Published June 8th, 2008 in Social Media
A few days ago I was contacted about a new site that targets the web design community. Design Bump is a niche social media site that was launched recently and is already building a bit of an audience.
Being built on Pligg, the popular open-source option for social media sites, Design Bump functions in a way that will be very familiar to many of you. The site has similar content and a similar audience to Design Float.
Published May 19th, 2008 in Social Media
Twitter seems to be gaining popularity almost every day. As a new user I decided it would be helpful to do some research to find designers who would be worth following. This list is not intended to be all-inclusive (so please add a link to your profile in the comments if you like), but it should give you a great start to following some talented designers. This is a list of over 50 designers, in no particular order, with a link to their Twitter profile.
cssglobe - Alen Grakalic of CSS Globe
chriscoyier – Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks
snookca – Jonathan Snook of Snook.ca
zeldman – Jeffrey Zeldman of Happy Cog
vpieters - Veerle Pieters of Veerle’s Blog
Published April 14th, 2008 in Social Media
Web design and social media marketing are two topics that I enjoy studying, and the two certainly impact one another for website owners and bloggers who are attempting to increase traffic to their site. While social media is intended to put a spotlight on the best and most popular content, the look and appearance of a page will often influence social media users and their decision of whether or not they should vote for a particular submission. The design of a site can be either a positive or a negative influence on the voting decision, and social media marketers need to consider appearance as much as they consider the content and headlines.
8 Ways Design Influences Social Media Users:
1. First Impression
The first impression of any visitor, regardless of how they arrive at your site, will be heavily influenced by the appearance of the site. Generally, opinions are formed in a matter of seconds, not minutes, so creating a positive impression is critical. While most of your website’s visitors will have a short attention span, social media users are notoriously quick to leave a site that doesn’t impress them right away.
Published April 2nd, 2008 in Social Media
For those of us that enjoy and appreciate reading great articles on web design and development, we’re fortunate to have access to a vast amount of quality information. Of course, subscribing to blogs is one of the best ways to stay up-to-date with the best content available, but most of us can’t manage a feed reader full of every post on web design.
Social networking and social media sites are a great alternative, as they give you an opportunity to quickly find information that other users have submitted and appreciated. But with so many social media sites to choose from, monitoring them can be just as time consuming as subscribing to hundreds of blog feeds.
Published February 20th, 2008 in Social Media
Social Media Marketing is attractive for several reasons, including loads of free traffic and the increased exposure that comes along with it. However, achieving success with the major social media websites can produce many other results as well. Most of them are positive, but not all. Here is a look at what you should be prepared for as a result of hitting it big.
popurls
The most popular submissions on major social media sites including Digg, Reddit, and del.icio.us are displayed on popurls.com , which has a significant amount of traffic itself. So, if you are fortunate enough to get thousands of visitors from a particular social media site, you may also get hundreds or more from popurls. In a few cases I have received almost as much traffic from popurls as I have from del.icio.us on the day that a particular blog post made it to the del.icio.us front page.
Published January 2nd, 2008 in Social Media
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you have probably seen that I have an interest in niche social media websites. However, the problem with niche social sites is that most of them have only a handful of users and they provide very little potential for marketing your website or blog. That makes the good ones even more valuable.
If you are a web designer or if you enjoy reading web design-related articles, hopefully you’ve already come across Design Float. Those of us in the web design industry are fortunate that there are several useful design-related social media sites. If you’re looking for a place to promote your own content and find other items of interest, I think you’ll like Design Float.
Unlike many other niche sites, Design Float sends a significant amount of traffic to popular submissions (in fact, today I’ve received well over 300 visitors from Design Float). And as its community grows I only expect it to get better.
I had the opportunity to interview Andrew Egenes, the owner of Design Float, about his experience with creating a successful niche social media site. Andrew has a great deal of insight that many of us can learn from. In just a few months he has accomplished the very daunting task of getting a niche social media website off the ground. I hope you’ll enjoy Andrew’s insight as much as I have.
Published December 27th, 2007 in Social Media
Last week I published a post that did pretty well with a few social media sites, but I saw some interesting results from StumbleUpon that I thought were worth sharing. I normally don’t send pages to my StumbleUpon friends through the SU toolbar to ask for a thumbs up, but I did for this post and it seems like that may have restricted the amount of traffic the post received from SU.
To look at the situation I’m going to compare the stats from that post to stats from another post that had similar success with social media last month. Both posts received very similar traffic from DZone, del.icio.us, popurls, and CSS Globe.
Published November 25th, 2007 in Social Media
Since I started consistently posting on this blog in July the top two sources of traffic have been StumbleUpon and Digg. Much is written about each of these popular social media websites, so I thought it would be interesting to compare the traffic that each has sent.
From July 1st to November 24th, 2007:
- StumbleUpon sent a total of 90,485 visitors.
- Digg sent a total of 61,274 visitors.
The four posts that have made it to the front page of Digg have also been 4 of the top 6 posts in terms of StumbleUpon traffic. This isn’t very surprising to me, as large waves of traffic from one site will logically result in votes at the other site from a certain number of visitors.
Published November 19th, 2007 in Social Media
On the subject of social media, Digg and StumbleUpon seem to get almost all of the attention right now. While the traffic potential for these two is considerably higher than other social media sites, Del.icio.us can be one of the most powerful resources for your link building efforts.
Quick Overview of Del.icio.us
Del.icio.us is [...]
Published November 18th, 2007 in Social Media
Social media is without a doubt one of the most powerful and significant sources of traffic for bloggers. However, it’s easy to get frustrated with social media traffic because it can be so inconsistent. One day you may get thousands of visitors, but it can dry up quickly. For this reason a [...]
