I know what your thinking. Who needs ANOTHER browser when FireFox 3.0 has just been released? I think FireFox has made some great improvements, but they are improvements to an old model of consuming the Internet. Browsers like FireFox and Internet Explorer have come to power as part of the Internet land rush where the primary goal of the online website visitor was to “browse” sites looking for things to consume like text and images. But the online landscape has grown to include audio, video, and social networks. So it makes sense to have a browser that understands how to handle these additional part of the online experience.

According to the Flock website, “When using Flock, people can easily discover, access, create and share videos, photos, blogs, feeds and comments across social communities, media providers, and popular websites.”

As a social browser Flock helps you pull together most of the more popular social networks into one common dashboard.

For example, using Flock I can see all my friends from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter all in one sidebar. Different networks are listed under their own tabs and all the networks can be crunched down into one tab that create a single activity stream or view.

The icon of each person in my people stream has a network badge to tell me what network they are on.

A great feature of Flock is the media stream. As I select a friend in my people sidebar, I can see all the available media for that person. I instantly see their pictures, videos, and other media options. From there I can leave comments on that piece of content.

The benefit here is speed. I am just a few clicks from the networks I use and I can move between social networks and still maintain one common user experience.

Flock also helps you extract content on a page that might overlook. For example, if you load a page in Flock that has an RSS feed, Flock will ask if you want to add it to your feed sidebar.

Again, the important point here is speed. You are not wasting time looking for feed addresses when subscribing to content. You can even add additional social networks and useful links to your favorites which can show up as a sidebar to give you one click access to your most common online resources. I use mine to get to Picasa, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Gmail.

Even though Firefox has a ton of addons that I use, I still find myself using Flock all the time now. It’s obvious to me that this is the next generation browser. Social media is here to stay and Flock offers a real solution managing the social networks.

Months ago I overlooked Flock as just another me-too browser in a noisy browser market, but today I understand that it’s a social networking tool that should be in the social toolbox of every online marketer and social butterfly. It’s the best kept secret that wont stay that way for long.

Enjoy,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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

The process of placing a request for my Stumble Ad was pretty simple. With my selected domain name in hand I headed over to StumbleUpon, signed up as an advertiser, and followed their step by step process to place the ad.

StumbleUpon’s idea of an ad is actually just the inclusion of a link to your website in their index of sites that are part of the regular Stumble rotation. The “ad” works the same way all other Stumbles work except a green button will appear on the StumbleUpon toolbar that says “sponsor” when your site is shown. Other than that the visitor is suppose to have no other distractions, just a full view of your page in the browser.

As part of my desire to sample Stumble Ads I placed a request to get 100 visitors at .05 cents per visitor. I chose a StumbleUpon predefined category for my content and submitted my request. Everything was very simple. The category I selected was “Christian” which at the time had a “(67)” next to it. According to StumbleUpon that 67 is suppose to mean, “Category name (thousands of users subscribed)”. So, I felt confident that everything was okay and my request was placed into a que as a pending request. According to StumbleUpon’s FAQ it would take 24 hours for the request to be processed. So I waited.

Well, less than 24 hours later I received this email:

Hi,

We’re sorry to inform you that one of your StumbleUpon advertising campaigns cannot be accepted at this time.

There are not a sufficient number of people to view your ad in the category you have selected. Try broadening your targeting and resubmit your campaign.

Please feel free to check our content guidelines or submit other sites for approval as well.

Sincerely,

The StumbleUpon Team

So, I decided to try again. In fact, I tried again six times over the course of three day using different domains and different categories. The only thing I didn’t do was increase my ad spend from $5 a day to some higher value. I guess that is my next thing to try. It should make for an interesting part two to the story.

Overall, here is what I am thinking. Bare in mind it is totally a conspiracy theory. I am beginning to think one of two things, either StumbleUpon is overstating their numbers and they don’t have enough traffic to support their claims, or they are not interested in dealing with a $5 dollar a day ad spend even though they claim you can jump in at that level. I am sure there is something else going on here. It could be that I am doing something wrong, but it is more fun to think of myself as the hard hitting Water Gate reporter type.

Conspiracy theories aside, I did find you a good alternative source of cheap traffic that is just as easy to use as StumbleUpon Ads and the quality of the traffic is about the same. The site is appropriately called goClick.com and it offers access to category based traffic with rates as low as .01 cent per click.

The goClick system works similar to a Google Adwords campaign. You bid on keywords and categorize your site for inclusion in their network of traffic. The initial account can be pre-funded with as little as $10 dollars. This is good for you because you can test your traffic strategies without sinking a lot of money and when the ad spend is up you can’t spend more than your account funds.

GoClick isn’t going to provide a particularly high volume solution, but it is cheap and if you are smart and put metrics in place to measure the response rate of your visitors, it can be a good source of cheap traffic that you can use to test conversions. Once you have even a small amount of conversion success using this low quality cheap traffic, then you can move up to a higher quality more expensive Adword pay per click campaign. I recommend this method of testing and measuring over jumping head long into an expensive Adwords campaign.

So yes, maybe I’m just doing something wrong with StumbleUpon. But, I don’t really care. GoClick is working for my purposes for now and I will continue to experiment with StumbleUpon. If you do find yourself in the same situation, be sure to let me know. I would be interested to know how many other people have had this happen.

Also, if you have suggestions for a solution, leave your comments for that too.

Stumbling on Stumble Ads,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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

BlogRush was launched over the weekend and I signed up as soon as I heard it was open. Immediately I started seeing visitor traffic to my blog, OpenSourceMarketer.com. The result was a sharp increase in mailing list subscribers, RSS subscribers, and blog comments. In fact, I am continuing to get visitors from the BlogRush widget on the blogs, though it has slowed down just a bit. Some of the slow down might be due to the overwhelming response that BlogRush has received. I bet John Reese didn’t anticipate such a great response, even though he founded the project.

BlogRush has enjoyed great success so far because it is context sensitive so it display blog posts from other blogs that are relevant to the content on the page. That means if your blog is part of BlogRush then your blog posts will show up next to relevant keywords on another blog. Ultimately that means that if someone is looking for information on a specific topic and they are searching blogs for that information then a link to your blog posts are going to show up near those relevant keywords. This is how Google runs their entire Adsense program so you know this is a proven method of getting readers to click on links.
BlogRush also has a viral marketing element to it that helps to make the thing attractive for everyone. Your blog posts get displayed on other blogs once for every time your widget is displayed on your blog. That is a good method of making sure that active blogs are being rewarded for attracting readers. And, when you refer someone to BlogRush and they create a free account, you get partial credit for their signup. This process goes ten people deep so the more people you tell the more your blog posts will be shown.

Now, let’s look at StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is basically a system for sharing user contributed links and reviews of content. Any StumbleUpon user can bookmark, or stumble, a page on the Internet. They can write a short review and categorize that content. Stumbles shows up on the user’s profile page and is included as part of the great StumbleUpon community.

StumbleUpon users can also randomly stumble through content that is included in the StumbleUpon index of content. When someone stumbles through content it is usually by a specific category or media type, such as news, movies, random pages, and the like. Because the act of stumbling is so random and effortless, StumbleUpon users don’t really have to do anything but click a button. This potentially puts them one click away from your content. This is where it gets hairy.

You see, if they don’t have to put any real thought or effort into the process then it will be just as easy for StumbleUpon users to click away from your blog. We will look at how you can make something positive out of this traffic in another aritcle, but for today just note that big StumbleUpon numbers is not a guarantee of success. Honestly, when I submit my articles to StumbleUpon I always get traffic within a few minutes. Sometimes my blog articles get a few hundred unique hits, sometimes my blog articles get one or two hits.

The initial rush of StumbleUpon traffic doesn’t usually last more than thirty minutes or so and then the excitement dies down. However, the articles still continue to get hits over the long term. Even today I am getting traffic from StumbleUpon for articles that were submitted weeks ago. StumbleUpon can pull the traffic, but you still need to consider the value of that traffic.

So, which is better, BlogRush visitor traffic or StumbleUpon visitor traffic? Honestly, they are both good for two reasons

1. The required actions to get the traffic are minimal. For the effort on your part, the return in terms of raw traffic is fantastic. So, really unless you have another activity that brings you better quality traffic, you have every reason to use these tools to gain blog traffic.




2. Even blog traffic on its own isn’t enough to bring great rewards. You have to give the visitor a reason to stick around and read your content. Then your content has to convince the reader to stick around, subscribe to your RSS feed, subscribe to your mailing list, click a link, or whatever. Traffic won’t make a blog successful on its own.

Ultimately, if you are looking for ways to get eyeballs on your blog, then both of these tools offer a free, low touch method of attracting visitors. Whether those visitors turn into blog readers is really another discussion all together. If you are considering ways to monetize your blog while using these tools, you might consider impression based advertising. While impression based revenue has been typically low for some time, you can still make a few dollars you didn’t have before. It really depends on what you are already doing and how many sites you are doing it on.

The important point is to focus on creating good quality content, get traffic to that content, try to convert those visitors into readers, offer those readers an opportunity to take some beneficial action, and repeat. BlogRush and StumbleUpon are only tools in this process and they can not take the place of having a good plan. So use them both and enjoy the traffic.

Working the plan,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

You see it doesn’t matter what anyone “says” social media is. What matters is how people are using it and what you can do with it as a marketer. Even if you don’t use every social media site out there, you need to at least know what they are about and how other people are using them. Social media sites are where people are coming together online to interact and that means you have an opportunity to get your website content in front of a bunch of people with little to no cost.

To get us started, here are seven things that social media sites offer people online

1. The ability to categorize and bookmark sites
2. The ability to share content and resources with others
3. The ability to communicate with others directly
4. The ability to create personal profiles
5. The ability to add user defined tags to content
6. The ability to group together by topics of interest
7. The ability to rate or rank the quality of content

In our upcoming articles we will examine each of these points as they relate to our chosen social media sites and we will discuss how we can use each of these capabilities to market using social media.

Until then I encourage you to visit Del.icio.us and learn what the site is about. Sign up for a free account and learn how to use the tool on a basic level. By using the tool and seeing how others are using the tool you will be better equipped to understand how it can be used to help you accomplish your marketing goals.

Meet you back here in a few days,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com