How do you perform Social Media on a Digg Veteran

Before I get into the more detailed stuff, I just want to say that a digg veteran is a client that has been on the Digg homepage over 40 times (4 in the last month), in my opinion anyway, which is a pretty impressive stat but it also means it’s difficult to show some large gains. So how do you go about increasing their amazing social leverage?

Firstly, I think we have to take a step back and have a look back at what Social Media Marketing involves, as Digg is certainly not just the be all and end all. Covered back in our post about “What is Social Media” and nicely in a video by ‘SMOgger‘, Social Media Marketing really includes:

• Helping a site become more like a community (allowing comments, poll voting, user interaction)
• Making a site more linkable (RSS to keep people updated, Social Bookmarking buttons, Being involved in the niche)
• Being Unique (Great content, Know your Audience, Rewarding Users)
• Getting Content out there (Social News, Social Discovery, Blogs, Forums)

Of course I could go into more detail but if you want to know more just check out the 2 links above. The site we originally took on was doing around 500k visitors per month, then with some simple SEO changes their search engine traffic started sky rocketing, throw in some link building and 1.3million visitors a month later we still hadn’t started with the Social side of things.

Getting Started Socially

1. When a site has been on the Digg homepage close to 50 times you know they must be producing great content. Even better when I see they have a category that just looks like every story was made to go viral (although it wasn’t), I just had to make sure the right people knew about it. Being close to a lot of top diggers and letting them know about the site, it was a pleasant surprise that they thanked me for the link and promised to keep checking on the content to submit things of interest.

2. I personally did not want to be submitting the content of the client, at least not a lot anyway and would prefer current website visitors to get in on the action aswell. To do that we suggested that the site developers make the social bookmarking links more prominent and remove a certain amount of clutter from the page in order for them to be a strong CTA (Call to Action).

3. It was pretty surprising to see that Digg was the only real avenue that the site was getting social traffic from, not that many links were coming from blog’s to each post that made the homepage either. We started submitting content from the site to the likes of Reddit and StumbleUpon and started to find content that was becoming pretty popular. From then it was a case of the people who already used those sites started checking out the RSS feed and submitting their own content.

Whats Next?

As just mentioned, the site doesn’t get a great deal of links despite the interesting content, we plan on increasing that by getting the client to link out to others more, make it easier for people to link to them (trackbacks, cleaner URL’s etc) and we have some other ideas up our sleeve.

Will certainly keep you posted!

4 Comments / October 31st, 2007 / Social Media

5 Simple steps for Successful Social Bait

‘Social Bait’ is the content you sometimes need to produce in order to have success with a Social Media Marketing campaign if you are a client don’t have any viral-potential content already.

With the potential in Social Media Marketing being realised by the masses, people aren’t as worried about how they can optimise their pages to get more traffic from Google but just as much wondering how they can use StumbleUpon to drive thousands of visitors or boost their ego with an article on the Digg Homepage.

This posts looks at 5 simple steps you can take, most of it common sense and the rest you could probably pick up from a site FAQ, but sometimes you need someone to tell you once again.

• 1. Be Involved in the Community
  

People need to understand there is an I in Social but it’s really a silent ‘we’. Being involved in communities is what they are there for but Of course you can be lucky in terms of getting on the Digg homepage and having never even registered but if you are going to submit your own stuff give something back to the community.

• 2. Write Something of Value
  

I don’t mean this in terms of so you can get on Reddit or go popular on StumbleUpon but I mean that your site readers are not going to want to hear you just talking to them, writing about things that are always personal or just have no benefit to them whatsoever. People read because they hope to get something out of it, give them something valuable, think about why you are subscribed to your favourite blogs and think about what they add to your life whether its knowledge, humour or something else.

If something is helpful to your regular site visitors / blog readers then you can be sure it has a good chance of being helpful to the majority of users on the likes of Digg and Delicious.

• 3. Add Friends, Build Your Network

Any Reddit, Streamy, SU or Digg-like site is likely to give you the ability to ‘build your network’, use it to your advantage. You can not only find some great relationships on these sites but find future supporters of your products or loyal readers to your blog.

If you are submitting and discovering content that people like, then they are going to watch what you submit more closely in the future, helping your Social Bait do better.

• 4. Submit Items to their Correct Categories
  

Another point that may sound obvious but many people fail to do. Just because the Technology section on Digg might get viewed by the most eyeballs, it doesn’t mean your picture of a cat stuck in a tree should go there if you want it to be promoted.

Submit stories to their correct categories so those who are likely to appreciate them can vote for them, then they can start getting more eyeballs as the story will get shown to more people.

• 5. Write an Engaging & Accurate Headline
  

Feedreaders, Social Voting sites, Emails…these are all places where the most important part of your content is your title. It can be the difference between somebody clicking through to read the rest of your blog post on your site or voting for your story on Reddit.

Headlines are the first thing people see so it’s important to look at how you can improve them, make them more engaging while still accurately depicting the following content.

To Summarise…if you stick to these simple tips, get involved in the communities that you wish to promote you content and ‘use the sites properly’ your content can go a hell of a lot further.

One Comment / October 10th, 2007 / Social Media

How this Blog received 100,000 Pageviews in 14 Days

On a certain day in June 2006 I had been awake 36 hours, I finished the 1st ever full revision of the ViperChill site and was ready to sleep. Funnily enough that first revision was offering ‘Search Engine Optimized’ Website templates, simply because I was told it would earn me a lot of money. I have no interest in website design, you have to realise what you love doing.

Once you realise what you love doing, you can start doing it. I’ve started to realise that with this site, I love doing SEO & Social Media, I like interacting with others on the subject just as much, but it’s pretty rare to find someone my age with the same interests so I don’t tend to bring it up into a conversation. One of the reasons this blog received 100k pageviews over the last 2 weeks was because I started writing about what I loved, and it showed.

Click the Image for a bigger View
I hate it when people talk about their traffic stats and never show any proof so there’s an image. I also hate it when people talk about how much traffic they received and don’t tell you exactly where it came from. So here’s the referrers:

(Remember these are stats from a 14 day Period)

• StumbleUpon: 41,182 Visits
• Digg: 9,389 Visits (Just the First Day of Traffic Counted)
• Direct: 4,695 Visits
• Sphinn: 618 Visits
• Google: 357 Visits

Over a two week period between August 26th and September 10th these were the top 5 Referrs to ViperChill.com. Please note that these are visits and not pageviews, some traffic has a terrible bounce rate while traffic from other sources tends to stick around.

What caused the traffic?
It’s all well and good knowing where traffic is coming from, but it’s certainly a lot more interesting to know where it’s going too. There have been two real posts on this blog that drove the majority of the traffic, I’ll go into them in a little more detail.

Analysis Top 50 StumbleUpon Users

This was the first post that really started the traffic spike, so far this as received over 33,000 pageviews for this one blog post. The top 5 referrs to this were:

• StumbleUpon: 30,724 pageviews
• Direct: 2,256 pageviews
• Problogger: 59 pageviews
• Google: 58 pageviews
• Danawallert: 48 pageviews

As you can see, StumbleUpon sent a lot of traffic to this page, this was because it was StumbleUpon related in my opinion coupled with the fact that a lot of people spent the time reviewing it and giving it a thumbs up. Due to this it was featured on the SU buzz page.

Analysis Top 100 Digg Users

This post was very similar to the last one but focused on a different site. No surprise that it didn’t do aswell on StumbleUpon but it did very well on Digg. This has received over 17,000 pageviews, here’s how the top 5 referrers match up.

• Digg: 12,454 pageviews
• StumbleUpon: 4,240 pageviews
• Direct: 682 pageviews
• Sphinn: 151 pageviews
• Popurls: 120 pageviews

As you can see the traffic was a little different for this one and it certainly depends who picks up your content. The numbers are a little more even compared to the large spike with the StumbleUpon post.

Summary

Two blog posts brought over 50k pageviews on their own, just from social media traffic. Notice how the search engine’s barely brought any traffic and if people hadn’t submitted the content out there or wrote about it on blogs I would have only received 1% of the traffic this site got overall.

I won’t deny that these posts took a very long time to write, but shouldn’t you be proud of everything you write on your blog? Aren’t your readers worth the time and isn’t the potential results worth testing? Go for it, and be surprised.

20 Comments / October 8th, 2007 / Social Media

Internet Marketers Guide to StumbleUpon

Like me, you’ve probably seen a few ‘Beginners Guides to StumbleUpon’ but these are often for people who seem to be beginners to the internet, although they are helpful. As Internet Marketer’s we should probably know a little bit about StumbleUpon and the basic principle so we don’t need to go through that today.

What we are going to look at is how you can get started using StumbleUpon (SU) and use it effectively to be able to drive massive traffic to your own websites and the websites of your clients.

Quick: What is StumbleUpon

Just in-case you are planning on marketing to a community that you have no clue about this little section should explain things for you.

SU is basically a socially driven discovery and recommendations websites. People discover websites, pictures and videos and they can give them a thumbs up or a thumbs down on whether they like them or not. This is done by installing the free SU toolbar for either Firefox or Internet Explorer.

The more thumbs up a particular content piece gets, the more the content is displayed around the SU network. Not only is the site great for getting a lot of new traffic but it’s also very fun to use and helps you discover new sites that you probably wouldn’t have found elsewhere.

What Traffic Can you Expect

Another beauty I haven’t mentioned about the large amount of traffic you can leverage from StumbleUpon is that the traffic is relevant and targeted, and catches people in the right frame of mind. When you register you can set-up the types of sites you want to be shown categorically or shown sites by keywords. Remember that when people are using SU they are looking for new sites, one of the reasons the current bounce rate I’m experiencing is only 30.89%. What this means is that 70% of people hitting my websites from SU aren’t just seeing it and leaving it, they are sticking around.

In terms of traffic volume I’ve seen in excess of 4,000 visitors in one day which continues for a good few weeks after the initial submission and can gather well over 10,000 is the content is good and can be relative at any period of time. Not all SU traffic brings your stats up that high but it’s quick easy to get a few hundred visitors over a couple of days. Traffic does tend to be higher initially then slowly die down.

Social Step-by-Step

• 1. Registration

Registering at SU is completely free, bear in mind you will have to install a toolbar but this takes up little space and can be easily hidden when you don’t want to see it.

Be aware that your username is likely to show up in Google rankings, and quite highly at that so if you use your company name or personal name, you might not want to go stumbling upon content you might not want people to know about. This can be the same for a marketing company where you don’t want your clients to be traceable via your SU history.

• 2. Building Friends

As with most social sites, you tend to get the most out of them the more you put into them. Becoming a loyal and active SU user means that you should interact with those you know on the site, add them to your friends and maybe even check out the sites they are stumbling. Having more friends allows your stumbles to have more leverage and can bring a lot more traffic then someone who just signed up and doesn’t have any friends.

Of course at the end of the day it is really about the quality content but for something so simple that can work so well, it’s definitely worth adding contacts to your profile. You can do this easily by importing your Email contacts which is something I did.

You don’t only need to add people you know but you can also check out the groups section and befriend people who have similar interests. The benefit of this is that these people are more likely to be interested in the content you are stumbling (the content you are interested in) and overall will be a better contact to have then someone completely random who is more interested in pictures of LOLcats.

• 3. Get Stumbling

Seeing as this is what the site is all about we better include it somewhere ;). Not only is stumbling ‘good for your account’ but it is also really enjoyable. I’ve found some amazing articles on some of my favourite websites that I hadn’t noticed before.

I have no doubt that part of the SU algorithm will be based on how often you stumble or what you stumble i.e. whether it’s the same few sites all the time or a wide variety. I tend to just do a search (rather than categorically) on keywords such as ‘Social Media‘ and I could easily stumble away for a few hours. It’s fun, it’s beneficial and it can make a boring day a bit more enjoyable.

Leveraging Traffic

• Tip 1. Create Quality Content

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in a social media marketing campaign is to try and promote something that just isn’t remarkable, quality content. If you don’t have something good to share then don’t waste time trying to share it. This can be said for other social sites and the truth is, the best way to leverage traffic from SU is to write something unique, create a humorous image or even an interesting video.

It sounds simple but it is something many people fail to do so bare that in mind before trying any of the following tips. There’s nothing worse than spending hours planning your tactics & strategy on content that just isn’t beneficial to anybody. Once you get Stumbling more and more, like any site you can start to see ‘what works’ and what doesn’t work.

• Tip 2. Take Care in Your Submission

If somebody has already submitted your story then don’t worry, you can still stumble it and write a quality review. If somebody hasn’t then take time to do the following.

• Tip 3. Recommend Content to Friends

Remember how I said it was best to add friends who had the same interests as you? Well this tactic is one of the reasons. Although this can be a little annoying and can be used to annoy people it’s really not worth trying to spam people with any old content. If you are constantly stumbling pages about dogs, and your friends are doing the same, then feel free to refer pages about dogs to your friends because they will probably stumble it as well.

This works well because the StumbleUpon algorithm sends traffic based on how many stumbles something gets, therefore if you send a page to a lot of friends and they all stumble it at once you are going to be able to generate a lot of traffic. Just a word of warning once again that if you send them anything spammy, unrelated or poor they won’t stumble it and may never stumble anything you send them again. You never know, they may go as far as removing you from their friends.

• Tip 4. PhotoBlog it

Believe it or not, written text is not the only active area of SU, images play a huge part in the interests of those who use the site and publishing a humorous, breathtaking or unbelievable image can drive even more traffic to your site. Once you install the extension for SU you will notice that when you right-click on pictures you have the option to PhotoBlog them.

It’s recommended that you leave some tags for the image that you submit and a description / review depending on whether it has already been submitted or not. One of the ways to get popular on Digg is to submit stories that have made the Reddit homepage because they are likely to make it on Digg. Well…one of the ways to get lots of Photo-Stumbles is to submit images that have made it onto both Digg and Reddit. Now you can see how things start to link together.

In Conclusion

I love SU, I really do. It’s not like Digg where I sometimes feel I’m only using it so others get to read quality content out there, with SU I find great sites myself and often get traffic from it when others like my content.

I like using the service and I put a lot into it, but I also get a lot back, I don’t think I can say that for many other sites. Please, Please, Please don’t try to fill it with anything and everything, pushing your poor content in the faces of those who were foolish enough to add you.

It’s all about enjoying a service, giving something to others and getting something back. I’ve gotten closer to a lot of great people thanks to the site; SU is for life, not just for Christmas ;).

38 Comments / September 17th, 2007 / Social Media

Diggers keep on Digging

Have you ever wondered just how important a headline can be on the likes of Digg? Well…hopefully this will make things a little more clear.

What Happened?

Just over a week ago, I submitted a story to Digg that made the homepage with 82 Digg’s, the site then went down.

The story received over 300 Digg’s even though the site was down and no mirror had been posted. If that’s not clearer than ever that your Social Bait headline is very important then I don’t know what is.

What’s a good headline?

Just because I’ve said a good headline is crucial, it doesn’t necessarily help you understand what one is. Once you start to emmerse yourself into these social media websites where headlines are crucial, you will soon start to see what works and what doesn’t. If you want to learn more about the Copy side of thing’s then I would read CopyBlogger.

Some good examples of headlines include:

• Titles that represent a list. Something that shows off the following content well, for example 7 Easy Steps to Speed up Your Site. Lists work because they are scannable and that means they can be read quickly, people don’t like to waste their time. Allow your headline to reflect the content.
• Interesting News. Interesting news can pretty much sell itself due to the fact that it’s interesting. Who wouldn’t want to read a story when the title is ‘Man arrested for Google Bombing‘?
• Something Controversial. Vanessa Fox caused quite a stir when she wrote ‘Why the SEOmoz Quiz is Completely Wrong‘. Something along the lines of ‘I don’t like the SEOmoz Quiz’ just wouldn’t have the same impact in terms of getting people interested and drawing people into the conversation.
• Write a Tutorial. People love to build up their knowledge, a headline that explains how they can learn something and what they can learn is always interesting to people. Even more so if it’s relevant to them, a good example is ‘How to Code Categorized Sitemaps for Wordpress‘, Wordpress blog users who know SEO is important are going to eat-up headlines like that.

6 Comments / September 13th, 2007 / Social Media