The Open Source Marketer

What would happen if your newest post was Dugg and all your friends at BlogCatalog knew about it? And then what would happen if they Dugg it too, letting all of their friends know it. That would be pretty powerful, right?

That was the first few lines of an email that was sent out by the BlogCatalog Team at 3:30 this morning where they announced they will be adding a social dashboard to the BlogCatalog community. This dashboard will allow BlogCatalog members keep up with social contacts. When a friend uploads a new Flickr photo or submit a new article to Digg, you’ll know and then you’ll be able to share it with your network.

The email went on to say:

“In the next couple of days, BlogCatalog is launching Social Dashboard beta, a new feature that displays your latest activities across many social networks — Digg, Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter, YouTube, and many others. That means automatic cross-networking and promotion right from your personal profile page. It also means that the your post updates, Twitter comments, Digg submissions, and other activities will appear on the Social Dashboard of all your BlogCatalog friends, and maybe their friends too. This is the kind of networking that can make posts go viral. And that’s just for starters.”

BlogCatalog is counting that the dashboard will give other members a reason to visit your profile page where they’ll be able to check for blog updates, Twitter messages, Flickr photo updates, Digg submissions, your YouTube videos and whatever else you might want to share. And by sharing with them, your network might share with their friends.

The email also goes on to suggest that you use the BlogCatalog Social Dashboard to promote your own activities. I find this particularly interesting because I am noticing more and more tools popping up that allow you to leverage multiple social bookmarking sites and to exchange traffic using those sites.

This trend should continue to increase as the number and popularity of social sites increases. Remember, social bookmarking slash social networking sites are all still relatively young and there is much more opportunity and room for maturing on the horizon.

BlogCatalog is already a great social networking site for the blogging community, so it’s interesting to watch as social networks leverage other social networks to boost traffic, engage members, and effectively push for a competitive edge in the market.

Sites like StumbleUpon and Digg will have to start thinking about how to navigate in these interconnected environments to preserve their relevancy and offer value to their members.

Already sites like SUExchange.com and SocialMarker.com are pushing the bookmarking sites off course slightly by creating a secondary marketing of link exchanging and traffic swapping. The social sites might not like it, but the reality is they can’t stop it.

As for BlogCatalog, this is really just a natural progression because they already offer the ability to link your BlogCatalog profile to your other social profiles. But this could definitely step things up a notch by pulling the social networks into a place where the members benefit from promoting each others links and social connections.

Check out the Open Source Marketer BlogCatalog Profile for a good example of a profile that is connected to other social networks.

BlogCatalog has been a good place for me to get ranking in the search engines and the increased blog surface area on their site has helped to bring traffic to my site in the past. You can see how the Open Source Marketer blog posts are pulled into the BlogCatalog profile page which increases your blog exposure. I can’t wait to see what value the social dashboard will add.

According to the email, they’ll be rolling out a beta version in the next few days.

The BlogCatalog Team is asking for feedback after the initial launch so be sure to let them know what you think. And don’t worry. If you don’t like the new features, you will be able to opt, but I don’t think you will.

What do you think about the BlogCatalog announcement? What social tools do you use?

Watching and waiting,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Recently, a member of my blog monetization BlogCatalog group mentioned using a Stumble Upon Exchange to get website traffic and it peaked my curiosity.

In the past I’ve seen somewhat positive results from stumbling my own posts, so I decided to do a little experiment to see if using a stumble exchange could help compound the stumble effect and generate even more visitor traffic for a blog.

The actual value of Stumble Upon traffic is an interesting topic to me and something we might discuss in another article, but given that a page view is a page view, I decided to try out the exchange site from the simple perspective of raw numbers. I wasn’t looking to measure the quality of the traffic, just the quantity.

Specifically, I wanted to know these five things:

1. How much traffic can an exchange generate?
2. Can I find truly valuable sites in the exchange list?
3. How much time is required to participation in the exchange?
4. Could I be penalized for being a part of the exchange?
5. Do I have to continually participate to get traffic?

So I created a free account. It took less than thirty seconds to complete the signup and email based account activation.

Once my account was activated and I was logged in, I was prompted to complete my profile which included some basic information like my stumble upon username, a contact email address, a short pitch about me, and a url of the website I wanted stumbled.

It only took a minute to complete the form and I was on my way to looking for other sites to stumble.

It’s worth noting that it’s possible to add more than one website to be stumbled, but for the initial testing I decided to use only one domain. If there was going to be a penalty for being in the exchange I didn’t want it to affect more than one website.

With a free account and about three separate ten minute sessions of hand picking sites that I wanted to stumble, I decided to sit back and see what would happen.

Stumble Upon Traffic Increase

Over the next twenty four hours I saw a definite increase in the raw traffic. The test site, which had previously been getting between two hundred and six hundred unique visitors a day, saw and increase by an additional twenty five hundred visitors. The total unique visits for the day was 3,287 and the total page views were 5,025. This is compared to the previous day’s numbers of 696 unique visitors and 1,204 page views.

Over the next six days the visitor numbers averaged out to be 2,595 unique visitors per day and 4,114 page views per day and the numbers are still strong as I am writing this article.

So, as a broad generalization I think it is safe to say that the exchange generated traffic beyond what was average for the site previously. Of course there are other off page factors that are mixed in like efforts to increase external linking from other sites, but given the over night change I will assume that a large portion of the increase was from the exchange activity.

Stumble Exchange Quality

As for finding valuable sites in the exchange, I did actually find several websites that I bookmarked with my del.icio.us account.

The other sites I stumbled because I either saw value in where they were going or I enjoyed the content of the site. But overall there was a good mix of creative sites and spam sites.

In general, I tried to stumble the websites I thought were of good quality so that I would add value to my Stumble Upon account. I try to consider that when making stumble choices because I like to think that a valuable stumble account carries more weight than a junk one and if the point is to be seen then you have to consider both sides of the equation to make sure everything balances out.

Time Requirements

Like I said in the beginning, it took very little time to get started and to gain the traffic. Given the free cost of the activity and the positive result involved I would say that this is definitely a productive activity provided you stay focused while you are doing it. It is also the perfect task to outsource to a high school kid in your area because it’s simple to do and the criteria is simple to define for someone else.

Possible Penalties

One of the remaining questions was, could I be penalized for using the exchange. I’ve put a lot of thought into this question and to this point I have to say I haven’t seen any backlash.

That doesn’t mean that someone couldn’t go too far and get slapped, but in my case I’m taking it slow and easy with the exchange and I’m stumbling sites outside of the exchange as well.

I have noticed a few of the exchange site listings that say they think their site has been banned, but at this point I don’t have a confirmation on those sites. I haven’t even tried to find out. Honestly, I think it might be to difficult to tell if they were banned for using the exchange or just because of some other activity that they were engaged in outside of the exchange. So, for now I’m just going to use a conservative approach to the process and see what happens.

Continued Participation

And lastly, I wanted to know if I would have to continually participate in the exchange to see a sustained benefit.

To answer that I must confess that other than my three, ten minutes sessions, I have only been back to the site one other time to award points and answer messages from other members.

In general I am continuing to see traffic from Stumble Upon on a regular basis. It might be that if left long enough this traffic would die out, but I have to imagine that the initial rush of exposure leads to more exposure as people stumble through to the site and therefore stumble it themselves.

If this is the case, then a good healthy push from the stumble exchange could spark a reasonable chain of traffic that could continue for some time. I will have to update this writing over time to let you know what the actual results are.

So, what’s my conclusion?

Well, as with anything, a little goes a long way and I wouldn’t recommend a stumble exchange as your silver bullet of traffic tools. But as another technique for getting visitors to your website, I would recommend it.

Of course, there is the disclaimer that you should only expose yourself to as much risk as you are willing to bare, but if you take a conservative approach and don’t try to abuse the system, then using a stumble exchange seems to be a good option.

What’s been your experience with Stumble Upon?

Stumbling here and there,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

A few really good questions about how to get blog traffic have recently come in my email so I thought I would share the answers with you.

To answer the questions I am drawing from my own personal experiences so if you have other suggestions or ideas, please share them in the comments for this article. I am sure others will appreciate the community feedback and my blog doesn’t use the nofollow tag so your comment link will benefit you as well. Here it goes.

Question: How did you build up visitors to your site? You have a lot of readers, and I was wondering if you actively went to other blogs and added comments or if MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog served to help with this.

Answer: I use blog commenting, forum posting, forum signatures, Meetup.com profiles, del.icio.us bookmarks, StumbleUpon submissions, email signatures, blogCatalog and MyBlogLog listings, and I joined Yaro’s Starak’s BlogMasterMind Course. That is all I can think of at the moment. There might be a few other things, but I think that is most of it. I use all of these methods in combination with offline events, and blog search engine optimization techniques. That helps me get search traffic as well as link traffic from multiple sources.

Question: Your content is a good reason for visitors to return, but how do you get them to show up in the first place?

Answer: I always suggest writing good articles that have attractive headlines and high value to the reader. Then link to that content in as many places as possible. Also, be sure you have multiple ways for the reader to stay connected to you when they get to your blog. For example, make sure you have options for RSS subscriptions and email updates. Then just keep pushing out value.

It helps me to think of blogging as one long continuous conversation. Each person I meet and each place I go is part of the collective voice of the reader I am writing for. It helps me to stay focused (though some days are easier than others). Overall I want people to find real information on the blog and not just filler. The idea being that this will keep them coming back and encourage them to spread the word. That’s what keeps me motivated during the journey.

I hope these tips help. It really is a lot of work to make an overnight success. So try to stay motivated and keep your focus on enriching the lives of others. It really is more about the journey than the destination. Even a ride on a first class flight can stink if you drop an engine along the way.

Aiming high,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com