Stumbling for the Little Blog
March 17, 2007 | Comments (0) | Filed under: Social Networking
These days, everyone seems to know all about social networking sites and the benefit they can have to a fledgling blog. Get your article on the main page of Digg, and you’ll have so many visits in one day, your web server will probably crash. Traffic like that can really put a new site on the map but just how hard is it to get to that type of exposure?
Recently, I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of that very question by experimenting with sites such as Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. Since Bookmark Bliss started in the world of online business, we’ve been trying to increase the visibility of our articles. After all, what good is a killer article, if no one knows you wrote it? For a new article, the skies the limit in terms of exposure. There are now a multitude of sites that allow you to submit something you’ve written and have the community decide (slightly differently for each site of course) whether it’s worthy of their praise or wrath.
In terms of potential traffic, any of these social networking sites can generate many visits to your articles despite a substantially different approach to how they actually operate. Take the first three sites I mentioned, each of them is based around community involvement for both the submission and the promotion of new content. All three have a rating system which allows users to visit a link and rate the content available with more or less a glorified Roman Coliseum thumbs up or thumbs down.
The real challenge, however, comes with knowing where to post and which site has the best potential for generating attention.
With Digg, I think most people will find it difficult to get promoted to the main page, especially if you’re a newcomer. As a tool for consistent article promotion, you’ll definitely need to invest a lot of time in the community. Digg relies heavily on a sort of friendship based relationship between members for promoting articles. I think you could write one of the best articles ever written, submit it as a serious member of the community, and still only have a small percentage chance of getting your article promoted to the front page. This has a lot to do with the sheer volume of posts submitted to Digg. A lot of factors need to align to make your article popular using Digg alone. Posting category, title, time of day for the post, and number of comments all play a huge roll in getting to the front page.
Similar to Digg is Reddit, but with an added twist. Since Reddit only allows topic titles and no descriptions, it can be EVEN HARDER for a new blogger to generate enough attention to get some traffic to his article. On the flip side, however, the lack of description means less things for people to scrutinize, so if you can write a catchy title, your chances may actually improve. Like Digg, without a large friends network you are mostly just hoping people will take the time to click your link, otherwise, your chances of promotion are very slim.
With StumbleUpon, the little blog has a bit more of a fighting chance. Stumble allows users running their stumble toolbar to rate sites they “stumble” upon and add them to the network. Once it’s in the network and categorized, anyone else stumbling through the web has a chance to happen upon your article. This has great potential for an unknown blogger in that people are immediately brought to your submission without having to click a link. This means your post has just as good a chance as any other for exposure and if it’s good, you will be rated highly increasing the number of people sent your way. It’s a great system that allows you almost as fair a shot as anyone to get your article seen.
In my experience, StumbleUpon has the best return rate for a submitted article. Even if you are new, a quality article can get a lot of Stumbled traffic. With Digg and Reddit, you are mostly hoping on a catchy enough title to cause people to click. If you don’t have it just right, your article will go no where.
Your best bet is to build up respect within all three communities, and keep on submitting articles. Eventually, your posts will start getting more and more traffic. While you may not reach the front page with Digg or Reddit right away, each can send you many visitors even for unpopular articles. It never hurts to submit if you think your post is a fit for the community. You never know what people will like at the end of the day…
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