Want a thumbsdown from a Stumbler?
Create a blinking banner demanding a thumbs up!

Muhammad Saleem recently gave seven reasons for giving a thumbs-down at stumbleupon.
I thought his list was thorough until I came across this: A page that included a large blinking banner asking Stumblers for a thumbs up! Yes, that big red banner blink, blink, blink, blinks, blinks!

OMG! Talk about giving me a reason to vote thumbsdown!Tags:Marketing Social Networking StumbleUpon

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Seven Ways to Drive Web Traffic:
Wall Street Journal

Today’s Wall Street Journal ran an article describing effective increase web traffic to your business. Among the methods listed? Paying for sponsored reviews using services like Pay Per Post and Blogvertise. (John Fox of Venture Marketing suggests Pay Per Post as the more professional of the two programs.)

Other methods mentioned by business men and women visiting the WSJ’s forum included:

1. Business blogs: Blogs which are indexed quickly, and use RSS are a good way to improve visibility of your ad campaigns and get them indexed in the relevant time frame.
2. YouTube Videos: The business oriented Wall Street Journal forum also stress the importance of having your YouTube profile point to your web site and also including business logos and contact information in the video itself. Daniel De LaGarza of Bankrate.com also suggest promoting your video using TubeMogul.com which permits you to simultaneously upload videos to multiple services.
3. Blogger networks and social media: Participating in various social media are mentioned, but specifics are light. Do they mean groups like BlogCatalog, myBlogLog, Facebook and Bumpzee? Or bookmarking sites like Stumble, Delicious or Digg? Or do they mean old fashioned email groups (still popular with craft oriented groups like knitters?) Any can be effective, but dj_covels at the WSJ forum points out, these can be very time intensive and costly.
4. SEO: Making a site and blog search engine friendly is repeated frequently. Simple things like remembering to use keywords, making sitemaps and writing blog articles about your products are mentioned. Bill Leaky of Apogee mentions their list of resources about search engine marketing which includes a paper discussing how to avoid bad SEO firms and another discussing how to identify a good one!
5. Local Media Coverage: Small business people can get the local media to cover events. Heck, even some knitting blog groups have managed to get a local paper to cover their knitting group as a human interest story. Of course this is easier to do if you organize a fund raiser, invite a celebrity or do something even slightly newsworthy, but if you do, create a press release and contact the small local newspaper.
6. Pay Per Click advertising: All forms of advertising are recommended, but PPC is mentioned repeatedly. This includes Google Adsense, AdBrite and numerous other services.

Can your business or blog use these traffic generating tips?

After reading the article, I sat down to figure out which tips bloggers could use.

Videos are a natural fit for blogs. I’d explored the idea of video podcasts for my knitting blog and created and uploaded a (rather bad) video to YouTube which you can see at The Knitting Fiend.

PPC advertising:I know I can eventually use some PPC advertising to bring traffic to pillar articles- but I need to organize this blog to maximize stickiness first. I also try to pay some attention to SEO at my blogs. You can obviously do both these things.

Social media? Well, I admit I’m still trying to figure out how to use those effectively. There are so many out there! Spamming Digg or Stumble isn’t going to work. I can’t possibly actively participate in 10 different social media sites write blogs, do my real job and also knit sweaters! If anyone has time saving tips, I’d like to read them!

I’m not quite sure how to use the other tips, but if you have suggestions, fire away!

Tags:blogging Marketing monetize ppc seo traffic web

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Dear Jason, About “News” Scraper Sites. . .

Dear Jason Calacanis,

I was thrilled to see referrers from Google Mail’s Mahalo email area indicating that people were visiting my post “Dear Jason, You Have a Problem with Link Rot NOW.” I was even more thrilled to check the revision history for climate change and discove, soon after those hits to my article, Sara removed the link rot that Lon missed during his early morning revisions!

Responsiveness does encourage feedback.

You predicted, the ability of total outsiders to comment on the pesky little problems at Mahalo would encourage us to give you more feedback. So it has!

So about news scarper sites. . .

I will tell you that this morning, I was saddened to see that Mahalo Press Coverage for August 22, 2007 currently includes a link to what appears to be a scraper blog. You know, the sort of blog that just copies the contents of other blog posts?

If you visit Technology News Blog: Jason Calacanis: Fast Company profile raises more questions than it asks, you will find that “news” story seems to simply regurgitate ValleyWags August 21, 2007 story with the somewhat similar title “Technology News Blog: Jason Calacanis: Fast Company profile raises more questions than it asks”.

Might I suggest the duplicate story be removed? Might I also suggest you train the Mahalo guides to compare the titles and content of “new” stories to already posted stories. That habit would help them avoid this sort of embarrassing duplication of content in the results of your human powered - reviewed - massaged or whatever search engine.

Why not replace that slot with Jason Calacanis - Mahalo?

I know deleting the link to that duplicate content article might make it seem the blog-o-sphere is not simply abuzz about Mahalo. So, might I suggest you replace the link to that scraper site with Jason Calacanis - Mahalo?

CyberCelt included a screen shot that shows the absolutely splendid results returned for “advertising”.

Now, I know that because Mahalo is only in beta alpha, the sort of results Cyber Celt shows might not be considered news. But don’t you think the VC’s might want to gauge public reaction to what you’ve released for public perusal? Especially by people outside the Techcrunch 50,000? Even if they just don’t seem to “get it” about Mahalo?

Or maybe the VC’s should be shielded from that story?

Of course, this is just unsolicited advice from a knitter. I’m sure you’ll use your judgment on including these links to these sorts of negative reactions. After all, maybe the Venture Capitalists aren’t sophisticated enough to understand Cyber Celt’s complex story told using screen shots of the results pages.

Alas, my news article is missing too.

Naturally, I would never question why Dear Jason, You Have a Problem with Link Rot NOW was not included in the August 22 news stories. I’m sure the guides got busy responding to emails and making all the changes I suggested, and just forgot to add the story.

Wishing you well!

As always, I admire your gumption in trying to make this thing work. Dealing with enthusiastic underpaid guides and the flurry of volunteers in the Greenhouse must be a bit like herding cats. Still, I’m sure that by 2040, you will manage to put Google out of business.

I hope my feedback helps!

Sincerely, Lucia

Tags:Dreams of Money mahalo Marketing Search Engines seo Spam Sphinn

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