It has been written again and again, but some people do not seem to get it. Social bookmarking services are a great new way to generate traffic. In fact, they are so good, that, for SEO purposes, you should treat them the same as you approach Google.
Here is an example from one of my projects. Keep in mind, its not even a “funny pics” or “funny videos” site, its a site that showcases the work of a certain professional, and offers a contact form to for anyone interested in hiring him. Hardly something appealing to the masses, it is actually targetted at webdesigners and web entrepreneurs. The site is beautiful, clean, almost minimalistic.
The spike is stumble traffic. The site is indexed in Google, but no visitors sent from it. The first stumble was mine, and my account is new and nowhere near “pro stumbler”. I made sure to put the stumble review in the appropriate tag, and write a short but good summary of the site.
The second stumble, came from a pro stumbler, coupled with a great review as well. I had nothing to do with it, she just found the site and liked it. I checked her other stumbles, and they had nothing to do with my site’s niche as well.
This case study clearly shows that when you buy mass stumbles etc, you are wasting time and money. Sometimes it works, but usually it doesnt. All it takes is a powerful stumble and the landslide begins.
Noone except the programmers at stumble really know how their system works, but from experience, and pure logical thinking, I can tell you that its the first impression that counts.
Its like the saying, you never get a second chance at a first impression. The way I understand stumble’s algorithm, every newly discovered site needs to get a small “grace period”, lets say a rank of 5/100. If they dont give that grace period, the site will never show up when compared to the other 80-90-99/100 sites in their index. That initial rank, those first few times it will show up on stumblers monitors, are your chance to get good reviews.
Buying 100 or even a thousand stumbles will give you a few more points, say 8-10/100. If we assume the weight of a pro stumbler is 10/100, then all he has to do is push his thumbs down button and you are down to 1/100.
This is totally from experience, but here is my checklist.
Stumblers like:
- Funny videos/images.
- Interesting videos/images
- Weird videos/images
- Weird sites (a good example is one site that uses google maps to show UFO sightings worldwide)
- Good design
- Fast loading pages (assume their attention span is that of a hyperactive 4 year old. You need flashy images and colors to hold them. A delay in loading time will simply kill you.)
- A good story (kinda like you approach Digg, although the userbase is less computer savvy)
- No ads (I already wrote that in an older post)
- Interesting news stories
I like stumble more than any other bookmarking service. The reason is that its real traffic, less computer savvy than Digg. Digg can also break down your server, while Stumble sends you constant chunks of visitors.
I also believe that submitting your site to 100 social bookmarking services is an overkill, except if you are doing it for backlinks. Red_virus at wickedfire offers that great service, one I highly recommend.
I like to use few but powerful tools/services for my work, so I recommend that you submit to:
- Digg. Well, its digg. No need to say anything more.
- Stumbleupon. Real traffic, sent gracefully over time, real visitors to interact with your site.
- Delicious. Just for backlink and indexing. I think Yahoo owns it, so it might be useful for indexing in Yahoo faster. It has never sent me a single visitor, but I still use it because of the easy-accessed button on my browser.
- Twitter. Although I hate it, like all the other disgusting web 2.0 cutesy bullshit, its the new fad, and its stupid not to leverage on that. I only recently added it to my tools, so I cannot really comment on its usefulness.
- Reddit. Good and solid site. Can give a nice amount of visitors, and is right in the sweetspot of reddit-articles/visitors ratio. Not too small to not make a difference, not too big to have competitors pushing down your stories in seconds.
Popularity: 9% [?]
Stumble it!
written by Glowleaf
