Vandelay Design Blog » Social Media

Design Bump: A New Niche Social Media Site for Design-Related Content

Vandelay Website Design — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 19:47:06 +0000

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, (My apologies. The site is actually built on Drupal) 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.

This blog has really benefited from niche sites for designers, like Design Float, so I hope Design Bump takes off as well. It will be interesting to see how both of these sites are able to attract and maintain users since they have essentially the same audience. Personally, I already visit Design Float on a daily basis and adding Design Bump to my daily stops shouldn’t be an issue.

Design Float was able to built part of its audience as a result of being featured in a number of CSS galleries, so we’ll see if Design Bump can do the same. I think Design Float has also grown as a result of offering bloggers the button to put on their posts that allows visitors to “float” the post. That helped to spread the word about the site and it continually encourages users to vote and stay active. At this point Design Bump does not have any buttons or widgets to use.

If you’re looking for a place to promote your own content, I can say that I have received some traffic from Design Bump to my posts that have been submitted. Of course, as a new site it won’t send floods of visitors to your blog, but I did see over 30 visitors the first day after I submitted a few posts.

If you haven’t visited Design Bump, I would encourage you to check it out and consider creating an account.

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50+ Designers to Follow on Twitter

Vandelay Website Design — Mon, 19 May 2008 23:46:00 +0000

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

mike9r – Mike Rundle of 9 Rules

randaclay – Randa Clay

cameronmoll – Cameron Moll of Authentic Jobs

andybudd – Andy Budd

simplebits – Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits

danbenjamin - Dan Benjamin of Hivelogic

mollydotcom – Molly Holzschlag of Molly.com

adactio – Jeremy Keith of Adactio

clagnut – Richard Rutter of Clagnut

clearleft – Clearleft

collylogic – Simon Collison of Colly.com

mezzoblue – Dave Shea of Mezzoblue

orderedlist – Steve Smith of Ordered List

ryancarson – Ryan Carson of Carsonified

jophillips – Jon Phillips of Spyre Studios

blogdesignblog – Vinh Le of Blog Design Blog

bartelme – Wolfgang Bartelme of Bartelme Design

tdhedengren - Thord Daniel Hedengren

justcreative – Jacob Cass of Just Creative Design

imjustcreative – Graham Smith of ImJustCreative.com

gracesmith – Grace Smith of PostScript5

feather – Derek Featherstone of Box of Chocolates

danrubin – Dan Rubin of Superfluous Banter

ilovetypography – I Love Typography

jcroft - Jeff Croft

tonychester – Tony Chester of OnWired

meyerweb – Eric Meyer

larissameek – Larissa Meek

stillframe – Brad Smith of The Big Noob

elliotjaystocks – Elliot Jay Stocks

shauninman – Shaun Inman

markboulton – Mark Boulton

rsg – Rob Goodlatte

sarahparmenter – Sarah Parmenter of You Know Who Design

iamluc – Luc Melgar of Octwelve

collis – Collis Ta’eed of Eden

abduzeedo – Fabio Sasso of Abduzeedo

wpcandy – WP Candy

bgardner – Brian Gardner

corymiller303 – Corey Miller of iThemes

youthedesigner – Gino Orlandi of You the Designer

adii – Adii

dustinbrewer – Dustin Brewer

tkadlec – Tim Kadlec

seanHodge – Sean Hodge of AiBurn

chrisspooner – Chris Spooner of Spoon Graphics

Woork – Antonio Lupetti of Woork

As I mentioned at the start of the post, please feel free to add a link to your profile in the comments. My profile is stevensnell.

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How Design Impacts Social Media Success

Vandelay Website Design — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 11:00:51 +0000

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.

Obviously, when it comes to social media, first impressions can help you or hurt you. Try to evaluate your site from the perspective of a first-time visitor that is arriving from social media. Would the page increase the chances of getting your vote, or would it make you want to leave and visit another site? Pictures and images can often help with creating first impressions. A great example of this is Blog Well’s post 100+ Resources for Web Developers. This post was popular on Digg, StumbleUpon and del.icio.us. While there are plenty of other similar lists for designers and developers, this one got a boost from a picture at the top of the post (screenshot below). Interestingly, the majority of the comments on the Digg submission (which received over 2,000 diggs) had nothing to do with the article or the developer resources, but rather the girl. This is an example of a blog using a picture to capture the attention of visitors (at least male visitors) and using that to attract social media votes

2. Page Load Time

Because most social media users are impatient, and because they have hundreds of other pages waiting for them to visit, page load time becomes even more of a factor than it is in general. If you plan to market heavily with social media, it’s a good idea to design your site to load as quickly as possible. This doesn’t mean that no slow-loading pages will have success with social media, but it can help you out if visitors are able to get to your content very quickly.

3. Readability of Content

If social media users are voting for content that they like, they need to be able to easily read the content in the first place. Most visitors that come from social media will be scanning the page rather than reading word-for-word, so make it easy on them by using short paragraphs, plenty of whitespace, bulleted lists, bold text, etc. Take the time to consider the layout of the page and how it will affect readability.

4. Emphasis of Content

If you hope to impress social media voters with your content, make sure it is front and center and impossible to miss. Are there other distractions in the design that will keep emphasis away from the content? Sometimes you will see content that is filled with advertisements not doing very well with social media when it could be doing much better with different ad placement.

5. Implementation of Buttons/Widgets into the Design

Most social media sites provide buttons, widgets or links that you can use on your site to encourage visitors to vote. These can be very helpful, especially if they are effectively incorporated into the design. When designing with these in mind, you’ll want them to be located where they will be noticed, but not in the way.

6. Branding

If you are marketing your site through social media on an ongoing basis, as more and more social media users are exposed to your site, your branding will be impacted. How does the design of your site allow you to brand yourself in a way that will make an impact with social media users?

7. Navigation

Typically, social media traffic will average a low number of page views. You can improve this by using effective navigation that leads visitors to other content that they are likely to be interested in. From my experience, the most effective way to encourage social media visitors to look at other pages is to include internal links within the body of the content. With this strategy, you may be able to drastically increase the amount of traffic that older posts receive.

Effect design should also include navigation bars or menus that lead visitors to other relevant content. In my opinion, this can help to increase page views, but not as much as links within the content itself.

8. Subscribers

If you are attempting to gain subscribers through social media marketing, be sure to design your pages so that your subscription options are clear and easy to see. Typically, you will want to keep them high on the page so they are noticed right away, and you may want to use standard icons that are easily recognized by potential subscribers.

What’s Your Opinion?

In what ways do you feel that design impacts social media success? Do you have anything specific from your experience that you would like to share?

Looking for More on Social Media?

If you are interested in social media marketing, check out my other blog Traffikd where I focus on social media and traffic building.

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Which Social Networks Provide the Best Design-Related Content?

Vandelay Website Design — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:35:30 +0000

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.

Because of the time crunch, you may want to spend your time on the social networks that continuously provide the best design-related content. In this post I’ll take a look at a number of different networks and the type of content that is provided on each.

When it comes to finding content that is specific to the subject of web design, you really have two basic choices. There are several niche social media sites that focus on content relevant to web designers and developers, and there are also general sites that offer web design as a category.

Design Float

Design Float is a niche site that takes a broad-based approach when compared to a few other niche sites. There are various categories such as graphic design and business/freelancing. Design Float appeals to designs that use other mediums besides just web design. While Design Float is less than 1 year old, it has a fairly large and active community.

Typically, a submission to Design Float will require about 3 votes, or “floats”, to be promoted to the front page (including the vote of the submitter). There are a number of submissions that become popular each day, and there is an RSS feed for popular entries, as well as separate feeds for each category.

My opinion is that the broad-based approach is both a strength and a weakness. As an active user of Design Float, I appreciate the variety of the content on the front page, and it certainly gives opportunities to more bloggers to gain exposure. However, I also think in some ways it has an effect on the quality of some content that makes it to the front page, and because I go there for web design content, some of it is not relevant to me.

Generally, I visit Design Float every day to find new content, and I like the fact that there are 24 entries on the front page at a time, which means less clicking through to endless pages to find content. Personally, I prefer the niche approach rather than finding design content at Digg, which is why Andrew created Design Float.

Here is a sampling of some submissions that have been on the front page during the past few days:

DZone

DZone is a social media site for web developers and software developers. Because it emphasizes development over design, the content at DZone is more advanced and technical than what you will find at any of the other social networks mentioned here.

To content that makes it to the front page is very targeted because of DZone’s approach to providing only the most relevant content. Typically, it will take about 5 votes to get a submission to the front page, and content that isn’t relevant to developers has no chance. Not everything that relates to web design will be appropriate for DZone. If you use the site for a while you will get a good feel about what fits at DZone and what doesn’t.

Like Design Float, I visit DZone on a daily basis because I know I will always find well-written and relevant articles. In fact, the RSS feed for popular items has about 12,000 subscribers.

Recent popular submissions that focus on web design and development include:

Design Related

Design Related is a niche site for designers of all kinds. The site offers more than just links to design content, but it’s news section is really what makes it belong in this conversation. With a smaller audience than the other sites we’re looking at, Design Related’s community is still growing.

The content that you’ll find in the news section is very diverse, and only a portion of it will relate to web design. Currently, there doesn’t seem to be a large amount of content here, but hopefully it will grow with time as the community itself grows.

A sampling of some recent popular submissions includes:

CSS Globe

While CSS Globe is not a social media site, the community news section is an excellent resource for finding information that other community members have submitted. CSS Globe also features some original articles written by Alen Grakalic, who participated in our group interview last week.

The CSS Globe community is pretty active, and typically there are a few new submissions each day. Personally, I subscribe to the combined RSS feed that includes both original articles and community news. If you’re interested in staying on top of design-related news and finding plenty of great articles, I suggest you subscribe to the feed or at least visit the site on a regular basis.

Here are some of the recent submissions to the community news section:

CSS Drive

CSS Drive is a community site that includes a gallery, navigation menus, forums, and a news section that is similar to the community news at CSS Globe. The news at CSS Drive is also submitted by users, although it’s a smaller group of select members that can submit news.

The news items that are submitted can be voted up or down by visitors, although the votes don’t affect the positioning on the page like it would with a social media site. The content at CSS Drive is very targeted to designers and you’re certain to find something of interest (and of course there is an RSS feed ).

Which Networks Do You Rely On to Find Design Related Content?

Personally, the ones I use most actively are Design Float, DZone, del.icio.us, and CSS Globe. But I’m interested to hear about your favorites.

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Secondary Results of Social Media Success

Vandelay Website Design — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:53:55 +0000

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.

Inbound Links

Aside from huge amounts of traffic, inbound links are the most sought after result of SMM. In fact, for many marketers links are the ultimate goal and traffic is just a means of achieving that goal. A successful social media campaign will bring plenty of links from other websites and blogs. Some social media websites are better at leading to links than others. Personally, I’ve had good results drawing links through hitting the front page of Digg and del.icio.us more so than any other social media sites.

Links from del.icio.us Bookmarks

One of the reasons that del.icio.us produces such strong results for link building is that some del.icio.us users publish their bookmarks to their blogs. Del.icio.us provides a simple option that allows any user to automatically have their bookmarks published to their blog at the end of each day. Pages that make it to the del.icio.us front page will typically draw a number of these links. To see some in action, pick out a few popular items from the del.icio.us front page, and tomorrow do a Technorati search to check for their recent links.

Higher PageRank

While it’s certainly not a guaranteed result, pages that are successful with social media and draw a significant number of inbound links are likely to receive a higher PageRank from Google. On this blog several of the posts that have had great success with social media have a higher PR than the blog front page. These are the only posts that have managed to reach this level of PR.

Copy Cats

Pages that become popular with social media are much more likely to be copied or stolen by others than the typical blog post would be. These pages obviously get tons of exposure, which means more opportunity to be copied, plus they have proven to be well-liked, which is a big plus for copy cats and scrapers. Stopping this can be very difficult, and from my opinion isn’t usually worth the time. The best way that I have found to combat it is to include internal links to other pages on your website/blog whenever possible. Most of the time when your content is stolen or scraped the links will be left in tact and at least it will be pointing back to your site. For WordPress users, the RSS Footer plugin can help with this too.

Comments

Blog posts that do well with social media are almost guaranteed to get more comments than your average post. This isn’t always positive. Social media success will sometimes lead people to your blog that are just looking to find something wrong. It’s not really a big deal if someone posts a negative comment, you can always delete it if it’s in poor taste or inappropriate. You will have less control over the comments left directly at social media sites themselves. Digg is notorious for negative comments even on the most popular and high quality submissions. If you’re marketing with Digg you’ll quickly learn to not even read the comments or you’ll grow some thick skin.

Knowing the Quality of Your Hosting Provider

If you’re unsure about the quality of your web host, get to the front page of Digg and see how it holds up. Most low-cost shared hosting plans aren’t sufficient for withstanding mobs of traffic in a short period of time, and as a result the site will likely go down.

Search Engine Traffic

The inbound links that result from social media success are likely to help you achieve strong search engine rankings for that particular page. Your pages that are popular with social media are likely to be your most productive in terms of search engine traffic as well.

Foreign Links and Traffic

Depending on the subject and format of the page, you may also see a boost in traffic and links from foreign websites. On my primary blog I have had success promoting resource lists for web designers. These posts typically include a bunch of links to resources that will help designers with a specific aspect of web development. Typically, these posts will each draw several links from foreign websites and blogs, and some have even become popular on foreign social media sites. A resource list can still be useful to those with limited English skills, whereas the typical blog post would have no relevance to them. One time I even had a resource list become popular on a foreign Digg clone that sent over 5,000 visitors in one day.

What Did I Miss?

From your experience with SMM what are some other secondary results?

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Building a Successful Niche Social Media Website: An Interview With Andrew Egenes of Design Float

Vandelay Website Design — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 03:20:21 +0000

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.

When did Design Float launch?

I launched the original version of Design Float in the beginning of August, 2007. After only a week, I began working on a complete redesign which launched about 2 weeks later.

What motivated you to start Design Float?

I’ve always been a fan of Digg and the concept of community generated and moderated content, which they helped pioneer. But as Digg became larger and more mainstream, the quality content became diluted with irrelevant and often pointless submissions. It continually became more difficult to find content worth checking out, let alone Digging. Digg’s lack of category and subcategory depth left the door wide open for clones that take the social media model to smaller and more focused niches. Design happens to be the niche that I’m most passionate about and I felt that a Digg clone aimed at the design community would be extremely helpful for designers everywhere.

What do you feel are the keys to success for a niche social media site?

1. Name your project something relevant to the niche you’re entering. I don’t think people put enough thought into what they name things these days. If you hope to build a memorable brand for your social media site that will last, put some thought into what you call it.

2. Social Media is still a relatively new idea, so don’t assume that you’re niche knows what it is or how it works. You might have to educate them on how they will benefit from using your site as a gateway into the topic you’re covering.

3. Don’t forget what your #1 one priority is: Giving your users access to focused, quality, relevant, and well organized information.

4. Don’t try and monetize your site too soon. I didn’t start serving ads on Design Float until a couple months after the project had launched and I made sure that the focus was still the content, not the ads.

5. Finally, listen to your community. Talk to them. Respond to their emails. Implement their requests. Nobody knows what the users in your niche want or expect better than the users themselves.

What does a niche site like Design Float have to offer users that a larger, more established site like Digg cannot?

The main thing that a niche site like Design Float offers that larger broader outlets like Digg cannot is better organized relevant content and less irrelevant content. The goal of a niche social media site is to keep its content and submissions directly related to a targeted top level category and its sub categories. What’s great about Design Float is that you can drill down into the different mediums of design and find highly focused content that would otherwise be thrown into the overall “Design” category at projects like Digg. Entries about CSS don’t have to compete with entries about branding, or photography, or interior design… or photos of the largest Lego car ever constructed.

Design Float is built on the Pligg system, is that correct?

That is correct. People often ask me why I opted to go the open source route versus building something from the ground up. When I first decided to create Design Float, I had a fear that the design community might reject the project because it was “Just another Digg clone.” Combined with the fact that I’m by no means a PHP genius, I decided it would be best to use Pligg because of the rapid deployment benefit that open source software provides. If the project was rejected, at least I wouldn’t have spent several months developing the backend for something that was never going to succeed.

What is your opinion of Pligg as far as the possibilities to customize it and how difficult it is to learn?

I feel the Pligg developers did a great job of making Pligg easily customizable for an experienced designer/developer and while I’m not completely sold on Smarty (the template engine used) I’ve learned to appreciate it. Getting a project to the level of customization that I’ve been able to achieve with Design Float does require jumping into the core files, however, and is something that might be intimidating for someone who doesn’t have an understanding of PHP.

There are hundreds of small social media sites popping up everywhere. It seems like 95% of them send no real traffic. How have you been able to build a community around Design Float so that it actually does send a significant amount of traffic to popular submissions?

Logical organization and a usable layout that puts the content in focus have been the two biggest things that I believe contribute to Design Floats ability to send significant amounts of traffic to popular submissions. In addition, things like hiding article summaries by default encourages users to write better headlines which translate to higher click through numbers. I also know that people who visit Design Float are looking for quality design related content, of which we have a ton of. And finally, the community does a great job of submitting and floating the quality design related entries and making them popular.

When Design Float was first launched, how did you go about getting people to start using it and building a community around it?

My initial form of promotion was submitting the site to popular CSS and web app showcases which exposed Design Float to one of the primary target audiences, web designers. After only a few days I could tell that the project had been embraced and a community began forming almost immediately. Pretty soon, a moderate viral blog buzz began to roll and before I knew it, there were over 250 mentions of Design Float across the design blogosphere. Design Float still gets mentioned regularly in design related blogs, and combined with the fact that the site indexes with major search engines like a dream, we continue to grow by over 300 new members a month.

Since I’ve been using Design Float I’ve seen an increase in the amount of advertisements on the site. The icons section seems to have a new advertiser every time I visit. It seems that a niche site that has such a targeted audience would be attractive to advertisers.

From your experience, how do you feel about the income potential and monetization opportunities for niche social media sites like yours?

There is, without a doubt, huge potential to monetize niche social media sites. Obviously the degree to which you’re able to monetize depends upon the niche you’re in. The design niche happens to have an abundance of companies and service providers that see positive results from traditional forms of banner advertising. The key is to find a balance of displaying advertisements for products and services that your target audience will benefit from while serving them in forms that are as minimally invasive as possible.

With the way things are changing, however, I believe there are going to be much more exciting and effective ways to monetize a social media site like Design Float. Things like affiliate marketing and interactive marketing don’t put a cap on the income potential of a site like the more traditional forms of web advertising do and I’ve been researching these to see if there is a way to incorporate them into Design Float.

At the end of the day, you can’t forget why your users are there though. If your goals are to make as much money as possible, you’ll eventually drive away your users and kill the community. It’s important not to get greedy. As long as you make your focus providing your niche audience with quality relevant content, the money to sustain it will follow.

Do you currently own any other websites?

I don’t currently own or run any other moments currently. I am going to be collaborating on a project in the near future which will also target the design community and it’s not going to be a clone!

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StumbleUpon: Interesting Results Examined

Vandelay Website Design — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 00:32:24 +0000

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.

21 Factors that Influence the First Impression of Your Website’s Visitors was published late on 11/27/07. Here are the stats for this post from November 28th & 29th:

13,638 page views

6,272 visitors from StumbleUpon

2,320 visitors from del.icio.us

839 visitors from popurls

591 visitors from DZone

187 visitors from CSS Globe

It’s impossible to tell how many thumbs up the post received at StumbleUpon because anything that receives more than 50 thumbs up just shows 50. This post does show 50, and there are 13 reviews with thumbs up.

Now, here are some stats from 22 Resources to Easily Create CSS Layouts, which was published late on 12/17/07. These stats are from December 18th & 19th:

7,356 page views

1,746 visitors from del.icio.us

1,525 visitors from StumbleUpon

678 visitors from popurls

549 visitors from DZone

266 visitors from CSS Globe

This post also shows 50 thumbs up, and 12 reviews with thumbs up.

Obviously the 2nd post received a few less reviews (and no way to tell how many less thumbs up) than the first post, but the numbers are not that far off. However, it only received about 25% of the traffic that the 1st post received in the same amount of time. Of course there are other factors involved that are being accounted for here, such as when the thumbs up and reviews came.

I can’t say for sure, but I believe the StumbleUpon algorithm saw that I shared this post with several friends, which influenced how many thumbs up it got, and as a result SU sent less traffic. I have read from a few different bloggers who have said that sending a page to your friends will result in less traffic than if the thumbs up come naturally, but I hadn’t seen results quite like this for myself.

Personally, I’m pretty happy with the traffic from StumbleUpon even if it was less than it could have been. If I hadn’t shared the post with friends who knows how many thumbs up it would have received? I don’t think this will prevent me from sharing other posts with friends in the future, but I do think it will discourage me from doing so when I am hoping for big results from SU.

Has anyone else had a similar experience? Or a different experience?

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StumbleUpon vs. Digg

Vandelay Website Design — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 00:02:40 +0000

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.

The post with the highest number of visitors, 77 Resources to Simplify Your Life as a Web Designer has:
- 115,571 total page views.
- 40,383 total visitors from StumbleUpon
- 29,980 total visitors from Digg.

Aside from that post, the other 3 that have hit the front page of Digg have all received more visitors from Digg than from StumbleUpon. Additionally, a few posts that were not dugg had some decent success with StumbleUpon. How to Set Up a Domino Effect of Traffic has received 2,891 visitors from StumbleUpon and 31 Sources of Quality, Free Icons has received 4,494 visitors from StumbleUpon.

Here is a graph of traffic sent from StumbleUpon. As you can see, it is fairly consistent with the exception of 1 large spike.

Now, compare that graph with the one below which represents traffic from Digg. On most days traffic is nonexistent, with a few large spikes.

Anyone who is active with social media marketing will not be surprised with the results that show StumbleUpon sending more consistent traffic than Digg, although some may be surprised that StumbleUpon has sent more than Digg overall.

I don’t think this information shows that one site is better than the other, but they both can be used differently. Most website owners and bloggers would prefer the consistent traffic from StumbleUpon over the large waves of traffic from Digg. What are your thoughts on these sources of traffic and what experiences have you had with these sites?

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Del.icio.us: An Underrated Link Building Tool

wpcoder — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 01:01:44 +0000

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 a social bookmarking site that really focuses more on the bookmarking than on the social aspect. There is not as much interaction from user to user like there is on a lot of social media sites. Del.icio.us users find a page that they think would be worth bookmarking, and they can use the Del.icio.us toolbar to bookmark the page and tag it with whatever keywords they choose. Anytime you want to find something in your bookmarks you simply go to Del.icio.us and browse through your tagged pages. The front page of Del.icio.us shows pages that are being bookmarked by a lot of people, and of course being on the front pages leads to exponential growth in the number of bookmarks.

From a website owner or blogger’s perspective, having your pages and posts bookmarked by your readers has a few benefits: 1) it increases the chances that they’ll come back to the page in the future, 2) if enough people bookmark your page it can move to the front page of Del.icio.us, and 3) Del.icio.us has a network system that will allow other users to see the pages bookmarked by someone in their network.

What Makes Del.icio.us A Great Resource?

Del.icio.us uses nofollow tags on its links, so you will not be getting search engine benefits simply from having a bookmark that links to your page. However, pages that are popular on Del.icio.us repeatedly gain a significant number of inbound links as a result of the exposure that Del.icio.us provides. Here are some things to consider:

1. Tech-focused audience – A lot of the pages that are popular on Del.icio.us are tech related, and a relatively high percentage of Del.icio.us users are website owners and bloggers themselves. This is important because you are getting exposure to people that have the ability to give you a link from their own website or blog. Plenty of non-tech pages make it to the front page, but it may be a little bit more difficult.

2. Some users post their bookmarks on their blogs – Del.icio.us offers a feature that automatically publishes your bookmarks to your blog at the end of the day. If you’re looking to gain links, this is something you will love. Anytime one of these people bookmarks one of your pages you’ll get a link. If you make it to the front page you’ll almost certainly get several of these links.

3. Easier than Digg – Getting to the Del.icio.us front page is a little bit easier than getting to the Digg front page. Because the traffic volume is lower there’s not as many people competing to get there. StumbleUpon, however, is probably even easier for getting significant traffic, but not necessarily for link building.

4. Long-term traffic – Those people who bookmark your pages are now more likely to return at some point down the road. As more and more people bookmark your pages your long-term traffic potential from Del.icio.us will increase.

5. Not as easily swayed by “friends” – Digg’s system strongly favors users who have more friends than other users. While Del.icio.us has a networking feature, it doesn’t impact the amount of success nearly as much as with Digg.

6. More mature audience – I like Digg for the traffic potential it brings, but the audience has certainly developed a reputation of being negative and immature. Del.icio.us doesn’t have a comment system, so I’ve never had a Del.icio.us user tell me how much of a loser I am, unlike Digg.

My Experiences with Del.icio.us

In the last 4 or 5 months I’ve had 8 blog posts reach the front page. Together those 8 posts have drawn 566 inbound links (according to Technorati) for an average of 71 links per post. Some of these posts have also had success with other social media sites, so of course not all of these links are a result of Del.icio.us. Of these 8 posts, 4 were on the Digg front page and 4 were not. Even the 4 that were not dugg still average 62 inbound links.

After my second time on the Del.icio.us front page I wrote a post titled 10 Tips for Making Your Blog Posts More Del.icio.us. This is the same strategy I have used since then to make it to the front page. If you’re interested in gaining more links I recommend you take a look at that post. I don’t want to repeat it here, but I do want to focus on a few of the points in that article that have really become even more evident since the time it was originally published.

Use other social media sites to increase your chances with Del.icio.us – In order to get to the front page you’ll obviously need to get a lot of bookmarks (most of my pages have made it to the front page with around 100 bookmarks, but it depends also on how quickly they come). Part of getting people to bookmark your page is getting as many people as possible to visit the page. For my web design related posts I like to use DZone, a decent-sized niche social media site. Of the 8 posts that have made the Del.icio.us front page, 7 have made the DZone front page first. DZone then sends a few hundred visitors which has been enough to rack up some bookmarks and put these pages on the front page of Del.icio.us. You can read more about this is in How to Set Up a Domino Effect of Traffic.
Show somewhere on the blog post how many people have already bookmarked it – When visitors come to a page and see that 50 other people have bookmarked it they may also be reminded and encouraged to bookmark it themselves. Del.icio.us offers a Tagometer Badge that shows how many bookmarks a page has drawn (You can see it at the bottom of my posts). FeedBurner’s Feed Flare also provides a similar option that you can embed in your posts.

Also remember that timing is important with Del.icio.us. Getting 100 bookmarks in a day might get you to the front page, but 100 over the course of a few weeks almost certainly will not. This means that you’ll want to try to send as much traffic as you can at the same time. If you’re going to promote the page at other social media sites, do it simultaneously so the bookmarks can add up faster.

What results have you had with Del.icio.us and how has it compared with your results from other social media sites?

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Building Consistent Traffic With Social Media

wpcoder — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 21:29:11 +0000

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 lot of bloggers dismiss social media as a reliable source of traffic and they don’t dedicate much time or effort to learning how to maximize it.

There are a number of things that you can do as a blogger to improve the consistency of the traffic you receive from social media. Of course it will always have peaks and valleys, but you can minimize those times where it is almost non-existent. This article does not focus on developing a particular post that will be popular with social media, but rather on what you can do to keep the traffic flowing more consistently. Here are some tips:

1. Post Frequently

You’ll find that your new posts are usually the ones drawing traffic from social media. After a few days the traffic to a new post will die down pretty significantly, but you can offset that by continuing to publish new content. Not every post you publish will draw a lot of traffic from social media, so of course you can’t just continually publish anything and expect it to draw traffic. But new content will frequently replace the traffic that is declining to an older post.

2. Be an Active User of Social Media

A big part of drawing traffic from social media is being an active user yourself and knowing how each site works and what types of content do well. It’s hard to expect social media to send traffic to your blog if you’re not willing to use it to send traffic to others. Those who use social media only to promote their own content rarely have much success. Be willing to vote for others and submit quality content.

3. Get to Know the Differences Between Various Social Media Websites

Each social media site will have its own audience with unique preferences and tendencies. By getting to know the differences you can better target your blog posts to particular audiences. Your blog may not be well suited for every social media audience, so if you know where it would be the best fit you can become more active there and develop your content accordingly.

4. Submit Your Posts to a Variety of Sites, Including Niche Sites

If you’re submitting each post you publish to Digg and nowhere else you won’t have consistent results (unless it’s consistently bad). Once you’ve gotten to know more about some of the different sites you can evaluate each blog post on its own and submit it to the most appropriate place. Some bloggers submit their own posts and some don’t. Not submitting your own posts to large sites like Digg and StumbleUpon is fine, but if you want to get traffic from smaller social media sites you’ll almost certainly have to submit it yourself. Niche social media sites can be extremely valuable because of the targeted traffic they produce.

Submitting to a variety of sites has a few advantages. First, it will keep the audience of a particular site from getting sick of seeing your posts every day. Second, it will help you to reach a larger total audience since each site has its own users. Third, it will allow you to target, like I mentioned above. Fourth, the traffic can carry over from one social media site to another.

5. Don’t Try to Push Everything that You Write

Not every post will be attractive to social media users, and that’s fine. When you write posts that you don’t think will have success with social media, don’t submit them. You’ll have better results if you only push those posts that have a better chance of success. If you have friends that you occasionally ask for a vote, save it for the right time. This may sound counterproductive to the point of this article, drawing consistent traffic. But in reality by pushing content that isn’t going to go anywhere with social media you will hinder the results of your content that is highly attractive to social media audiences.

6. Focus on StumbleUpon

Of all the social media sites out there, StumbleUpon is easily the most likely to send consistent traffic. StumbleUpon traffic doesn’t come in huge spikes like traffic from Digg, but it can be just as significant over a longer time. Popular blog posts with StumbleUpon can receive traffic literally for months. You can target SU by being an active user yourself and networking with other users, as well as by adding a button or widget to your blog posts that reminds visitors to give you a thumbs up.

7. Submit Older Posts During Slow Times

If you’ve recently found a few new social media sites to use, don’t forget about the opportunity to submit some of your older blog posts. During a time when your traffic may be slowing down a little you can submit an older post and hopefully make up some of that traffic. I’ve used this strategy with a few niche sites that I’ve come across, and it’s a nice way to give your traffic a boost when you need it.

8. Build Power Profiles

Top users of major social media sites can create traffic almost at will. If you have a powerful profile you can quickly turn a traffic drought into a flood. Some power users don’t submit their own content, but at least you will have the option if you need the traffic.

9. Use a Mullet Strategy

Maki wrote about the mullet strategy for social media and link bait, which I tried for myself. As I mentioned earlier, not every blog post is going to draw traffic from social media. If you want to target social media users without sending too much of this type of content to your subscribers you can use the mullet strategy to create a blog page instead of a blog post. This way you can still promote it on social media sites but without sending it to all of your subscribers.

10. Write About Social Media

One of the most popular topics among social media users is social media itself. If you use Digg you’ve probably noticed that posts that focus on Digg tend to do well, and likewise posts that focus on StumbleUpon tend to do well with StumbleUpon users. If the topic of your blog is relevant to social media you may be able to increase the amount of traffic you receive by writing more frequently about topics related to social media.

11. Develop Relationships with Those Who Vote for You

One way to encourage votes in the future is to thank those who vote for you or just get to know them. With StumbleUpon you can see who has given your post a thumbs up and thank them, add them as a friend, or write a review of them. With Digg you can see who has dugg your posts and add them as a friend.

12. Use Buttons On Your Posts

A common method for encouraging votes is to use buttons or widgets on your individual blog posts. These buttons make it easier for visitors to vote for you, since they won’t have to leave your page, and they also serve as a good reminder to vote for you. Some visitors will be willing to vote for you, but they may just not think about it. A button is a great reminder.

13. Follow Up On Topics that Have Worked Well In the Past

Have you analyzed your traffic from social media to see which topics have drawn the most attention? If you see particular trends you can learn about what types of content will be likely to produce similar results in the future. Past success can be a good indicator of what will result in future and consistent success.

14. Develop a Large and Loyal Following

Ok, so this one is not easily accomplished. Bloggers that have very large audiences have so many readers that use social media that many of them are bound to vote or submit the blog’s content. What may be more realistic is to develop a very loyal audience that looks for opportunities to send social media traffic to you. You can do this by doing the same thing for other bloggers and treating your readers well.

What other thoughts do you have about consistency with social media?

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