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Every bloggers dream is to get an article on the front page of huge bookmarking sites and reap the rewards of having your servers crash due to the massive amount of visitors you’ll receive. Since it is quite hard to game social bookmarking sites due to their fancy schmancy algorithms and community participation, it’s not an event that can be forced. There are, of course, a few ways to nudge the masses to your favor - with a certain style and subject of writing, you can hugely improve your chances of reaching that front page and building some buzz and backlinks for your blog.
GET INSPIRED
The easiest way to get ideas for a post topic is to simply look at the front page of the bookmarking site you want to get popular on. Digg around a bit in the categories until you’ve Reddit all (puntastic!). If one of the top articles is about a bizarre animal, do some research about another peculiar being and write about that. I did this once for another blog and got a hefty number of views (and a nice sum of money as well). Don’t be afraid to steal borrow ideas.
PICK A FORMAT
Social media users don’t want long, drawn-out articles. They want something digestible and easy on the eyes. Fill your writing with loads of pictures, bullet points, humor, and numbered lists. Great examples of viral content can be found at Cracked’s “Top #” lists.
WRITE
The self-explanatory part. Just follow your format and your topic and you’ll (hopefully) soon have a ready viral article!
PUBLISH
Put your post up on your blog and wait. It’s best not to submit your post yourself unless you’re an extreme power user and you’re SURE you won’t get penalized from the bookmarking sites. Self-submission gets your stumbles devalued at Stumbleupon and makes Digg-ers hate you. Twitter your new post and hint that you’re trying to make it viral. Contact other webmasters in your niche and tell them to check it out. This should get the ball rolling.
THE CATCH
You can’t force social media popularity. After all, it’s SOCIAL - and there is no “I” in soci-
Uh. Well, there is. Regardless, gaming these sites =/= easy. There’s only so much you can do before throwing your content to the masses and hoping that someone sees how good it us.
Posted by Max Miroff |
13 Comments »
While talking to my good friend Breakaway from Link Building Bible about social media optimization and StumbleUpon, I came across a startling and obviously enormous theory that will change the way everyone will think about Stumbleupon. Forever.
Well, kinda.
STUMBLEUPON KNOWS
Not about that time you accidentally used the wrong bathroom, but about whether your Stumbles are organic or not. That means that if you get a bunch of your friends to thumbs up a page in an attempt to boost its initial traffic, a red alert goes off at the SU headquarters and your page gets blacklisted or at least denied some traffic. I know from experience that even though some of my articles have had 5+ stumbles within two minutes from friends, they never got any visits. In short, inorganic thumbs up that occur within a set period of time after you submit your site probably have a small effect, if any.
ORGANIC VISITS = WIN
StumbleUpon most likely checks whether or not it referred you to the page or if you came there through different means. If you were sent there through http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=”pageurl” then all is well and your thumbs up have power. On the other hand, if you aren’t, they devalue your thumbs up/review. This makes it even harder to game and furthers the fact that the only people that can make an article popular are the actual social media users. Generic make money online blogs aren’t going to be happy about this one!
Posted by Max Miroff |
11 Comments »
- This is a bulleted list, and no one likes it. It’s like numbered list’s ugly adopted brother.
- It tries to be funny but it isn’t. You see that attempted humour in the above bullet? Yeah. It wasn’t that funny, and that’s coming from the person that wrote it.
- This list isn’t new content. Seriously, top ten lists are everywhere - what makes this one different from all the others? It’s just the same old crap in different, shinier packaging.
- This list doesn’t have any images in it and thus looks pretty boring.
- It’s published on a fairly unknown site, and if it’s not a big-name blogger then why should you even bother reading this post?
- This list has a filler entry which really doesn’t contribute anything to the list except to add another entry.
- This list is built purely to get more traffic in social websites and doesn’t provide any real value to its readers.
- This list doesn’t elaborate on its points - it looks like it was put together in five minutes.
- This list only has nine reasons. Users of Digg and StumbleUpon hate this a lot and often leave comments telling this to the author.
When this list fails, I won’t be sad - I’ve predicted it! Monitor the unpopularity!
Posted by Max Miroff |
21 Comments »
A current view of the StumbleUpon website. Beautiful, isn’t it?
It looks like something went wrong at StumbleUpon. The website is all there, but the formatting is messed up. The toolbar seems to work fine and other than the appearance everything is good.
OR IS IT?
Yeah, it probably is. Another screenshot of this surely-to-be historic fail moment:
Whoops. Turns out it’s scheduled maintenence. You scared me there, StumbleUpon!
It’s been like this for at least 12 hours. Whats going on, SU?
Posted by Max Miroff |
3 Comments »
Yes, you read that title right. You should copy content to get the highest results from StumbleUpon. Sure, original stuff is great, but who really wants to put in the time and effort to create something popular? 99.596% of “Making Money Online” blogs are based on the premise of regurgitating content and they show no sign of stopping.
OKAY, BUT HOW DOES COPYING GET ME TRAFFIC?
Well, it’s not really copying per se. It’s more of taking things and putting your own spin on them. Take the following image, for example:
Badly-drawn stick figures are amongst the most popular things on StumbleUpon.
As you can see, simply changing around a few things and adding some features creates a wholly new piece of content that eager StumbleUpon users can explore.
THE STEP-BY-STEP PROCESS TO COPYING CREATING POPULAR STUMBLEUPON CONTENT
- StumbleUpon various sites until you come upon one that you feel is popular.
- Check how many “Thumbs Up!” this item has in the review page. If it has over 20, it is suitable for your uses.
- Copy/paste the content into either Photoshop (images) or Wordpress (articles).
- Make a few changes. Try to add humor. Remember - StumbleUpon users love cats, funny videos, humorous quotes, new technology, and wit.
- Put it on your site!
- Wait for the traffic to pour in.
So remember - if it worked the first time, it’ll probably work again.
Posted by Max Miroff |
11 Comments »
Upwards arrows tend to indicate increase, much like what will happen with your traffic after you use the following method.
Do you have StumbleUpon? Do you have a website? If so, building traffic in this method may be right for you*.
BUILD TRAFFIC WITH SITE TRANSLATORS
Some websites offer services that translate your entire website into another language or dialect on their own servers. Seeing other languages amuses some StumbleUpon users and thus they could possibly give your translated website some thumbs up and traffic.
HOW TO DO IT
Commence the list!
- Go to Pikachize, Gizoogle, or whatever whole-site translator you wish.
- Input site URL into the translation field.
- Translate the site.
- Laugh in amusement at your sites translation.
- Submit the translated URL to StumbleUpon.
- Wait for the hits to come pouring in! (cry if they don’t.) These hits count as actual site hits and you’ll get more people viewing your content.
There you have it. A very, very clever way to get traffic with site translators and Stumbleupon.
This post has been sponsored by Nullamatix! Wooh!
Posted by Max Miroff |
2 Comments »
(Image Credit: MarCom Professional)
Having trouble exploiting social networking sites? Can’t think of content the masses will enjoy? Try these simple formulas to get on the front pages of Digg, Reddit - you name it!
Posted by Max Miroff |
4 Comments »
THE GREAT OPEN RANGES OF BOOKMARKING
Just take a look at all of the icons above - that great mosaic of social websites has nearly every bookmarking site available for you to use solely to give exposure to your sites. All of the above is prime internet space for your ventures. No matter what the theme of the site you’re going to submit it to, it’ll accept it. Trust me.
SHARING IS CARING
You’ve got a blog running and you want people to know about it. Why wouldn’t they - you’ve got content greater than that of any other website, right? While you keep telling yourself that, you should let others know about just how awesome you are. Open up Digg.com or one of its many clones, make an account, and prepare one of your pages for submission:
- Think of a list of keywords you think are popular - they should preferably not relate to the actual content but rather to what you think will attract the most views.
- Make your title and description as interesting as possible. Include lots of funky words that will be sure to incite controversy. Mention current politics. Claim that you have found a cure for cancer. Any of these are valid. After all, even if they click and it’s not what they want, internet users are too lazy to go back.
- Add a random humorous picture. Babies doing funny things or cute pets in adorable poses work well.
SUBMIT, DON’T COMMIT
Now that you’ve primed up your post, copy every detail to the clipboard so that you can rinse and repeat. Click the button and close the site - your work here is done. Your content, being awesome, will promote itself until it rises above and beyond and ascends to the front page on a gushing fountain of gratitude and praise from other users.
Posted by Max Miroff |
1 Comment »
