Quite a few came in that I wish to share with you today. Hopefully you will not only see some honest reviews of the eBook but you’ll come across some sites that you enjoy.

In no particular order, here are the reviews from around the web:

• Quest for Balance - Q4B is ran by my friend, Lisis Blackston, and covers her life stories and inspirational writings to help people grow. You can find her site here, and the review of Blogging Blueprint, here.
• Dream in the Life - This is a site ran by Karen who actually used my BloggingBlueprint guide to start her website which you can find here. You can also find her review of the eBook, here.
• Hunter Nuttall - Hunter runs one of the few sites that I have been following since I started my own and he consistently offers excellent value on the topic of Personal Development. You can find his site here and the review of Blogging Blueprint, here.
• Where’s Carla - Where’s Carla is you guessed it, ran by a woman named Carla. She took time out of her schedule to be one of the beta testers for the eBook which I really appreciate. You can find here site here and the review of Blogging Blueprint, here.
• RedCube - Redcube are a design, PR and Marketing consultancy. Their website can be found here, and the review of Blogging Blueprint can be found here.
• Sun, Rain, Or… - Tis is a website about living a productive and creative life. I appreciate the time the author took to write a review on the eBook which is very in-depth. You can find the site here and a review of the Blogging Blueprint, here.
• Emma Lee - Emma is a writer who has had her poems broadcast on BBC Radio and short stories featured in a number of publications. You can find here website here and the review of Blogging Blueprint, here.
• The Skool of Life - This is a site ran by Srinivas Rao which covers topics like visualisation and personal growth. You can find the site here and the review of Blogging Blueprint, here.
• HDougie - This is a site ran by Howie Dougie which covers his personal stories of growth and self improvement. You can find the site here and the review of Blogging Blueprint, here.
• Gilang - This is a site ran by Gilang Ramadhan which covers teen life, friendship, and romance. You can find the site here and the review of Blogging Blueprint, here.
• Epic Self - Is ran by one of my favourite bloggers, Amber, who is currently travelling the world, taking just two backpacks to her destinations. You can find her site here and the review of Blogging Blueprint, here.

I encourage you to check out the sites, and make sure you download the free eBook (link opens as PDF) if you haven’t already!

Comments are closed on this post.

Since launch, the site has received tremendous growth and now has over 3,500 subscribers. That is more than I managed to build for this site in 3 years and more than I possibly imagined I could build. I’m enjoying myself so much writing about the topic that I just want to keep going.

Of course, I still have a marketers mindset and my ‘Mr. Statistics’ nickname is not misplaced. I still have my head in stats and figures on a daily basis, always looking at how I can improve this or that. At PluginID I have been writing about Personal Development, and although this has nothing to do with blogging, a lot of people have been asking me how I grew my site so quickly.

I came to a point where I wanted to stop answering lengthy emails and put it all in one free guide, so that’s exactly what I did.

Today, I am announcing my free BloggingBlueprint eBook which is jam packed with 69 pages of value. Best of all, I don’t even want your email address to give you a copy (click here to get yours, opens as PDF). The guide comes in three parts:

• Part One - My story of how I made tens of thousands of dollars through blogging, how I landed my dream job in the internet marketing industry and how one of my main projects was featured in a book at 16.
• Part Two - This part is all about creating your story. I go through the very basics (and I mean basics) of setting up, creating and promoting a successful blog.
• Part Three - You guys will probably enjoy this part the best as it shares some of my ’secrets’ if you like in blogging (although most people know there are no secrets). I haven’t held back and I think everyone can learn from what I’ve written here.

What are you waiting for?

Click Here To Download Your Free Copy (Opens as PDF)

Already Blog? Here’s Another Freebie

If you already run a blog (or start one very soon thanks to this guide) then I have another bonus available, completely free. All you have to do is download a copy of the eBook and post a review about it on your own blog. The only requirement is that you must link back to this post so your readers can pick up a copy if they wish.

In return, I will include a backlink to your site from PluginHQ which has a Google PR of 4 and over 2,000 feed subscribers. Not a bad deal, eh? Depending on how many people do this, you may be one of only a few links and receive quite a nice influx of traffic. To qualify, simply write your blog post and then email me the link when it is live.

Click Here To Download Your Free Copy (Opens as PDF)

With this guide, however, I want to share more information on the site than I ever have before, a guide not just for marketers but anyone who wants to get the most out of the great service. That could be a lot of people, seeing as my ’spy’ access into StumbleUpon’s statistics tell me they now have 7.5 million active users.

What is StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a system that allows you to find new and interesting websites based around your favourite subjects. The more you use the service, the more the system ‘learns’ about your interests and can show you web pages that interest you.

This is a new, social based model of finding content rather than searching for what you want in a major search engine and finding results generated by a computer. With StumbleUpon, it’s all about the users and the content that the community enjoys.

How to Use the Service

Traditionally, StumbleUpon utilises a toolbar that you install in a browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox. More recently however, they have came up with a toolbar that you don’t need to install, and shows at the top of the pages you are viewing.

I prefer using the toolbar option and here is how it looks in your browser (note that my version has been tweaked based on my preferences):

Original StumbleUpon Toolbar

New Web Toolbar

The three main buttons that you should be aware of here are the ‘Stumble’ button and the up and down thumbs. The Stumble button will load a new page in your browser that has been based around your interests, the thumbs up button signifies that you like this page and of course the down thumb signifies that you don’t like it.

There are two aspects of this thumbing up and down that effect the system. The first aspect is that StumbleUpon learns about what type of content you like and what you don’t, and then tries to show you more of what you do like when you click Stumble. The second aspect is that they learn what pages the community like, and tend to show them to more people.

With over 7 million active users on the site, that means that there is a lot of potential for certain content to get viewed thousands of times. In fact, a blog post I wrote recently received over 100,000 views from users of the service. Instead of trying to explain how the system works, I’ve drawn this small graphic which should help explain things:

Becoming an Active User

If you’ve never used the site before, I’m warning you now, it can become very addictive and turn into a huge time waster. In fact, images that have said “Stop Using StumbleUpon” and shown up while browsing with the toolbar have become a thing of humour because people know how fun the service can be.

The following points are applicable whether you are just starting out in the service, whether you’ve used it and want to get more out of it or you’re an internet marketer looking for website traffic. Either way, it’s good to take full advantage of all the features available and become a genuine, helpful user of the community.

Define Your Interests

When you sign-up to StumbleUpon you will be asked what topics you are interested in. Of course, it’s important that you tell them what you are actually interested in so that you can get the most out of the service. When I signed up I entered ‘web development’, ‘internet’ and ’self improvement’ as my favourite topics.

What this means is that whenever you hit the Stumble button, you will be shown a page that has been tagged as relevant to one of these categories, and you won’t see pages about random subjects.

Choose a Profile Picture

This is something that I think everyone should do, no matter what your reason is for wanting to use the site. Your profile picture will of course show on your profile, but it will also show on any reviews of pages that you comment on and it may show on review pages which show which people liked the content.

Here are some examples of popular avatars in the social media space:

It is up to you whether you want to use an ‘avatar’ style picture like this or a picture of your face, both are acceptable and about as popular as each other.

Writing Your Profile Description

Every user on StumbleUpon gets their own profile, yours will be located at http://username.StumbleUpon.com - of course, substituting username for whatever username you chose. Your description is there simply to tell the world a bit about yourself. I recommend that you fill this out and be honest; the friending feature of StumbleUpon is used a lot and this will help you connect with other users.

A nice touch in the description section is that you can add a link to other websites so if people like your Stumbles they may check out the links to see what you are about. I’ve made some great relationships through StumbleUpon and turned many of my ‘friends’ on the site into blog subscribers, Twitter friends and even Facebook buddies.

Add People to Follow

I’ve already mentioned that when you sign-up you get to pick your favourite interests, and then the Stumble button will show you relevant website pages. The Stumble button is not the only way to find great content on the site though, you can find it through your connections.

When you Stumble upon a page, you will be able to see the user who submitted it via the toolbar like so:

If you like what they are submitting you can both add them as a friend and subscribe to their submissions. This means that when you go to your home page on the site (http://username.stumbleupon.com/home/) then you will see all the recent reviews by your friends. My own profile has 142 people subscribed to my updates.

Create Your Own Shortcuts

Once you start really getting into the site, you’ll notice that you want to speed up certain aspects of the features available. My current set-up goes like this:

• I let Stumbleupon prefetch the pages it is going to show me
• If I click ‘Thumbs Down’ then it automatically loads a new page
• CTRL + Left Arrow on my keyboard shows a new page (Stumble Button)
• CTRL + Up Arrow on my keyboard gives a page a thumbs up
• CTRL + Down Arrow on my keyboard gives the page a thumbs down

This means that I can browse around and find great new content without having to keep clicking on the toolbar with my mouse. You can change your shortcuts by going to Tools >> Toolbar Options >> Shortcuts. If you like the idea of auto loading a new page when you click the down or up thumb then you can change that in the configuration tab.

Getting Traffic from the Site

If you are not a webmaster and simply want to find awesome content, then the information above should be more than enough for you to get started. However, this is an internet business blog after-all, and StumbleUpon is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your websites.

StumbleUpon is known to have the ability to send thousands of visitors to a page over a few day stretch. I remember the days when the traffic would only have a 30% bounce rate, and while it’s around 70% now, visitors from the service still leave comments and sign-up to RSS feeds which is what most people want them to do.

Just to show you the potential of the service, here are the traffic stats for one of my sites for the month of March, 2009.

Note: I wanted to share a more realistic example of similar results you can hope to achieve. However, I have also seen StumbleUpon send this site over 80,000 visitors to a single page, this one.

So, how do you get all this traffic from StumbleUpon? Before we find out, I want to say that it’s clear these days it’s no longer about having a powerful profile or a huge network of people you can send your page too and ask them to Stumble it. Now, it’s largely about the content (and that’s a good thing, especially for those of us that genuinely want to help people).

Now, let’s find out about that traffic should we…

Write Creative Titles

Although your content should be good, it isn’t nearly as important as the title of your page. The title of your article or blog post is the first thing people see, and if it doesn’t entice them to read on then they aren’t going to stick around. Great title ideas include:

• List / Resource Posts
• Something that is humorous
• Something that is relevant and fills a need
• Something that is shocking and against the norm

A title like ‘Some snails in London get painted’ is nowhere near as interesting as ‘Graffiti Artist Uses Snails as His Canvas’ which was in fact, an article. Don’t write a great title if you don’t have the content to back it up, and make sure the title is relevant. But remember, the title is without a doubt the most important factor of whether people will read your content or not.

Want proof? Look at the top rated pages in any category and they will all have great titles. Or, test it out for yourself.

Create Viral Images or Videos

Text isn’t the only type of content that works well on StumbleUpon. For a while last year I ran a motivational pictures blog and each day I would receive thousands of visitors from the toolbar. Remember, most StumbleUpon users are just browsing around the web, looking for something interesting and pictures and videos are great ways to catch their attention.

However, it’s important to note that while images or videos can be great at getting a surge in traffic from the site, it’s far less likely to convert in a way you want it too compared to text content. Unless of course, you’re trying to increase the view count of your videos ;).

Enter Relevant Submission Information

It’s important that you do not simply keep submitting your own content to the site as I’ve noticed a lot of people do as this is a fast-track way to get your account banned or have your site banned. Even a huge blog like ProBlogger was removed from the service and while the domain was allowed back into the system after a huge uproar, it does show that nobody is exempt from their heavy hand.

You can submit a new page to the system by simply clicking ‘I like it’ and if the page has not been discovered before, a pop-up box like this one below will appear:

If the title of the current article is catchy then leave it, otherwise you can tweak it to help it along. For a description I sometimes just copy the introduction of the article, or you can write your own short review. It’s important that you pick an appropriate category for the submission. If you choose a sports category for a financial article, nobody who it is shown to is going to like it and it will quickly drop off the queue.

Send the Page via a Re-Direct

I mentioned earlier that it is no longer effective to send a page to all of your friends and ask them for a stumble. In the past this kind of activity would guarantee you thousands of visitors but now it is rarely the case. Thanks to my friend Marc, I’ve noticed that if you do want to use this method, it is far more effective to send visitors through a StumbleUpon Re-direct.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/click_redir.php?t=49e34c6117e3f&src=url&u=YOURURLGOESHERE

This reason this works is that StumbleUpon are clearly not sending a lot of traffic when you click the ‘I like this’ from a page you are already on. However if you go through the re-direct, or keep stumbling and land on a page then vote it up, it looks a lot more natural and like a genuine recommendation.

Look at What Is Hot

A good way to get traffic from any social media website is to look at what is hot and is working well in the community. After-all, it makes sense if you find out what people on websites enjoy and send them more of it, they are going to stick around on your site.

A good way to check what is hot on StumbleUpon is to check the top rated pages for each category. As an example, PluginID is in the Personal Development niche and the closest related category to that on StumbleUpon is self-improvement. So what I would do now is head on over to the self-improvement page (you should do the same for whatever category is most relevant to your niche) and look at the top-rated pages.

You can quickly see the type of content in your industry that is doing well and getting 50 reviews or more. As an example, in the self improvement niche I have written 3 of the top 50 highest rated articles ever. All of these have received over 50,000 visitors from StumbleUpon and this one even received 110,000.

In Conclusion

StumbleUpon is without a doubt one of my favourite websites. Not only does it allow me to find content I wouldn’t have found otherwise, it’s also been a site that has allowed me to make some great connections. A lot of the information in this article, while simple, is enough to ensure you understand the site and how it works.

If you are an internet marketer, please, for obvious reasons, do not abuse the system. I see so many voting rings on forums that say ‘if you stumble me then I’ll stumble you’ which only brings down the quality of the service for anyone who uses it. I don’t see any harm in asking for a bit of help in promoting quality content, after-all I see a lot of information rarely getting the content it deserves, while blatantly made for adsense sites show up on my browsing.

Let me know what you think of this guide, it is almost 2,500 words but I think creating long, in-depth posts like this can be helpful as a one stop resource in getting started.

Flickr is one of those sites where you see an odd guide here and there about optimising your images or getting traffic, but I like to think I take things a little further than that. This post is going to look at how a personal account gets around 4-5,000 views daily, and has amassed over 450,000 views so far. And trust me, those views result in traffic.

What is Flickr?

For those of you who don’t know, Flickr is a photo sharing (and now video) community that allows photographers, hobbyists and designers to upload their works for the world to see. Flickr has a real community feel about it, and with active groups, commenters and genuinely nice users, it’s a friendly place to spend your time.

The site was taken over by Yahoo and you’ll see why this is important to know later on in the guide. Flickr was founded in February 2004, and now claims to have over 3 billion images on their servers. My favourite aspect of Flickr is the ability to mark photos of favourites. Whenever Adam does a new post highlighting some top images, I save most of them so I can recall them later whenever I’m writing a new blog post.

My Stats

Before I get onto how you can get traffic from Twitter, I thought we should look at the traffic potential. Bare in mind that Flickr traffic isn’t going to be a huge wave of visitors flooding your server, similar to Digg or StumbleUpon. Instead, Flickr traffic is a lot ’steadier’ and tends to be traffic that you can receive for months and months without doing anything extra.

Over the last few months, Flickr has been consistently sending me around 100 visitors per day. While this is not a massive amount by any means, this is targeted, relevant traffic that is coming to my site and actually converting in ways that I want them to. An extra 3,000 visitors per month for doing nothing but uploading images (and then stopping) is not bad in my opinion.

I believe that the reason traffic drops off is that newer images take the first page of Flickr search results and tend to get the most traffic. The good thing is that with Flickr’s detailed analytics, I can go in and see which images have lost traffic, or which traffic sources have dropped, and work to improve that.

For any photoshop detectives out there, all I did was move the text on the left closer to the images (there is a huge gap), all the figures are still intact - feel free to zoom in ;). Notice how I am getting traffic to both sets and collections, I’ll discuss this in more detail later.

Getting Flickr Traffic

The great thing about uploading Flickr Images is that in the description for each you can include links to your website. These are actually no-follow so they won’t help much in the search engines, but they do send traffic.

However, for any link junkies out there, links to your site from the sets and collections pages are dofollow and you can use any anchor text that you like. I’m not sure how long that ‘hole’ will stay open now that I have mentioned it here.

Choosing the Right Images

One thing you should know is that 99% of the traffic to my Flickr images comes from the Yahoo search engine and the Flickr search engine. Funnily I get single figure visitors daily from Google Images (apart from to my site) but Yahoo really sends a ton of traffic to your Flickr page, unsurprisingly as they own the site.

On this note, that means that you need to upload pictures that people actually want to find; some tips I have on doing this include:

• Upload Pictures that Already Get Traffic - Do you have images on your site that already get a lot of visits? If so, upload optimised alternatives onto Flickr and see if you can boost traffic to your site that way.
• Upload Wanted Images - It’s not hard to think of images people might look for on a daily basis but of course you should try to think of relevant ones as well. Pictures of celebrities, sporting events and famous landmarks will always be a hit when it comes to traffic.
• Look at Popular Groups - If you look at the popular groups on Flickr, you can start to tell which photos people are interested in, and this generally means they want to see more of them. For example if there is a popular group about Beyonce Knowles, and you own a celebrity blog, then it might be wise to upload some pictures of her (that you have permission to use, of course).

At the end of the day, it is still important that you upload relevant images to your account. There’s no use getting lots of celebrity traffic if you run a hotel that is situated near a theme park. In that example, it would be much better to have images of the theme park or surrounding interests in the same area.

Optimising Your Images

Now that you have your pictures up on Flickr, you need to optimise them. If I’m totally honest, I have optimised my images to the point of ridiculousness (I know that’s not a word) and you really don’t have to go this far. Why did I? Simply because I test every single thing possible to work out what is best, and because it is on Flickr’s site, I don’t think there is something like over-optimisation.

There are several ways you can optimise your images on Flickr:

• Image Titles - This is probably the most obvious and definitely the most effective tactic to get more image traffic. The title of the image should be relevant to what the image is and not something like 00002.jpg or whatever it was when you uploaded it. If you are uploading multiple images that are around the same subject, add a number or extension word to the title i.e. Beyonce Knowles, Beyonce Knowles Smiling, Beyonce Knowles 2 or similar.
• Tags - For each of your images you are also allowed to put tags that describe them. Here I honestly go overboard and include a large number of tags in that describe my images. What I also do is add misspellings that people might use and this is especially handy for getting traffic directly from the search function in Flickr.
• Sets - Flickr allows you to create sets that group together all of your images. So for example, staying with the celebrity theme, you could have a ’set’ that shows all your photos of Beyonce, a set that shows all your photos of Madonna and so on. Of course, the celebrity theme is just an example but you should know how you can separate your own photos into different sets based on relevance. Again, the title of the set should be optimised so that it is relevant to what the images it contains are about.
• Collections - This is why I say I went a bit overboard on the optimisation, and that is because I took advantage of collections as well. If sets are a group of like images then you should see collections as a group of like sets. Your collection could be about ‘celebrities’ and include the sets Beyonce and Madonna. Another collection could be about ‘theme parks’ and show Six Flags in America and Alton Towers in the UK.

The reason I make use of all these is that you get a lot of internal links to your images from the same site. One of the reasons Twitter profiles rank highly in Google is because they have a lot of internal links from other profiles, and this method with Flickr is no different. Some of my sets pages have amassed a PR 3 and 4 with nothing but internal links from tags and other areas of the site.

Linking to Your Site

As I briefly mentioned earlier, the links from a Flickr photo page are nofollow but they do send traffic. If people are searching for pictures of landmarks from a certain area, and you have a hotel in that place, that visit might result in someone paying to stay with you. That is just an example, but if you use your imagination there are literally thousands of ways that you can get this image traffic to convert how you want them to.

• Images - When you upload images you are asked if you want to give them a description. This is where you place the HTML code for your link. Your text should be inviting so for example you might say ‘for more pictures of X go to myurl.com’ or ‘Like this picture? Find out more about this area at myurl.com’. Of course you can test this to see what works best for you.
• Sets - Your sets page contains all the images that you want to put in a certain group. Sets do get indexed by search engines and they also do not have the no-follow tag on their links, so you can get a relevant backlink from a very trusted domain.
• Collections - Just like sets, collections allow you to name them uniquely and their descriptions also do not have the no-follow tag on links. Collections, as stated, allow you to group all your sets together and these pages can also acquire some decent pagerank if you organise all your internal linking effectively.

The more images you upload, the more chances you have of getting people to your Flickr pages and the more chance you have of getting them to your site. Of course, it’s better to be able to upload images that get a lot of searches, rather than lots that don’t get any.

I use this method with a few sites, uploading relevant niche images and pointing the description back to my site. It might only bring an extra 50 visitors per day, but a few thousand visitors per month is not bad for less than a days’ work.

I was featured on the huge blog a few weeks ago (80k+ subscribers) and received over 1,200 visitors as a result for a backlink in the middle of the post. However, the page people were landing on had a lot of exit paths, and there isn’t much I can do about that, that’s why I got the link (Resource page).

Tracking & Testing

I use BLVD Status as well as Google Analytics to check website traffic; BLVD is very useful because it includes live tracking so you can see what is going on in your site, right now. I was watching a flood of visitors land on my page, and could see that they were all quickly closing the site or clicking off to some of the links on the page.

After about 900 visitors I had received an extra 3 feed subscribers, this is from a blog that is highly targeted to what I write about. I knew I had to change something. I’ve been spending a lot of time in affiliate marketing recently so I kind of went back to my roots, the nice arrow pointer to wherever you want people to look.

I included the following image on my page:

That arrow was pointing directly to my feed sign-up box which includes a link to my regular RSS feed and my email submit form.

The result: For the next 300 visitors I received over 30 subscribers. A 10% subscription rate is very rare and I’m pretty excited about the potential of putting a big arrow in peoples faces ;).

Implementation

Personally, I think it would look a bit spammy and over the top if you included this on all pages of your site. So, what I recommend is that you might want to put something like this on your high traffic pages in order to get peoples attention. I think this might even work better than sticking more RSS notices within the post as the arrow and benefits really get a readers attention.

What I’m using this for now on a number of my niche sites is to display a special image to visitors from certain websites. Use the code below and copy that anywhere in your wordpress theme template, change the image to one that you’ve created, and make sure there’s a big arrow (call to action) pointing to your RSS feed or subscriptions box.

<?php
$camefrom = parse_url($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);
switch($camefrom['host']){
case ‘www.stumbleupon.com’:
echo ‘<img src=”imageurl.jpg” />’;
break;
case ‘www.digg.com’:
echo ‘<img src=”imageurl.jpg” />’;
break;
default:
//echo $camefrom['host'];
break;
}
?>

You shouldn’t need any technical skills to work out how to add more sites to the list, just copy the case, echo & break lines and be sure to change the URL. For the images, customize them so that they specifically mention the site where the user came from, this will increase the number of sign-ups that you get.

Now, if you start converting 10% of your visitors or even 5% into subscribers, how much of an affect is that going to have on your final numbers? My guess is a huge one.

Some other great articles on increasing RSS subscribers include:

• How to Get 1,100 subscribers in Five Days
• 10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers
• Double Your Subscribers while Blogging Half as Often

These are stories that remained on the full page, in other words they didn’t get buried, and I’ve taken a look at all international traffic that Digg sent.

When I first came up with this idea, I definitely thought that there would be a strong correlation between the number of Diggs received and the amount of traffic the site sends. This would particularly be the case when a story gets enough Diggs to make the ‘Top 10′ stories of the day which are constantly featured on the right hand side of the newspaper.

So, what do you think: Can you get a decent estimate for how many visitors you would receive for X number of Diggs? Let’s find out shall we…

The Data

Below is a table of the 15 stories that I analysed, the number of Diggs each of the stories received and the number of hits sent from Digg.

And for those of you who prefer graphs to look at, here’s one of the above data:

Analysis

As you can see from the graph, there is a clear correlation between the number of Diggs a story gets and the amount of traffic that is sent. As I stated earlier, I think the reason stories with a lot of Diggs (1000+) get much more traffic is because they get featured on the ‘Top 10 Stories of Today’ which is constantly featured on the right hand side of the Digg homepage.

In total: 15,928 Diggs sent 437,417 visitors to a site we are working on, that is an average of 27 visitors per Digg. Of course, 27 visitors per Digg is based on you getting enough Diggs to make the homepage of the site.

Based on that stat, we can predict how many visitors you could receive if you reached a certain number of Diggs on one of your stories. I’ve outlined some of these predictions below:

Apart from what the stats are telling us, I hope this data is even useful to those who are wondering how much traffic Digg still sends these days.

What Affects the Data

Of course, I knew I would never be able to make a completely accurate idea of how many Diggs will send how much traffic to a page. Factors that contribute to varying results include:

• Time of day the story goes popular
• Whether it makes it into Top 10 Most Dugg of the Day
• How many people are using Digg at the time
• A small(ish) sample, if I had 100 stories to work with the results might look different…

…and any other factors that may obviously influence different results. On the whole though, the figures I’ve presented (27 visitors to every Digg, providing the story makes the homepage) should be fairly accurate.

I usually conduct these sorts of tests out of personal curiosity but I also find it interesting to see whether the sites with the most traffic are doing well in social media or missing out on a huge traffic source.

Photo Credit

The 10 Newspapers

I took the top 10 newspapers from this page and decided to rank them based on their Alexa & Compete data to get a fairly accurate idea of which of the sites get the most traffic. Here they are, with the first being the site with the most traffic:

1. NY Times
2. Washington Post
3. Wall Street Journal
4. LA Times
5. USA Today
6. NY Post
7. Chicago Tribune
8. NY Daily News
9. Houston Chronicle
10. Long Island Newsday

Presence on StumbleUpon

The LA times are really lacking on StumbleUpon compared to the big 3 sites before them. It is interesting note that in this case, the sites with the most traffic get far more attention in StumbleUpon than the rest.

Presence on Digg

The NY Times has more than double the exposure on Digg compared to second-place, Washington Post. The LA times fairs slightly better against the competition this time, far better than they are doing with StumbleUpon. The Chicago Tribune also seems to be doing well on the site.

Presence on Reddit

Once again, the NY Times are completely dominating the competition when it comes to social media presence. The Long Island Newsday and NY Post are really struggling for any exposure on Reddit whereas the NY Daily News seems to be quite popular.

Presence on Delicious

The NY Times are closing in on what could soon be triple the presence of any other newspapers online entity in regards to Delicious. It’s interesting to see that there are 5 websites which really don’t seem to be getting any hold on the site. I wonder if this means they write less ’sticky’ content that you would want to come back to.

Presence on Mixx

Mixx is quite a bit newer than any of the other websites so you would expect them to have lower figures in terms of newspaper mentions. The Chicago Tribune appears to have been an absolute hit with the Mixx community as well as the Houston Chronicle which tend to get minimal traction elsewhere.

What to Take from This

First of all, I’m quite amazed at how much the NY Times are dominating every other newspaper for each website. The Washington Post are doing amazingly on StumbleUpon but could definitely ramp things up on other websites such as Digg.

I’m going to email every single newspaper that was mentioned in this and hope they read up to here. If you are a representative / developer / marketer for any of these websites then here is my advice:

NY Times -You are getting millions of visitors from the top social media websites. Why not greet each site visitor with a custom site specific welcome message, encourage them to subscribe to your RSS feeds (which should be ad supported).

Washington Post - Let people access a few pages of content before having to log in. If they aren’t logged in then potentially millions of people are missing your content.

Wall Street Journal - Keep up the great work across the park, there is a lot of feature style content on the site that is obviously attracting a large audience. If don’t think you should change what you are doing just for an increase in Reddit traffic i.e. humorous content.

LA Times - You have absolutely no presence on Delicious which can be a great source of web-savvy traffic. Try to write more resourceful and sticky content that people will come back to.

USA Today - Things are going well for you, you’re performing much better than competitors, especially in regards to Delicious.

NY Post - Quite possibly the worst performing site in regards to how many mentions the site has for the traffic it receives. Encourage users to promote your content with bookmarking buttons and try to create some ‘feature’ pieces with attractive titles.

Chicago Tribune - Keep up the great work on Mixx, you are obviously doing right in those regards. It also looks like you are writing some great digg-bait that is helping you on other sites as well.

NY Daily News - You are struggling to pick up much traction in any of the sites, although you certainly aren’t off the radar. Encourage current site visitors to help you promote your content, the key is making it easy.

Houston Chronicle - Although the figures are low, you are actually doing quite well for your traffic level. See if a concentrated push towards a site like StumbleUpon (active users, appealing content) could help you across the board.

Long Island Newsday - You guys are really struggling across the board, read my advice for the Houston Chronicle above and monitor the results.

To be honest, I didn’t even want to write this post, I would rather move on and get on with what ViperChill / PluginHQ are all about, writing amazing content on the subject of Internet Marketing / Business. However, this site has been around for 3 years now and I owe it to all readers to explain my decision about what is going on.

The Journey so Far…

Some of you may or may not know, but in September of 2007 I quit college, left all my family and friends behind and took on a job as Social Media Manager for a large internet marketing company in South Africa. I’ve been able to work with some Fortune 500 companies, big newspapers and large financial companies which have provided me with exactly what I wanted when I made the trip over here…experience.

However, all this is about to come to an end. No more South Africa and no more 9 to 5 job. For the first time in my life I’m going to be going at this 100% full-time, and when I say working full-time I mean it. I won’t be slacking off and trying to work a four-hour workweek. No way, I’ll be pumping out 15 hour days to focus on what I do best: drive website traffic & make money online.

Unless something drastically changes I’ll be back in England at the end of next month and ready to start this new chapter in my life / career (I see them both as one). To be honest, I don’t even want to be in the UK…it’s not somewhere that feels like ‘home’ and I prefer living a more relaxed lifestyle. My plan is to give it a real go in the UK for a few months and see how things are going, if I’m doing well enough financially then I plan to move elsewhere (France / Netherlands) as soon as possible.

Why Rebrand?

“Just because you are leaving your job, it doesn’t mean you have to rename your site“. You are right, I don’t…but it’s something I want to do. I’ve been running a site called PluginID and working hard on that for the last few months and I’m really happy with the growth it’s had. Now that I have no ‘backup income’, I really have to focus on the projects I’m working on; otherwise I’m going to have too much going on and not enough income.

With that being said, I plan to dedicate the next few months working hard to build both PluginHQ and PluginID into big brands in their respective niches. I’ll still be around online, in fact I’ll probably be around more than ever. If my sites fail, then I fail. If I don’t make money online then I go back to getting another job, it’s as simple as that.

PluginHQ & PluginID are like DailyBlogTips & Daily Writing Tips, TechCrunch & MobileCrunch, they are two sites that I want to focus on building within a similar ‘brand’. If things go big and I want to continue to focus on blogging then there is nothing stopping me from creating more blogs on different topics within the brand that will grow overnight because of mindshare.

PluginHQ is all about seeing what I do, how I drive traffic and how people are making money online with their Internet Business’. You are going to see everything I do, I’ll share everything I know and not hold back…essentially letting you see into my Headquarters.

Problems with Moving a Site

Changing ViperChill was not something I decided on overnight; in fact this website has been sitting here for 2 weeks with the design and content all in place. Now, I’m going to do my best to re-direct ViperChill and the hundreds of pages over to this domain.

• I’m going to lose search traffic
• I’m going to lose social media traffic (especially stumbleupon)
• I’m going to lose readers
• I’m going to lose a well known brand in this industry

That’s fine!

I’m not drunk or high, but in relation to other blogs out there, PluginHQ is still small. We have around 800 subscribers but there’s the potential (and I believe I have the ability) for this site to grow a lot bigger and get out there into the mainstream like ProBlogger, CopyBlogger and many others in different niches.

This is something I want to do and something that feels right, I know I’m going to have to work hard to get people to trust in the name and work hard to pump out quality content but I’m ready for the challenge. Thanks to everyone who has helped me on the journey so far and I hope you’ll continue to stick around, it’s going to get busy around here.

Note: I’ve disabled comments because I just want to get on with this. I appreciate your support / criticisms or anything that you have to say, but for now I think the best thing to do is get on with what this blog is all about. There’s a killer post going live tomorrow I think you’ll all enjoy.

This post is going to look at a simple tactic that brought over 10,000 visitors and hundreds of links that you can replicate today.

Photo Credit

Using Ideas

As many of you may know, I’ve been in this industry for over 3 years now and I’ve seen many bloggers come and go. With that, there have been so many post ideas I wish I had thought of, but once it’s out there it’s not really my thing to take the idea and just re-hash the writing.

However, if something does well in one niche, you can actually take that to a different niche and put it on a site there. This is exactly what I did, I copied an idea that has done very well in this niche, had it made and then put it in a completely new niche where it can work just as well. The result?

• Over 10,000 visitors to the page
• Hundreds of backlinks and rising
• Over 80 extra feed subscribers

And best of all, you don’t even need a blog.

The Idea

I’m sure most of you have came across this before, and you’ve probably even thought about doing something similar. However, the difference between doing and thinking is a big one. Personally, I don’t sit around, I would rather spend some money and see if something sticks. The idea in question is this list of the ‘Top 100 Make Money Online Blogs‘ by Mark and 45n5.

I paid a programmer from India $100 to create me the same script and put it to use in the personal development industry. Basically you enter a site via the admin panel and it ranks them via Google PR, Technorati Score & Alexa rank. Because you are giving bloggers exposure, they are more than happy to help you promote the page, all I did was contact each blogger to let them know that they were listed.

The results…

Over 400 links to the page according to Yahoo (in less than one month):

Over 10,000 pageviews on the page itself:

All this after spending $100 and about 30 minutes of my time to contact all the bloggers on the list who were all happy to link to, tweet, and stumble the page. This page is only around 2 weeks old so the traffic is only going to continue to increase as well as the links.

So, the next time you see a good idea in one niche, how about you give it a shot on one of your websites, instead of just wondering ‘what if?’.

I’m not one of these social media marketers that simply write about the topic (sadly, there are a lot of them), I work with some of the biggest companies in the world: consistently driving huge amounts of traffic. Today I’m going to share the exact methods I use to help promote linkbait even after it might not have done well initially.

So, what’s the problem?

We’ve all been there; our ‘Simple Guide to Losing Weight whilst Eating More’ getting a few votes on Digg and maybe a few hundred visitors from StumbleUpon. The only links to the article coming from the social sites themselves. Yet, we often hear about sites getting thousands of links in a short space of time, so why isn’t it happening for us.

Well…I had the issue about a year ago until I realised there’s actually more you can do to get eyeballs (the linkerati) on your content and receive a wave of backlinks even after you think it may have failed. Before I get into that I do want to outline some of the issues marketers face when offering a service like linkbait for clients:

• Relying on Others - the fact is that you can’t really control how far your linkbait goes. You are always relying on others to vote for your stories, write about them and in-turn drive links
• New Niche - it’s often that I’ll be asked to come up with content ideas for a new niche, one where I don’t know the popular communities or the type of content the audience enjoys
• Hard to Measure - besides the obvious traffic figures and backlink count, linkbait can do wonders for branding and direct traffic which you can’t accurately measure

6 Tactics to Re-Ignite your Linkbait

1. Add Content on a New Domain then 301

Sometimes you may even have the issue of a domain being auto-buried or just want to be careful and constantly trying to promote a certain sites content without being spammy. One of the best ways to counter-act this is to create your linkbait on a new domain and promote that instead.

Obviously this doesn’t give you the traffic benefits but you can pass some of the link-juice that your lovely content managed to build up by 301 re-directing the page after a few weeks.

2. Drive Traffic via PPC

I’ve used this twice now and it has been surprisingly effective. It works on the basis that if your content is indeed viral and people are going to want to talk about it, the more relevant visitors you can get to see it the better.

I remember when Aaron Wall launched his ‘SEO for Bloggers‘ article. Although the article would have received a lot of links anyway, Aaron setup Google Adwords to show the article around relevant keywords. This works especially well if you have on-page social bookmarking buttons and want to encourage extra votes.

3. Make things Easier on Yourself

I don’t really recommend re-publishing information and then submitting it again but a common reason linkbait doesn’t do so well isn’t because of the content but because of the page / site it is on. Make things easier on yourself by:

• Including social bookmarking buttons
• Removing any annoying or excessive ads
• Keeping all the content on one page
• Not trying to push something such as services on the user

After that is done you may want to rewrite the title and some of the content and give it another go or completely start again.

4. Make use of Niche Communities

Although your article about Scrapbooking might be funny, it still might not appeal to audiences on the likes of Digg, Reddit or Mixx. However there may be a digg-like site or active forums in the niche that would really enjoy the content.

Due to the fact that there are a few hundred million blogs, it’s likely that a lot of these community users blog and therefore are able to link to your linkbait. Of course, give something back to the communities whether it be submitting stories from other sites or writing helpful forum posts before trying to leverage them.

Brendan Picha over at Squareoak put together a great list of 83 social voting sites that might help your research.

5. Just get Traffic to the page

I’m stating the obvious here but the only way people can link to you is if they actually know about the article. Whenever I’m on the Digg homepage (about 5 times per month) an article gets about 500 links, that is because there are tens of thousands of people that viewed the article who have the ability to link to you from blogs, forums, personal websites etc.

You can get traffic to the page via the likes of Mixx, Digg and StumbleUpon but if that fails you can:

• Buy banner ads on relevant sites
• Use Text-Link-Ads ‘Intext’ feature for a month on high traffic websites
• Pay bloggers to write about something relevant and include a link to the article

6. Become a Top User

If all else is failing on you after multiple attempts, it may be that you are just not writing quality content that people want to talk about. Another option is to really build up a power profile on top sites in order to give your own stories a boost whenever you submit them.

This is going to be very time consuming but if you want to ‘leverage’ a site then you have to give something back. I think StumbleUpon would be the best place to get started as there’s an audience for all types of content, and luckily I’ve already written a guide on becoming a power user.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below!