Blog Post Ideas - Check your Referrals

Blogs are a great way to interact with your visitors and have fresh new content that can gain you extra visitors from search engines, but you lose the benefits of having a blog if you aren’t adding content to it and just letting it stay stale. With that in mind, I have to admit it’s not always easy adding new content on a regular basis, but I really like this idea to give you fresh thinking on what to write.

What I like to do is check my referrals, basically checking what keywords people are using in search engines to find my site, you can actually get some referrals that would make a good blog post, here’s an example of some referring search phrases to this website:

Although some of these may seem pretty obscure, and it’s not like there would be a lot of search engine traffic received when writing about any of these subjects, there are a few benefits to this method:

1. New Content - The point of this post is to highlight another way you can think up content ideas from your blog, go and check phrases you have found in your search logs to see if there’s any questions people are asking that you feel you could answer with confidence and is relevant to your blog
2. People want to know the answer - Although it’s not a huge volume of searches, I can see that a few people would like a dedicated post on how to become a top stumbleupon user, and as it’s relevant to my blog it’s clearly something that I could write about in the future.
3. Guest Post Ideas - Not everything in your referrals is something you want to write about yourself, for example I probably wouldn’t write about ‘how did digitalpoint grow‘, but if a relevant blog like Community Spark was looking for guest posts it may give me something to talk about on another site, or even give them an idea for something to write about.

Still stuck for something to write? Some other blog content ideas include:

• Asking your users a question, do a poll or conduct some sort of survey to interact more with your readers and add new content to your site
• Tell a story, surely you have been involved in a few ‘incidents’ or ’situations’ regarding the niche of your blog, why not tell a story around something that has happened
• Share a tip, I didn’t just write this post because I seen that somebody else did, I checked my referrals and thought that some of the search phrases would be good blog posts to cover

12 Comments / January 7th, 2008 / Social Media

10 People Made Famous by Youtube

Youtube has consistently proved itself as a great platform for aspiring artists / comedians / actors and anyone else to be noticed by its millions of users and helping change peoples lives for good. Therefore we decided to put together this list of 10 people that have been made famous by the site, and the success that they have generated.

They are not really in any order, just ordered slightly in the amount of success they have had but also our favourites as well. Number 10 is a new ’star’ that we think has big potential, and although not exactly famous yet we felt she deserved the spot.

Read the rest of this entry »

28 Comments / January 2nd, 2008 / Social Media

Are Webmasters / Internet Marketers ruining StumbleUpon?

When I created my post about the top 50 stumbleupon users, I never expected it to received the level of success that it did, and even though it’s been live for quite a while, one of the most recent commentors was someone I really respect on StumbleUpon so I decided to get in touch with her, caile-girl.

One message she sent really struck me, and I asked for her permission before posting it here, as follows:

i realize i’m not a big favorite of marketers, traffic staticians and SEO bloggers. i’m quite outspoken and a bit annoyed, obviously, at all the dissection going on regarding SU and its traffic-generating possibilities. i’m also aware that with growth comes commercialism and all its necessary evils.

i guess i feel like i’m on some crusade to preserve the integrity of why the forum is even here, but i know it’s a lost cause and i’ll eventually move on, like most of the more idealistic veterans, and leave the “new” SU to all the marketers.

nothing wrong with marketing. i’m just sad seeing all the misrepresentation and the fact that something i’ve spent two years doing nearly daily for the fun of it (and for the learning experience) is no longer much fun anymore and i kind of resent the intrusion of those who have other ideas for how to exploit it.

however, times change and people have to make money and no one (especially me!) likes working in a cubicle for someone else’s gain, so i understand why this is happening, even if i don’t like it.

From this I can clearly sense her frustration and relate to why she might be feeling like she does. There is a lot of ‘manipulation’ that is used on one of my favourite sites but I want to make some comments that I would rather do in public to help defend what people like myself do.

I will state that I offer internet marketing services, and sometimes we use StumbleUpon to help drive traffic to our clients, both free and paid.

1. Traffic Generating Possibilities - It’s true that people like to talk about the mass amounts of traffic that StumbleUpon can bring, this is because there are so few resources that can do this that people like to try and maximise it for everything that they can. Companies like us, will only submit the content and let the community to decide, if people like the content (which we have hopefully created to be good) they will give it a thumbs-up, if they don’t they will give it a thumbs down. This to me is no different than submitting a general article on the site of which we have no relation (which we of course do as well).
2. Leaving the ‘new’ SU to Marketers - As I said earlier, I accept that there are people out there just manipulating the site, just check the freebies section on Digitalpoint and this will become clear. However not all internet marketers are there to try and make SU a bad place or just utilise it for traffic. Just like I use Digg majorly for finding interesting news, I use stumbleupon to discover new and hot content in the internet marketing niche or whatever I have a ‘craving’ for at a certain time.
3. Resent those exploiting it - So do I, I hate it when I see crappy websites getting 50+ stumbles via Digitalpoint and then report back to say they received thousands of visitors. Even if people didn’t like it there just won’t have been enough thumbs down to counteract the benefits that people are receiving. Maybe this is a flaw with StumbleUpon in the sense that they havn’t found a way to get around this? I’m already seeing emails everyday from people sharing links with me on Mixx, it’s only a matter of time before the community becomes less friendly and the marketing does take over unless they can counteract it as well as, or better than digg.

In Conclusion…
There is some clear manipulation of StumbleUpon as highlighted earlier, but internet marketing companies aren’t necessarily the people to blame for these problems. If people can find ways to get more out of a system by manipulative tactics they probably will, but as mentioned maybe that’s a flaw in the SU system and something they should learn how to address. I too don’t like seeing the spam that gets shown on these sites but it certainly doesn’t lead me to give up and not expect things to change for the better.

What do you think?

5 Comments / December 20th, 2007 / Social Media

Using Social Media for a Good Cause

I recently emailed a lot of charities (around 20) offering free SEO services, I’m not sure if my pitch was poor but I only received one response, even though I explained there was definitely no catch and that we just wanted to do some good in the internet marketing world.

I actually received the response on the 1st of December (last saturday) which for those who don’t know, was World Aids Day. Here is how it looked:

We are an AIDS charity, tomorrow is World AIDS Day, and we have just put on Myspace, Youtube,

and on the AVERT website, www.avert.org, a new video about preventing babies dying of AIDS.

But we have no marketing capacity, as we are a small charity, and we now have to get people to watch the video.

Any help you could give us would be greatly appreciated.

You can get to the video from the home page of www.avert.org.

Thanks for the offer of help anyway.

Regards,

Annabel Kanabus

Director

It was a saturday, and I was about to go out, but I certainly wanted to help a good cause, especially for an issue that is so big in this country (South Africa) so I delayed my plans. Sure enough I found the video the email was regarding, and then I sent it to all my friends on stumbleupon (over 100) so as you can imagine this took quite a while.

When I first watched it I found it pretty special, and it was clear a lot of hard work had gone into it, but at only 214 views it certainly wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. Now the video sits at 3,404 views, more than 15 times the amount of views it had before we sent it around stumbleupon, but that certainly wasn’t the only traffic driver.

Michael Martine (who writes a great blog you should check out) was kind enough to also post the video on his popular video blog which has over 1700 subscribers, I never asked for this but he did it anyway. After letting Avert know the good news they told us that a lot more people had signed up to their aids campaign, and no matter how many views a video gets, as long as it produced some results that is what matters in my eyes, this also ended with a kind email:

Hi Glen,

Thanks very much for your help with this. We have very little experience promoting videos so your assistance is much appreciated.

The views on YouTube are now over 3,000, which we’re very happy with.

Kind regards,

Rob Noble, AVERT (replying in place of Annabel, who is in Africa)

If everyone of those 20 charities had of gotten back to me, I would have done 20 different 5-7 page reports for them free, it’s nice to know that we can use our ‘power accounts’ on popular social media websites to really make a difference. Thanks to all those who thumbed up the videos and for those who signed up to the campaign.

7 Comments / December 5th, 2007 / Social Media

I Love Mixx, but I’m Still a Digger

You can’t help but notice all the discussions going on about Mixx these days, from my favourite bloggers like Tamar and Tad, to top news sources like TechCrunch - it’s like the time sphinn was launched with all these updates in my RSS reader about the same site.

If you’ve missed out on all the news; Mixx is a bit like Digg, where users submit stories and other users vote on them, the stories that get a lot of votes and are deemed interesting appear on the ‘popular page’. Mixx is unique in that it offers some great story, picture and video sections and I especially like the process for submitting pictures.

So, like the title says I love Mixx, here’s a few reasons why:

• I can see stories from topics that interest me straight away (click on the image above)
• Voting for stories and leaving comments are fast, something that digg seems to be getting worse with
• A lot of my friends are on there (Tad, Tamar, Muhammad, MrBabyMan, Zaibatsu, Greg etc) and that’s one of the reasons I love StumbleUpon so it’s good to see others have moved over as well
• It’s new, theres no bitchyness in the comments and theres a lot of good, unique and most of all diverse content that is making the homepage of the site

Mixx is taking a lot of my time away from Digg, so why don’t I just leave the giant (Digg) alone?

Well…I can’t, and there’s a few reasons for that as well:

• I like the homepage, although some of the stories might be clutted with tech dicussions or ron paul articles, I always find a lot of interesting content that I’m tempted to share with colleagues
• It still drives the most traffic, although 95% of my time on the site is for personal reasons, when it comes to helping out clients or others, having a successful submission on Digg can drive a lot of traffic and get the story in front of people who can link
• It’s Digg - although that might seem pretty silly, Mixx is going to be compared to Digg for a very long time until / if it becomes a bigger website. Digg is famous for what it is and it’s still first on my mind when I want to find interesting news from around the web
• I love the comments section, although it’s one of the things a lot of people hate I just find some of the comments hilarious

So for now I’m mixxing (pun intended) up the sites I use on a regular basis — on a personal level not company…

Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, Propeller, Facebook, Mixx. How are you shaping up?

6 Comments / November 30th, 2007 / Social Media