So many friends on Facebook but people still feel lonely.

I noticed recently one of my blogs getting a good amount of referrals from Twitter. I started to feel slightly guilty for not jumping on the Twitter bandwagon and making the most of this potential traffic source. Problogger has been talking a lot about Twitter recently, so it must be giving some people benefits. However, I don’t use Twitter because:

• I doubt I would have much to say apart from: “please come and visit my blogs”
• I don’t particularly want to invest the time in growing a network of followers. (Interestingly I gained 6 followers, despite not adding any thing since I set up the account 4 months ago)
• My principle is that it is always better to spend time creating blog posts on your own blog, rather than working on third party products. This is a similar reason as to why I reduced the amount of comments I leave on other blogs.
• Many people say Twitter can become a bit of a time waster and you get distracted from doing other things.
• Note:
• Just because Twitter doesn’t work for me, doesn’t mean it can’t work for you. I have several blogs, so there are always blog posts to do. If you only had one flagship blog, it would make more sense to work on promoting the blog through things like Twitter.

Why I Don’t Use Twitter Very Much

Well I couldn’t resist testing what I was criticising, this is my first ‘twit’ in the past 6 months. Tejvan Twitter Profile

Q. What is the plural for people who use Twitter? A bunch of twits? (sorry, poor joke alert)

Quite often people can get over 100, or even over 150 diggs and still not get on the home page.

Some people have said that being on Digg actually gives less traffic then you might hope. (some less than 10,000). The number of visitors Digg can send varies alot it depends on factors such as:

• how long you remain on home page. (e.g. do you sped along time on the highlighted section on right)
• how attractive your headline is  to diggers – Does the topic of the article appeal to the digg home page readers
• The time of the day and week.

Digg still has the capacity to make a blog, check out The Art of Manliness

You’ve got to digg Digg to get Dugg by Skellie (example of how 173 diggs is still not enough to get home page

John from eggrage left this comment, which is interesting. But, the thing to note he was successful for an established site and not his own. I definitely agree with the bit about people who vote for an article without reading it.

I have to say though that I’ve found Stumble traffic to be far more valuable than Digg, the article of mine which you linked to has so far received about 3,000 clicks from stumble in the last couple of weeks, but only 100 from digg. I also find that a large number of digg users will digg your submission without actually reading it.

The biggest thing to take into consideration from my point of view is that indy sites don’t get on the homepage. It just doesn’t happen, and when it does its more of a fluke. You look at the homepage and the overwhelming majority is bbc.co.uk cnn.com wikipedia.org smashingmagazine.com engadget.com etc etc etc. As soon as an unknown source starts getting diggs, the digg community assumes its someone spamming their way to self promotion (which it usually is) and they either get buried, or just receive no more diggs.

That was why I wrote about piggybacking off one of the big boys, though admittedly that method is far from flawless!

Since I spend a lot of time voting up and voting down, I would like to share common reasons why I vote down.

1. Where’s the Content?

Quite often I stumble a page and I can’t see anything useful. Often there is just an introduction and perhaps a link to articles. But, if the article is elsewhere, why not stumble that page? I want to see the useful page, not an introduction or ‘welcome page’

2. Too Many Ads.

I am not opposed to ads (I have them on my own site). But, if there are too many banners and google ads, it is much more likely I will vote you down. Like most stumble users, I am lazy and give a high weighting to the content above the fold. If 70% of your content above the fold is ads, there is a much higher chance of getting thumbed down.

3. Weak design.

We are told ‘content is king’ but actually, this is only half the story. When stumbling I often decide in a few seconds. If the design is bad, weak or unprofessional, it is much more likely that I will vote an article a day. Perhaps this is unfair, perhaps I should ignore the content and read carefully. But, experience suggests there is often a correlation between design and quality of content. If the design is weak, I assume the content is more likely to be weak. However, I should also say, that some of the best stumble pages are completely basic and seem to have no CSS at all. However, these pages usually have the content right at the top; in other words the lack of design makes you focus on the content which is good. Bad design is often ugly, too many jarring colours and distracts from the content.

4. Blog Carnivals.

I often submit to blog carnivals and I can understand why people stumble them. This is an example of a good blog carnival because the blogger has taken the time to write intelligently about each entry. However, if a blog carnival is just a long list of 100 entries with no explanation, I often vote them down. I would rather have a stumble showing a selected article.

• BTW: I really don’t know why people bother trying to submit blog carnivals to digg. Digg is never going to have blog carnivals on the home page. It is just a waste of time.

5. Poor Content.

Sometimes the content is just poor and not interesting. Other times it lacks focus and seems to be only of interest to the blogger.

6. Too slow to Load

If a page is too slow to load, then I will either click on stumble again, or even mark it down. True, it might be good, but it has the same chance of being good as the next stumble, so I will always prefer a page which is quicker to load.

7. Self Promotion.

Some pages have a heavy degree of self promotion; they are articles geared towards getting people to buy their latest product; rightly or wrongly I tend to be suspicious of these article. Note: to people who pay for stumbles, it really is a waste of time paying for stumbles to ‘commercial landing pages’ You are better off paying for stumbles to useful pages related to your product.

8. Stumble Cards

I have never understood the purpose of these. I have consistently voted them down. If I want to play top trumps, I will get a pack of cards and play with my 13 year old cousin.

9. Why Not Stop stumbling and get back to Work?

The first time I saw this, I smiled, felt guilty and stopped stumbling. But, I’ve seen it too many times and don’t want to be reminded of my time wasting.

10. Music Playing without Choice

This is annoying, especially when you’re trying to stumble whilst you are supposed to be working.

What makes you vote down on stumbleupon? Do you use the vote down feature?

Related

• Why Stumbleupon is better than Digg
• 10 Tips for Using Stumbleupon
  
• What Makes Stumbleupon Unique?
• Funny thing happened on way to 3,000 stumbles - shows how Stumbleupon can send very good traffic.

How Much Effort is Needed to Get on Digg?

To get on Digg home page you need a way to attract at least 20-25 votes to give the article a chance. If an article is just submitted, it will in all probability disappear without trace.

One article, I wrote received over 50,000 referrals from Stumbleupon (over a 4 week period). From Digg it received 2. There are so many submissions to Digg, that most new submissions just get lost without anybody looking at the article.

To have any chance you need a submission to attract 20-25 votes pretty quick. This means it will then show up in the upcoming section of your chosen category and then at least you have a chance.

To get 25 votes means you will need to ask friends for favours to vote for you. This can be done through either digg shout system or emailing friends asking for votes. Alternatively, you could become a power digg user, who gets loads of friends and so people are more likely to vote for your submissions.

Either method requires a lot of effort. If you are regularly asking people to vote for your articles, you will probably need to spend time voting for their articles.

Even if you get in the upcoming stories section, there is still no guarantee of success. Even if you can get 100 friends to vote for your article there is also no guarantee of success. I’m sure Digg try to discount ‘vote requests’ i.e. people going straight into digg voting for one article and then leaving. To get promoted you will need a lot of organic digg votes from the digg community.

If Digg gives the most benefits it also is the most competitive. With digg it all depends whether you can get promoted to homepage; it is kind of all or nothing and mostly the return is nothing.

Basically, to have a good chance on Digg, you will need to spend time building up a network of friends at Digg, or elsewhere. This is time consuming and if you are not careful, you can spend more time asking for votes than writing content. If you don’t make it, this effort is largely wasted – you would have more to show from writing another blog post.

Reasons to Persevere With Digg.

Digg momentum. Some blogs which get on Digg, are then able to capitalise on this success and get more and more articles promoted. Some blogs have so many loyal digg users subscribed that even if they posted about going to local shop to buy some cabbages, they would probably get 50 diggs. Don’t just think in terms of a one off digg. Think in terms of long running success.

It can make Your Blog.

True, 99% of 50,000 visitors from Digg may leave without clicking on adds or just leaving snarky comments. But, if even 0.1% of visitors subscribe, that is an extra 50 subscribers. Some blogs have made huge progress through Digg. It usually results in natural inbound links which are great for improving search engine positions.

You are in the right niche.

Sometimes I see blogs trying to promote a post on digg such as: ‘how to make money from adsense’ This kind of article has almost no chance – it doesn’t interest the digg community. Think how many times Problogger hits the digg front page.(very rarely) If you are blogging about blogging it is even harder to do well on Digg. If you are blogging about ‘Why ebay is ripping off consumers’ that has a much better chance

You have the right kind of article / pictures

The article has to be good and appeal to the digg voters. It is also worth asking whether this article would be relevant for your blog?

Conclusion

If you are going to try and use Digg. Give it 100% effort. Write really good articles and then make sure you have a way of getting 20-30 votes and then just hope the rest of the Digg community like it. Don’t give up after 1 or 2 failures. If you don’t think it is worth all the hassle of voting and getting others to vote, just forget about Digg, there are many other ways to build a successful blog.

Personally, I don’t really bother with Digg because I don’t really enjoy all the effort involved in voting and becoming a member of Digg. But, I would like all the benefits associated with it.

• Maybe Digg will be more successful when your blog has grown and got a good subscriber base. If you are new to blogging, I would suggest it is even less desirable to spend your time trying to get a digg.
• Don’t forget Digg don’t like people submitting their own content, you will also need to ask people to submit your own article.
• If you try to get on Digg half heartedly it won’t work (unless you are lucky) either make it a priority or leave it.

Related

• Why Stumbleupon is better than digg
• How To Benefit from Digg
• How to Hit Digg home page from eggrage
• Dear Digg please ban my site – perspective from Andy Beard

Content Not Ads above the Fold.

If you really want to maximise the traffic from social media, it is best to sacrifice the optimal ad positions. Sometimes I am stumbling and the only thing I see on the screen is a logo and a 330*300 Google adsense block. Invariably I mark the content thumbs down, without even seeing the article. This is not to say you can’t have ads at the top of the screen, but, if the only thing that is seen by the viewer is ads, what impression does that give? It is helpful to view blog traffic as investment. The small return from short term advertising is worth much less than the potential benefit of attracting long term subscribers who will help grow the blog. If you really want to have ads dominating the top, you could at least remove them from articles that are targetted at high traffic.

Easy to Subscribe.

It is important that it is easy to subscribe. In my opinion this is the most significant benefit of getting traffic from social media. Visitors will not click on ads, most will never return. But, if you can get even 0.5% to subscribe then it’s all worth it. The obvious thing to do is to place an RSS subscriber link in a prominent place. Some people like to make a feature out of it and place it at the top of a blog post. This probably has a good conversion rate, although it does have the drawback that the content is pushed further down. Email subscription is also worth having.

Best Articles

I have found that on a strategically designed blog a stumble visitor can visit an average of 2.3 pages. (this may not sound a lot but, it does disprove a theory that stumble visitors have a high bounce rate. However, to get a low bounce rate requires an effort to keep readers. An excellent way to do that is highlight your most popular articles. You can do this with a plugin or manually add the articles. Recent articles are also good to highlight as long as they are not just average page fillers.

Make the Most of a small success.

Typically traffic surge’s will come to one post in particular. This can count for 80% of your traffic. If you start getting a good return on an article, this is an excellent incentive to make this page as good as possible. Remove any typos, and give people a reason to further explore the blog. For example, at the bottom offer 2-3 suggested links to other articles.

Promote Those That Are Doing Well.

Often the best articles to promote on social bookmarking sites are the ones that have already had some success. This indicates that it is likely to go down well. This is the time to ask for the odd favour from people you might now always ask; you don’t want to be asking friends for votes every single post. But, if a post has already achieved some success, pull out the stops to try and make it really big. It is better to have 1 real success, than 10 posts which get a medium return. Often I feel with social bookmarking sites, it is all or nothing.

Create Anticipation

Try give some impression of Forthcoming articles. If you have a really popular post, you could add at the bottom a note saying more similar articles will be coming soon. If you have a real success on one topic, why not make a series out of it? Future anticipation offers an excellent reason for people to subscribe.

What Does the Design say About the Blog?

I spend alot of time (probably too much) stumbling articles. From my own experience, I tend to give a very high weighting to the overall look of the blog. Maybe it is bad, but, I often vote things up or down without reading the whole article. My vote tends to be dominated, to a large extent by the overall look. This does not mean it has to be anything fancy. I often like quite simple, text based blogs. But, you can’t ignore the power of visual impact. In particular try to declutter as much as possible. Ask yourself how much value all those widgets and links really offer.

Related Posts

• The Stumbleupon Effect
• Why Stumbleupon is better than Digg
• Increasing Traffic through Search Engines
• 3 Ways social bookmarking is broken and how to fix it.

The first article was Top 10 Financial Products to avoid at personal finance blog. This received about 1,500 stumbles in a short space of time and appeared on Stumblebuzz – a list of the most popular current stumbles. The benefit of being on stumbleupon is that it led to creating links from other sites. Gaining links is something that rarely happens from ordinary Stumbleupon traffic.

The second article was Effective ways to get out of a negative mindset at my self improvement blog. This started off slower, but still received 1,000 on the first day. Since it went down well, I sent it to a 3 stumbleupon friends who I thought might like it. This created a second wave of stumbles and this second wave seemed to create a momemtum which has kept the article being stumbled throughout the week. In the past 7 days, the article has received over 10,000 stumbles and seems to be going strong.

On this blog Why Stumbleupon is Better than Digg has also done quite well

Things I learnt From the Experience

• Stumblers don’t bounce straight away. One of the best results of this experience was looking at my Google analytics to see that stumble traffic actually stays for much longer than expected. On average readers from stumbleupon saw an average of 2 pages per visit. The bounce rate was 66%. Not amazing perhaps, but it does refute the myth that Stumblers only ever stay 5 seconds.
• Do Ask Friends for the Odd Favour. I wouldn’t want to overdo it. But, it does seem worthwhile finding friends who would appreciate your content and using the stumbleupon toolbar to ask them for the occasional stumble. I assume it is also good to look for new friends and not just rely on the same few for favours. I believe stumbleupon give less weight to votes from people who repeatedly vote for the same website.
• Encourage Reviews. As well as leaving a thumbs up, it is also helpful to get reviews.
• Stumbleupon is not Good for gaining links, unless you get on stumblebuzz. According to Bryan Clark Chris Garret, Delicious is much better at giving quality links than Digg and I assume stumbleupon.
• The main benefit of Stumbleupon is gaining RSS subscribers, who are likely to want to stumble future articles. In other words there is no immediate gain, but, it helps the long term growth of your blog.
• Make Sure the Content is Good Quality. I left this to the end because I assume it to be self evident. But, if the articles are not high quality, no amount of promotion will give you 10,000 stumbles.
• Choose Good Headlines.
• Sometimes an article is stumbled by a couple of people and it sends no traffic at all.
• Make Sure you give reasons for people to explore your blog further. Choose some ‘top articles’ and of course make it easy to subscribe

If you want the odd stumble request feel free to add me as a friend

http://tejvan.stumbleupon.com

(note I used to be keynes13.stumbleupon.com but for the life of me I can’t think why I wanted to be named after a famous economist. I think it is important to choose a name that is memorable and builds up a blogging image.

 Related

Why Stumbleupon is Better Than Digg 

Using Stumbleupon to connect to people in your niche - Caroline Middlebrook

Stumbleupon and Social Media project at Inspiration Bit

Stumbleupon at A1 Fan fun 

1. First Impressions Count

The visual impact of the site does matter. People don’t just vote on the article, but their subconscious opinion of the site. Make it clean and attractive and don’t go over the top with ads and banners. It is also important that you have the content above the fold. Don’t have huge headers and graphics which makes it hard to see any of the actual content.

2. Be Focused.

Every week, try to create 1 or 2 outstanding posts / articles. These should be original and offer something of real value to visitors; it these 1 or 2 articles that you will focus on promoting. Be prepared to take time to write the best article that you can. Don’t be half hearted in creating content – it is better to have an attitude of all or nothing. It is also important that the articles have a clear focus. Don’t get sidetracked into relating unnecessary personal experiences.

3. Headlines are everything

Quite often people on Digg will vote for a submission based on the title alone – without ever reading the actual post. Because of this it is vital to hone your headline writing talents. A good starting point is to just look at the kind of headlines that get to the homepage of Digg. A good headline has the following characteristics:

• Grabs people’s attentions
• Is Descriptive
• Is Original.

A title like “How to Increase Your Traffic” is so boring and repetitive it has absolutely no chance, no matter how good the article. Try, “Secrets of Increasing Traffic to a new Blog” “10 Powerful Tips for boosting Your RSS readership”

See: Ideas for Eye Catching Titles

4. First Paragraph.

Often diggers are lazy, when submitting they don’t want to write their own description of the article, but, will look to use the first paragraph of the article. Therefore, make sure that the first paragraph is an enticing description of why you should read the rest of the article. If, in the first paragraph, you get distracted into writing irrelevant content, you will lose many readers straight away. See: Importance of first sentence

5. Be Original

Perhaps the most difficult thing, especially for competitive niches. There are few topics that haven’t been done many times. To create greater originality try:

• A New perspective – Copyblogger has many good examples of this.
• Personal experience
• Link Article to Recent News Event.
• Looking at Topic from the Opposite Angle

6. Negative Perspectives Often Do Well.

It is perhaps unfortunate, but, a negative perspective often generates greater interest. If you don’t like being negative, you can still write from an opposite perspective. For example, if you write on the theme of self improvement instead of: “Tips on creating Happiness” why not try “Are these Beliefs keeping you Miserable?”. An article like this captures the interest but it can still be a useful guide to creating happiness. Negative titles need not be negative articles.

7. Make it 20% Better.

If you write an article, spend time to make it even better. We could use a bell curve to illustrate the distribution of articles.

Most articles tend to fall in the middle range of average to good. If you can make improve the quality of your article by 10% your article has a chance of standing out. By improving the standard of your articles by 10-20% you can gain an 80-100% improvement in return. Social bookmarking sites do not reward quantity but quality. Sometime people talk about creating ‘link bait’ for social bookmarking sites as a negative thing. But, in my view, the potential success and rewards of social bookmarking sites, is an incentive to produce excellent content rather than just writing for search engines.

8. Build Up RSS Feed Count

It is no coincidence that the Digg home page often features the most popular sites. Having a loyal and regular readership means you have a captive audience likely to vote for you and give your article an initial push. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy – the most successful sites do well on Social Bookmarking Sites and so become even more popular. However, there is no reason why you cannot also benefit. If you are a new blogger, don’t just worry about getting on social bookmarking sites, build up your RSS readership through consistently good blogging. Also, try writing guest posts on these popular blogs – you at least may get on Digg homepage on another site! see: 8 Effective ways to increase RSS readership

9. Don’t Submit Your Own.

In the long run, submitting your own articles doesn’t work; it is also goes against the guidelines of sites like Digg. However, if you are a relatively small site, it will take a long time before anyone volunteers to submit an article. In this case, it is important to generate friendships with like minded webmasters who share you commitment to quality. It can work well to ask a friend to submit an article, and then returning the favour. It is good to have variety in people who submit from your site. Don’t just rely on one friend.

10. Become a Genuine Member

Don’t just look upon social bookmarking sites as “what can they do for me?” think about how you can contribute in a meaningful way. Don’t just be interested in promoting your own articles, use it for bookmarking articles that you really enjoy. Also getting to know other diggers is one of the best ways to helping your chances. Look for active Diggers who are willing to help each other.

11. Don’t Be Intimidated

Sometimes we look at the Digg home page, dominated by popular sites and think it would be really difficult to enter. However, every site starts off with 1 subscriber; think big and don’t be put off by the perceived ‘difficulty’ of getting on Digg.

12. Be Prepared for the Traffic Surge.

If your post goes viral, it is possible that you can get upto 100,000 visits in a single day. Would your server cope? If you are on a shared hosting account there is no guarantee. I am currently with host i Can, although I feel Dreamhost may offer an even better chance of coping.
Important Tip: If you use WordPress make sure you have WP-Cache installed, change the settings on time elapsed to 9999999, this will significantly reduce the load on your server. Basically, any CMS which uses mysql and php you want to look at cache settings. How to configure wp cache to abate the digg effect

13. Get To Know The Social Bookmarking Sites

I often see people submitting content to Digg that I feel has little chance at all. At the moment, Digg are not so keen on SEO and blogging tips. – How often does Problogger get on the front page of Digg these days? If you are writing articles “Top 10 ways to monetise your site” I think it will be difficult to do well on Digg at the moment. For these kinds or articles, you may have more return on sites like Sphinn and Mixx.

Social Bookmarking Sites are Not Everything.

Many people comment on how the traffic Social bookmarking sites send is low quality. Also, it is important not to lose focus and feel that getting tons of traffic from Digg is the holy grail of blogging. It can help, but it is not indispenable. I think this advice is particularly important for new bloggers; often time spent on improving your blog is more beneficial than making friends on social bookmarking sites.

1. Stumbleupon Rewards the Best Articles

Stumbleupon seems more democratic. You can submit a good article to digg but it can fly off the new section as quickly as you submit it. Generally stumbleupon is better at picking up on good articles. At digg everything counts on the 24 hour window after first submission, and your network of friends. At stumbleupon it seems less important who are your friends and most stumbles I receive are good quality. Spam doesn’t seem a real problem at Stumbleupon.

2. Stumbleupon doesn’t ban the best sites.

Many times I have seen my favourite sites getting ‘banned’ by digg, usually because they are ‘too successful’ Examples that come to mind include Pick The Brain and Copyblogger. (true sites can come off the banned list, but it can take a long time)

3. Stumbleupon has more Positive Pages.

It seems that on Digg stories that do best are the negative ones. See article at We The Change on Digg At times, the negativity can be overwhelming. When browsing the internet, I like to see some positive stories and articles of inspiration.

4. Stumblers Like Stumbleupon

Whenever I goto Digg the top stories seem to be complaining about Digg, which I find completely uninteresting. At Stumbleupon you aren’t bombarded with articles complaining about rigging of Stumbleupon e.t.c.

5. More Diversity of Interests

Stories that do well at Digg tend to be fairly narrowly focused on a small number of aspects. Stumbleupon enables a greater diversity of topics, it is also easier to choose the topics you are interested in. If you like topics like self improvement or minority interests you will find greater coverage at Stumbleupon.

6. Stumbleupon has Beauty

Some stumbleupon blogs are beautiful to visit. e.g. Tutu stumbleupon

7. Stumbleupon gives more traffic.

True digg can give a mad rush, that brings down you server; but overtime I find Stumbleupon gives a bigger traffic boost. Problogger agrees here. Why Stumbleupon sends more traffic than digg

8. Stumbleupon has a better quality of comments.

Stumbleupon comments are usually simple and fairly positive. Reading comments on digg often leave you in a state of despair (Of course, you can go to Digg without reading comments)

9. Stumbleupon seems to attract a greater diversity of web users.

Digg users seem to be focused on young males 18-31. Stumbleupon is more diverse.

10. Stumbleupon is easy to Use

So that’s my experience – Stumbleupon is better than Digg.

Of course, if I get on the home page of Digg I’m quite prepared to completely rewrite this and say what an absolutely marvellous, and inspirational site Digg is…. </sarcasm>

See also:

• Top 10 Tips for Using Stumbleupon

Because of the consistent quality and variety of articles, Pick the Brain, has seen its RSS readership reach over 10,000 in just over 12 months. Several articles from the website have also reached the front page of Digg.

I was rather bemused to find that when I tried to submit an article to Digg it gave the following message:

URL blocked

This domain has been consistently flagged as an intermediary to the direct source of news and/or video content. Please link directly to the story source.

The first thing to point out is that Pick The Brain has never used ‘recycled’ content from elsewhere on the web. All articles are original and uniquely written, they are also written by a variety of authors. Therefore, there is no good reason for Digg to block the URL.

This occured 3 weeks ago, so I wrote to Digg asking to change this error (I believe the owner of Pick the Brain also wrote to Digg). However, 3 weeks later nothing has changed and I received no reply.

It is bad that Digg have blocked the URL for a false reason. – It may be the case some users didn’t like the fact Pick The Brain often made the front page (like other sites such as lifehack.org and Smashingmagazine.com)

If it is the case that certain sites make the front page too often, the solution is for Digg to tweak the algorithm so that it is more difficult for ‘big’ sites to make it on home page. (I believe Digg already do this to an extent.)

However, Digg have no good reason to ban a site, for a reason that isn’t true.

Yes, Pick The Brain have had several articles on the homepage. But, that is because they have been voted up by Digg Users. They are not ‘replicated’ content, but articles people like to read.

Of course, Digg can do whatever it likes. It’s their site and there probably is a real problem of some spam blogs submitting duplicate content in the hope of benefiting from it. However, it reflects badly on Digg that they are blocking a site which produces good content, often appreciated by the Digg community in the past.

Also, why are Digg unable to respond to a legitimate question? – They are unfairly blaming Pick The Brain with being an intermediary – an accusation that is not true.

Let us hope Digg will take notice and only ban sites with care.