Friendster 5 years ago, on MySpace 3 years ago, on Facebook for a year or more and already planning to move on to Diaspora? Have you left Digg and tried Propeller to end up on Mixx where more or less 10 people read your submissions? Did you try Pownce and Friendfeed just to end up on Twitter but already consider moving on to Foursquare?

I’ve been there, done that. Maybe not exactly as described above but in very similar ways. I truly believed in these social media sites. I developed my networks, submitted quality content, I was friendly to everybody who deserved it and I fought spammers, trolls and racists who mess up social networks.

No matter how much time and effort I invested I have been disappointed in the end.

Most social media sites end up nowhere.

Either the community moves on by itself because of the next big thing, the site dies by itself or gets sold to someone who more or less kills it. What’s very common as well is that you get evicted out of your community. Or the community gets so ugly that you prefer to leave or you fight back and then you get banned for fighting back.

I left Mixx because of racism. I left StumbleUpon because of content theft and I left Hacker News because of my disagreeable opinions. Each of the social media sites have silenced me in one way or other. Mixx banned me for two weeks after I talked back at a racist. I was flagged at StumbleUpon by trolls and content thieves alike.

On Hacker News I have been called “idiotic” because I dared to criticize banks on a page populated by die hard capitalists. Then I cited the TOS which says don’t say “idiotic” and my account was set to invisible. I was a very prolific “power user” on all these sites before that. That didn’t help though.

This post is not meant to complain or whine. Also I have already written about the Mixx and StumbleUpon fiascos in greater detail. My short intermezzo at Hacker News was not even worth a post. In most cases I was a suspected criminal from day one because I admitted to do SEO or rather I wrote about SEO.

I’m now on Twitter and Sphinn mainly plus on Google Buzz, LinkedIn and Facebook halfheartedly.

I could easily become a Google Buzz, LinkedIn or Facebook pro with the right amount of time and effort. By now I’m an social media skeptic though.

Most social media sites turn ugly sooner or later. Facebook and LinkedIn already are in a way. They sell your private data to others or your social network back to you. You have to be there but you always need to remember that both sites are already useful as channels leading back to your website and business. Social medai sites do not make sense as a long time investment or time, effort and money. Sooner or later, or rather sooner they all deteriorate and you have to build up your network from scratch elsewhere.

You need to take control back and network with people directly.

Cut out the middleman. You don’t need to friend your mother on Facebook to know what she’s up to. You can call her. It takes less time. You have to invest the time and effort into your won website and business.

there are many ways to do that. You can set up an email list of subscribers and broadcast newsletters to them. This is very SEO 1.0 but it works when you use the correct tools. Most people suggest Aweber. That’s not my style though. You can use CRM tools but there are dozens of them and they don’t seem to have standards. For instance you can’t use Salesforce plugins for other CRM tools and vice versa.

CRM is very SEO 2.0 but I have checked so many CRM tools by now and I don’t like and trust any one of them to invest my time and effort. Also most of them cost money on a regular basis so you’re depend like on social media sites but you have to pay as well and you’re still locked in more or less.

The answer is much simpler: Most people who are freelancing one man shows like I am should simply keep address books and add not only email addresses there but also the website and blog URLs, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn names/URLs and so on. Your open source Thunderbird email client offers an address book with an “other” tab. There you can add 4 custom fields and notes (see screen shot above).

That’s your best best bet for your personal social network. That’s the best CRM tool. It’s open source, simple to use, easy to backup and move. That’s better than social media hopping. It can save your business when once a again a social site turns ugly, bans you and tries to sell your content, relations or data back to you or to others. Think Ning, think Facebook, heck, even Geocities. All you effort goes down the drain.

Many people have often suggested that SEO 2.0 is just another word for social media marketing. Well it isn’t. SEO 2.0 is still there even without social media.

SEO 2.0 is not about social media. It’s about being social.

It’s about the relationships not the tools. The most important thing when it comes to SEO 2.0 tools is that they don’t interfere with your socializing like social media sites do.

So stop social media hopping and now to save your business later. From now on I will add you to my own personal open source social network on Thunderbird. I will add your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Sphinn user names and I will be happy. Maybe I will even notify you about being added to my own social site on my computer. I won’t send you newsletters and such. I’m here for the long term relationships not the quick buck.

In 10 years from now most of the hot social sites will be obsolete but I will have the best relationships around as I will follow you no matter where you go. I will always stay here though.

Related posts:

1. 7 Social Sites Every Business and Professional Should Use
2. Social Media Refocus: What Site is Next?
3. What Social Media Benefits for Business Can You Expect?

1. 7 Social Sites Every Business and Professional Should Use
2. Social Media Refocus: What Site is Next?
3. What Social Media Benefits for Business Can You Expect?

Photographers and other visual artists have a magnificent tool to show off their work these days, the Internet. Everybody loves great photos and artworks so they spread basically by themselves.

Still there is a big difference between being successful on the Web as a photographer or visual artist and having your images scattered randomly over the Web. Image SEO is a great tool to decide yourself which way your work gets on the Web.

Most good images get stolen and used without your permission

to generate ad revenue for the content thieves while you not only earn nothing financially but don’t getting any publicity either due to lack of proper credits.

The best way to become successful is to

use your images as free advertising

for your name while earning money with professional services or premium products, selling your images for print purposes for instance. Today I want to focus on the ways of promoting your work over the Web to get links and publicity while at the same time curbing image theft of your works.

Add your email address to your Flickr profile, the same applies to Deviant Art. I often want to seek permission for use of images but do not find a way to contact the photographer or artist. Where there is no way to ask or buy people will just take images without permission or ignore you. I do the latter and search for other images instead. Also add “more at youraddress.com” links below each of your images on Flickr.

Do not use LinkedIn as the only way to contact you, only premium members can send you images. So people relying solely on LinkedIn to get messages will get just get a tiny part of them. Unless you don’t care provide an email address or at least some form address like formspring.me

Use Behance and similar portfolio community sites and make sure to use you real name plus, again, add your email and homepage address there.

Add your URL or name to images. Add a text layer in Photoshop or using another tool saying something like youraddress.com or copyright by youraddress.com People who steal images tend to add their URLs so in the best case scenario you make sure that people understand the image is yours by saying something like your name, photography.

Submit your images to image bookmarking sites and socialize with like minded users there. In case you don’t submit them others will, without your permission and proper credits at worst. So make sure you are the first and foremost who submits them with the proper source.

Cut out the middleman e.g. Getty Images. Why? I’ve contacted Getty Images a week ago to seek permission to publish an image and I didn’t get a response beyond an automated “we get back to you” reply. Also their prices are so high that only mainstream media can afford them so by selling there you actually make sure that you don’t sell many images. Retain ownership of your images and decide on a case to case basis how much to charge.

Use TinEye to find out who uses and steals your images. TinEye is a “reverse image search engine” that allows you to search for an image just by uploading it or linking it. So you don’t use keywords but only the image itself.

Use StumbleUpon and Tumblr etc. to spread your images yourself, reprimand users who steal your images. StumbleUpon and Tumblr are notorious for wide spread image theft. Most people who submit your images don’t care for copyright on earn money by stealing them and showing them along their ads. Especially StumbleUpon is full of stolen images to rip off photographers and artists.

Use a CC license to control the use of your images. Creative Commons licenses are not about giving away your copyrights, they are about deciding yourself what copyrights you grant others. This is far better than letting people steal your images. Let the people use the images with your permission and you get plenty of links, especially with those licenses requiring attribution.

Build your own homepage and display your images there. While many photographers aren’t web designers or can not afford expensive web design there are many services where you can set up a homepage easily. Some of them are even specialized on image content. Without a homepage you will always depend on third parties like Flickr, Behance etc. Flickr might ban you or delete your images. Many images simply get censored because they show parts of the human body. So Flickr etc. are good to spread the word but not to represent you.

Don’t let Google Images steal your images. Use a so called frame breaker script to ensure Google Image search users are routed to your site and do no stay on the Google page that frames you.

Apply basic image SEO best practices on site to make people find your images on your website.

Update: Use image specific link building techniques.

These simple and often quite obvious measures will already provide you with plenty of links and publicity. It takes time to use all these tools. Even adding your URL to your images can be quite tedious but you also can automate it. Some people ma not call these techniques image SEO at all but at the end of the day it is.

In the age of social media SEO is about findability, digital asset optimization wherever your assets are and off site optimization does not mean only link building.

That’s SEO 2.0

Related posts:

1. Image Bookmarking Sites for Daily Inspiration
2. Attention! SEO 2.0 Was Spreading Malware Yesterday
3. The 10 Simplest Website Tweaks for Designers to Get More Clients

1. Image Bookmarking Sites for Daily Inspiration
2. Attention! SEO 2.0 Was Spreading Malware Yesterday
3. The 10 Simplest Website Tweaks for Designers to Get More Clients

Just yesterday I published a post that bluntly criticizes the many shortcomings of StumbleUpon. A few hours ago I got the first reaction by StumbleUpon staff. No, they didn’t ask me how they can help me, a self proclaimed StumbleUpon engineer send me a death threat.

Death threats on StumbleUpon have been pretty common over the years but now we know why they never tackled the issue, they send out death threats themselves.

Also this person, who uses only a pseudonym “benadamx”, and who obviously never has heard of me before, calls me a “spammer” and “SEO scammer”.

Here is what he wrote [sic!]:

.. dead to spammers and SEO scammers, anyway.

Viva StumbleUpon!

Now this is what I call customer service! They never replied when I complained about death threats unless I suggested to write an article about it for Mashable. Now we know why.

Related posts:

1. How to Use StumbleUpon Without the Toolbar
2. 3 Way Link Exchange with SEO Spammers Is a Dead End
3. StumbleUpon Traffic Stopped

1. How to Use StumbleUpon Without the Toolbar
2. 3 Way Link Exchange with SEO Spammers Is a Dead End
3. StumbleUpon Traffic Stopped

Dead End is a Creative Commons image by Benny Lin

StumbleUpon is dead. Read my story first and then the 12 reasons.

It was long ago, probably a year or more, that I have stopped recommending StumbleUpon for business users or “getting traffic”, at least when using means actively participating on the site and using the toolbar. It doesn’t work that way if it ever has.

Unlike on Twitter neither self submission nor friends’ votes count on SU so it’s even better not to join or to engage with others on the site in order not to render your and their votes worthless.

StumbleUpon only sends stumblers your way when a random complete stranger having no connection to you whatsoever votes for you.

This is how the system works.

Now I’m a man of habit. I just get used to things. Also I like sharing so I still used StumbleUpon privately for discovering and sharing things. I liked the idea of being able to share environmental, artistic or self improvement finds with a lot of subscribers (I have over 800 of them) plus automatically with the followers of my followers. At least this is the way StumbleUpon was meant to work. It doesn’t.

After the new design has been introduced SU started to display how many views your stumbles get. I noticed that most of my discoveries get only one view, yes, that’s a “1″. That made me kind of sad as I discover stuff quite often and I wanted to make it known and support the respective activists, artists or bloggers. Instead I basically sabotaged their sites as they never got any visitors from SU after I discovered them.

At first I assumed that I did something wrong, like writing not enough reviews or not including images or discovering the wrong content or topics. I changed everything in trial and error and even tried some highly popular stuff from elsewhere, to no avail. Most of my submissions get just 1 view.

Why should I waste my time submitting stuff to a site that does not send any of the stuff to my followers at the same time penalizing webmasters for being submitted to it?

Then I suspected a penalty on my profile due to being a writer for a SEO blog as the topic SEO is still considered “evil” on StumbleUpon even after the introduction of an SEO category earlier this year. Everybody writing about SEO is a suspected spammer according to this misguided opinion. Also I have been very vocal in the fight against the omnipresent content theft on StumbleUpon. SU is full of stolen images, indeed stolen images tend to be the most popular discoveries on SU. Maybe the many content thieves I thumbed down and gave a bad review flagged me or something?

So I kept checking other people’s profiles and looking at how many views their discoveries get. I was surprised to find out that most people who have many views on their discoveries rarely discover anything. The more you discover the less visitors your discoveries get it seems. Plus the number of stumbles or friends has no positive impact on the power to reach people. I have 17k stumbles and 800+ subscribers but nobody ever sees my dsicoveries. It’s the other way around, the more friends you got the less other non-related strangers are there to push your discovery. In some niches there aren’t many at all so subscribing to most of them means Stumble suicide.

1. Most discoveries get buried by the system and won’t get seen anybody beside yourself – “1 View” phenomenon
2. In a bizarre logic the more friends you have the less traffic your discoveries get, only votes by strangers count
3. Content theft abounds and gets most popular while the sites of the original artists or photographers get no credit or traffic
4. Business usage is officially banned in the TOS, as a business owner you are only allowed to advertise not
5. Sites you like the most get the least traction as submitting the same source more than once gets your vote devalued
6. You actually hurt people by discovering their sites or blogs as they can’t get any traffic in most cases
7. For inspiration there are far better sites like image bookmarking services FFFOUND! and Dropular
8. For business use and to spread the message Twitter is by far the better choice for sharing Tumblr is far better than SU
9. Old, completely outdated posts often get pushed by the SU system while new ones get ignored, hoaxes from 2003 for example
10. You can’t block the infamous StumbleUpon trolls via htaccess anymore as everybody uses the same home URL now
11. You can’t browser stumbles by categories anymore, I used to browse the architecture stumbles but now I can’t even find them
12. The SU categories are broken. A wrong categorization means in most cases the death of a submission though

This is not a post to whine about StumbleUpon treating me bad or something. It’s just a post that warns you not to follow my advice from 2007 and early 2008 when I hailed SU as the new messiah of the Web.

In 2009 Twitter has become both the most important social sites and source of traffic, StumbleUpon is a dinosaur.

SU hates busiess users and has an algorithm that effectively stifles both sharing and socializing. StumbleUpon is dead and I personally switched to Twitter for business usage more than a year ago while I switched last week to Tumblr for

• inspiration
• community
• social discovery
• and sharing.

I won’t make the same mistake again using Tumblr for business so that my account there will remain completely private.

Now you might say: I still get traffic from SU by the thousands. Me too, but it doesn’t have anything to do with me. Just last week I got 1k visitors to a post with just 2 thumbs up by complete strangers. On the other hand most of my friends waste their time and votes when they vote for me on SU.

This post is not a pull a Calacanis type of linkbait. Who am I baiting, Stumblers? LOL. It’s just a warning to my readers and followers. Also I ask you to follow me elsewhere:

1. Twitter
2. FriendFeed
3. Delicious
4. LinkedIn
5. Browzmi

You still want the social browsing experience with me? Use Browzmi! It has been largely deserted but it still gets your more views than the “1″ from SU. Btw. I could have come up with more than 12 reasons to abandon StumbleUpon but I don’t want waste any more time with it.

Read my other posts on the broken categories on StumbleUpon which still haven’t been fixed, content theft and other SU annoyances. Also make sure you know how to use Twitter instead.

Does SU still work you for business or private use? In case you aren’t in the most awesomely amazing creative content theft business tell me how you do use it.

Many other former fellow stumblers and other long time users tend to agree with me:

• Has StumbleUpon Jumped the Shark?
• StumbleUpon Can Kiss My Ass
• StumbleUpon Sucks
• i hate stumbleupon right now
• StumbleUpon – The Art of Alienating Users

Last but not least: I apologize all the green activists, bloggers, artist and designers for discovering their stuff and basically banning these pages on SU. Mea culpa! StumbleUpon is dead. In short: I’m simply sick and tired of all tha content theft crap and discovering stuff nobody ever sees.

Related posts:

1. StumbleUpon: 7 Ways to Influence Stumble Traffic
2. Private: 12 Reasons Why Browzmi is the Best of StumbleUpon, Twitter & Mixx Combined +++
3. How (Not) to Pitch Me on StumbleUpon

1. StumbleUpon: 7 Ways to Influence Stumble Traffic
2. Private: 12 Reasons Why Browzmi is the Best of StumbleUpon, Twitter & Mixx Combined +++
3. How (Not) to Pitch Me on StumbleUpon

I’m still not entirely convinced that Facebook is useful for business and not only vanity but I’m sure some of you might point out case studies where FB made real sense. I have seen only a few of them until now.

Facebook is the most used channel when it comes to sharing online so it must make some business sense as well.

Many marketers lately argue that there is no single social media to go after for businesses trying to join the conversation. I disagree. There are 7 of them you have to join and use.

The 7 social sites every business and professional should use are:

1. Twitter
2. Facebook
3. LinkedIn
4. Delicious
5. Yahoo Answers
6. A niche social site for your industry (Sphinn for me)
7. FriendFeed

It’s true that you have to find out where you fit in best. Maybe it’s even YouTube, Flickr or StumbleUpon instead of Delicious but those 7 sites are indispensable at first to find out. You’ll never even know what’s going on when you’re not there.

These 7 sites enable you to

• join social media on a business and professional level
• meet and connect with industry peers there
• find out about industry trends and what’s popular outside your niche

More than that you’ll find out what’s popular from your niche outside of it.

I was a big proponent of StumbleUpon a year ago and I’m still active there but it’s a site which is very difficult to use for business purposes other than actually reading about business. By now I think that it’s far better to get stumbled by others “accidentally” than actually engage yourself there.

Related posts:

1. Broken Social Media: Anti-Social Sites vs Alternatives
2. Top 10 Social Media Sites + Lists [Meta-List]
3. What Social Media Benefits for Business Can You Expect?

1. Broken Social Media: Anti-Social Sites vs Alternatives
2. Top 10 Social Media Sites + Lists [Meta-List]
3. What Social Media Benefits for Business Can You Expect?

Question mark is a CC image by Marco Belucci

With the meteoric rise of Twitter and Facebook the social discovery service StumbleUpon got almost forgotten. Many people still use it for casual browsing though. It’s very difficult to use SU for business though unless you use the StumleUpon URL shortener. Any other business use is basically prohibited, especially self promotional stumbling.

While you would assume that at least the private way of using the StumbleUpon system is in a way desired by SU I was amazed to find out that the just for fun stumbles I submitted rarely got popular.

Popular SU submissions still get substantial traffic in the thousands which can work financially if you have CPM (cost per mille, paid per 1000 impressions) ads on your blog or publication.

Many stumblers by now send out their submissions to all of their followers to spread the word.

This can get quite annoying if the same person sends such “shouts” daily and even mediocre content gets send out. I use the “share this” functionality rarely (the last time I tried it was broken anyways). Also I preferred the old “pull” way of StumbleUpon. Pushing your submissions or favorites by sending them to everybody is just not the way SU was intended initially.

So after a while of looking closely at what happens or doesn’t while discovering new pages on SU I came up with 7 factors that influence whether a submission will work on SU:

category
Which category do you want to submit your discovery? Is there a matching one (for SEO there is by now)? Is the category popular enough or should you choose a broader one (like Internet instead of SEO)? Submitting something about SEO in the SEO category will get you only a few visitors but in case it’s SEO only you are off topic in the broader Internet category. Try “marketing” or “web development” then.

general interest
Is the submission of general interest for a wider audience or is it just valuable for o very small community? Is this community on SU at all (the SEO community is partly)? How can you make your submission interesting for a wider audience? You can make it humorous, bizarre, geeky to gain the attention of a larger group.

friends
In order for a submission to work on SU you need friends but not just any friends but those who subscribe to the same topics as you. SU sends your discoveries to your friends first. Ask yourself: Are your friends interested in this topic? Mine are interested in SEO, search and marketing but most ignore my art, bicycling or feminism stumbles. Would it hurt a submission when you submit it due to your lack of friends in this interest group? Do you know somebody who stumbles often in this category? Maybe it’s better to let someone else who has more friends.

time
Do you submit while most stumblers (in the US) are asleep? Do you submit on the weekend when most of the business stumblers are off line? Do you submit a story too late, when several others have already submitted other sources? While SU is not as US centered as some of the social sites still the largest part of the community are US users. On weekends most people interested in SEO and other business won’t see your discovery. Also submitting a story after several have submitted it already will not lead to success.

preferences
Sometimes submitting a post in the “right” category won’t make you succeed. For instance an article like “Why Feminism Sucks” certainly won’t work in the feminism category. So ask yourself: Does the group of people subscribing to the respective SU channel approve of your message? Does a certain audience prefer images or videos? People interested in the “birds” category want to see images of birds not texts about birds. People subscribing to “animation” most probably like Flash files. Does a submission have the right hook for the audience you wan to reach?

pitfalls
Does your submission contain NSFW for imagery or strong language? Some people will disapprove of that or downright mark it as r-rated or x-rated content and it’ll diappear. Does your submission display a certain political bias? Is the source you submit from a low quality site nobody trusts? Try to minimize such pitfalls and work with main stream topics and sources. I don’t do that and that’s one of the main reasons most of my submission don’t get popular. I often submit radical art, weird bikes and pro-feminist articles from obscure sources that only a few people are interested in or agree with. Btw. Art is one of the most popular topics on SU.

push
Is the page you submit attractive enough to work by itself or does it need an initial push? In case it needs one send it out to your friends or just those you know are leaders in a certain category. Can you motivate your friends outside of SU to stumble a submission? Twitter or Skype might be your tools here. SU devalues stumbles by friends when they were informed through the system. Will the submission work after the initial push? You can ask dozens of friends to push you but with other people approving as well you won’t succeed on SU, the traffic will rather equal the number of friends.

The SU system is very complex.

The right answers to these 21 questions do not guarantee that you get it right. In case you need a simpler tool for spreading the word try Twitter. SU also disallows actual business usage. You are not allowed to advertise your brand like you do on Twitter. StumbleUpon might ban you out of the blue for that and never disclose the reasons.

The best thing of SU is the longevity of your submissions.

Once you get a submission really popular it can work for years or get popular a few times. I still get a steady trickle of traffic from submissions that got popular in 2007. Discoveries that get hundreds of reviews basically stay popular all of the time.

Last updated: March 27th, 2011.

Related posts:

1. StumbleUpon Adds SEO Category
2. How (Not) to Pitch Me on StumbleUpon
3. 7 Ways Self Submission Hurts Yourself on Social Media

1. StumbleUpon Adds SEO Category
2. How (Not) to Pitch Me on StumbleUpon
3. 7 Ways Self Submission Hurts Yourself on Social Media

Expert by Pete Prodoehl is a Creative Commons image.

In recent years and months the Web has been flooded by social media experts. They’re everywhere you move, you can’t escape them it seems. There is one problem though: Social media as such exist only for a few years.

How can you consider someone an expert who has just 2 or 3 years of experience or even less?

Some social media in the stricter sense like StumbleUpon exist since 2002 but most people, especially the marketers who refer to themselves as experts joined later on, somewhere around 2005+, in the case of SU more 2007+.

So are there true social media experts at all? Yes, there are. How can you spot them among the plethora of self proclaiming ones? It’s easy. True social media experts display the following 3 traits:

Social media experts don’t call themselves social media experts.
It’s like with every other discipline. You can call yourself specialist, professional, consultant or whatever but you can’t refer to yourself as an expert unless others do, or rather only other people can call you an expert. Otherwise you’re simply boasting. So true social media experts won’t tell you that they are experts actually. They will point of what they accomplished, how long they are using specific social media “channels” etc. They might cite others referring to them as experts in reviews or testimonials.

There is no social media.
Imagine someone calling himself media expert. What media is s/he an expert in? Print media? Radio? TV? “Multimedia”? There are journalists, photographers or scientists studying media but there are no sicla media experts because there are no unified social media. Social media is a huge term basically containing everything you do online communicating unless it’s email. So you can be a Twitter expert, Digg top user or Power-Stumbler but you can’t be possibly in all social media. Mastering even one of those sites or tools requires a huge amount of time and commitment, how do you imagine to master all? I’m a complete Facebook noob. After one year of Twitter, I’m an advanced user of it. After almost 2 years of StumbleUpon I still struggle with it despite more tan 15k stumbles.

Real social media experts don’t reply to emails or answer calls.
You can coment on their blog or reply to their tweets. You can follow them or subscribe to them but they won’t reply via media or phone. Not only because they use other media, the “social media” but also because they are overwhelmed with time consuming social media participation.  Also due to a gigantic boom in social media marketing they have potential clients flocking to them like the gold diggers to Klondike during the gold rush. There are  simply put only a few social media experts out there and the demand by an overwhelming margin surpasses the supply.

Of course I oversimplified, I might even err but I’m no social media expert myself so how can I know? ;-) This post was inspired by this rant.

Related posts:

1. What Social Media Benefits for Business Can You Expect?
2. The Real Rules of Social Media Marketing Unmasked!
3. SEO 2.0 Reality Check: What’s True What Not?

1. What Social Media Benefits for Business Can You Expect?
2. The Real Rules of Social Media Marketing Unmasked!
3. SEO 2.0 Reality Check: What’s True What Not?