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Well we’ve got some content, we’ve got a theme, and now we should be ready to promote. Promoting these things tends to be the one thing that scares people silly. Some think it’s impossible to get a blog to 1k-2k daily uniques in under a month. I disagree. If you utilize all the tools at your disposal, it can be a pretty quick process. A little disclaimer before we start though… some niches, articles, etc perform better on social sites than others. So if you aren’t getting 1k uniques a day, don’t sweat it… it could be your niche that’s not very social friendly.
1. Plugins
First of all, you need to get out there and get the Anti-Social, or Sociable plugin. This allows visitors to bookmark your article from the same page rather than having to go to the actual site to do it. It allows you to include as many sites as you’d like, but I’d stick with the major ones… Digg, Stumble, Reddit, Del.icio.us, and so on.
2. Email
I’m sure by now most of you have made some blogging friends. Email them! Ask them to check out your new blog, and to bookmark it if they would. You’d be surprised at the results you get if you send out an email and ask everyone to Stumble your posts… it takes 2 seconds, and most are pretty happy to do it.
3. Forums
There is one particular forum I know of that allows you to submit your URL’s along with a description and keywords for others to Stumble and/or Digg. I can’t post it publicly due to their Terms of Service, but email me and I’ll send you the URL. Make sure to read the instructions before submitting anything!!!
4. Pay for It
This is ILLEGAL for the contest, but for future reference… One of the fastest ways to get going is to pay for Stumble traffic. This can be quite valuable because whatever traffic you pay for, has a chance to mulitply incrementally. You can buy packages starting at $10, and each hit is worth $.05. The great part is if any of that traffic clicks the “thumbs up” it’ll send you more traffic for free! I end up getting an average CPC from Stumble of about $.02. Not bad at all!
5. Submit Your Own Posts
Start submitting your own posts to Digg, Stumble, Reddit, Del.icio.us, and others. I know it’s against the Terms of Service, but they don’t know the blog is yours. They catch on when you bookmark your own stuff constantly without bookmarking anything else. So stumble or bookmark other sites (like this one!!!!), as well as your own so that you escape trouble. They’ll catch on given a long enough period of time, but I’ve never had a problem doing this with a short flip. The blog is gone within 30 days, so I don’t ever have to submit more than 30 posts before it’s sold… and I submit posts from other blogs just to mix it up! Get on this one, it’s WORTH IT!
6. Ask!
Leave a little message at the bottom asking people to bookmark or Stumble your site. I’ve done this with pretty good success on other blogs.
7. Send Shouts
Digg allows you to send shouts to your friends that you’ve added. Stumbleupon has a similar feature. Use these sparingly (only your best posts). If you use these correctly, they can be a great boost of traffic.
July 7th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Thanks Bryan,
I don’t have any friends, so can you stumble a post for me?
Also, I’ve seen people advertising their services on forums, etc to be paid for submitting to social sites for you, but do you know of other places/sites? I assumed by using the term “packages” that there’s a website with the services available somewhere that you have used successfully?
Thanks,
Jay
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Bryan Clark reply on July 8th, 2008:
Yes sir!
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July 7th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
I started the ball rolling with this today and am seeing ok results.
had around 400-500 today all from social media… next up have to start hitting the search engines.
Is everyone getting some indexing by google?
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Bryan Clark reply on July 8th, 2008:
That’s awesome Forest. I’m glad you are starting to get results with StumbleUpon!
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July 7th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Oh also, I’ll be doing a post on my site tomorrow and wondered if anyone wanted a link to their blog in the post with keywords other than the name of their blog?
I’m just researching my keywords
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July 7th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Jay:
add me as a friend on SU:
http://m38967.stumbleupon.com/
and then on Digg:
http://digg.com/users/acedigger
Then add everyone else from here, or your own buds.
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July 7th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Okay peeps. I stumbled everyone so enjoy!
Coach Kip… where is your site in all this? I know you have one!
Forest… you can link to PB if you’d like I’m not quite sure what blog fluff will be doing just yet.
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Bryan Clark reply on July 8th, 2008:
Good stuff PB!
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July 7th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
@PB: That’s good sportmanship! You don’t even have any content yet, and you’re out stumbling everyone else!
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July 8th, 2008 at 2:56 am
I shall be out and about stumbling y’all later too
Great post Bryan….and timely too.
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July 8th, 2008 at 3:58 am
I hate that I chose acthighbrow.com for my competition entry. Forest, I’d love a link I put you on my blogroll already, well all the contestants, lol ^_^
Anyway, good luck all - I’m going to go and do some work on act highbrow - wheeeeeee!
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July 8th, 2008 at 6:10 am
Thanks Piss Biscuit for noticing that I am absent. I am part of the contest I think?.?. Bryan will have it posted soon.
I have always used social media but struggle to get more than 100 a day. How in the world to you get 400-500 Forest. That is the thing that I would like to learn the most out of this contest.
BTW I love the competition and you guys have so many good ideas for sites it is incredible.
Hey Bryan how about a private forum for us hard core competitors?
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Bryan Clark reply on July 8th, 2008:
I’ll get it posted today. And I’ll work on a forum for you guys… hopefully I can have it up and going by tomorrow.
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July 8th, 2008 at 6:21 am
With the major social networks yu really have to play their game, make friends, digg and stumble and discover new things as much as you can.
I still have trouble with digg but do pretty well with SU.
I have a few friends who have decent SU accountds too so always ask them to stumble for me.
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Jay reply on July 8th, 2008:
@ Coach: I was hoping/thinking the same thing. I need to learn the tricks of the trade to get mass social traffic. I’ve used people successfully before to get me decent results for $6.00 ……so I assume if they can do it for six bucks, I should be able to learn how. lol
@ Forest: Yeah, that’s part of my problem. I’m not really active at Digg and SU, so I guess I should start making more of an effort at those (?)
I get in phases. I actually try and keep it part of my schedule to “network in general”, but that consists of many arenas, and I often just get caught up with “work”.
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Bryan Clark reply on July 8th, 2008:
Forest, you aren’t the only one. I still haven’t mastered Digg. The most Diggs I’ve ever received for a post was 140. Not nearly enough to hit the front page.
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July 8th, 2008 at 6:55 am
Bryan, do you think that using articles to gain interest and traffic might work?
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Bryan Clark reply on July 8th, 2008:
As in article submission? I suppose it could. Article submission isn’t as powerful as it used to be, but it still can be pretty effective if you stay consistent with it.
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Marceia reply on July 9th, 2008:
I’ve found that it can work well if you do a couple of things:
1. don’t have any extra outgoing links on your blog post. just the post, ma’am, just the post.
2. when you write your article, choose a low competition keyword (50k competing pages in google or less, if possible).
3. link to your blog post in the article. this won’t work for out and out affiliate marketing, but it will if you have solid content to use as a reference for your article.
Of course have your author box link to your blog. I snagged some Google page 1’s this way with 300k plus competition using this method. You can either write more than one article to support your post (I’m talking 2 not 20) or do an article and a squidoo lens/hubpage.
Hope this helps!
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July 8th, 2008 at 8:15 am
Oh my word, I dunno how this could have happened but acthighbrow.com was suspended because of too much usage used - how on earth that happened I dunno because I’ve got a terabyte of usage and when I last checked I hadn’t even used 1/4 of that
So I’m trying to get it fixed by Hostgator but for the first time in almost of year of being with them, I had terrible service with one of their support consultants.
He basically said, “Sorry can’t help you email this and this” and went off line before I could even ask him anything.! *rant*
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Bryan Clark reply on July 8th, 2008:
That’s terrible Jovanna. I’ve never had a bad experience with Host Gator customer service. I’m sorry to hear that you got a bad apple.
They don’t block accounts based on bandwith or space. It’s based on resources. So if you used to much of your servers alloted resources (most likely a hack or an exploit), then that’s why it’s down.
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July 8th, 2008 at 8:18 am
Oh bugger!!! That is outrageous and must be a mistake!!!
I submitted a post of yours to stumbleupon but the most traffic I have ever known that to generate is 15000!!! Hardly enough to fo anyone to suspend an account.
I hope you get it sorted right away!!
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July 8th, 2008 at 8:38 am
Forest, I doubt it would have been that. I think someone must have hacked it or something terrible could have happened I dunno - hopefully they can get back to be as soon as possible.
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July 8th, 2008 at 9:24 am
Hi, guys:
I posted yesterday a link to my accounts on SU and Digg. When Bryan gets up and approves the post, you all can friend me on there. Especially you SuiteJ, since you say you have no friends. We should all add each other on Stumble Upon and Digg.
Out of all the social networks, the ones i use:
Stumble Upon
Digg
Sphinn
Twitter (this one is for communication mostly, but it can be viral)
Kirtsy (aimed at women)
I don’t use MySpace of Facebook that much, at all. Just once in a blue moon.
Which ones do you guys use, and want to be friended on? Let me know.
On my site (Bloggers Search), i should have a nice theme on there and a few more posts by end of day tomorrow. (abit behind)
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Bryan Clark reply on July 8th, 2008:
I’ll get a post going today so that we can all find each other at major social networks.
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July 8th, 2008 at 10:52 am
you can find me (coachkip) on facebook, stumble, digg, and twitter. I do use them but like SuiteJ I am not very good at making friends
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July 8th, 2008 at 10:59 am
@Missy: I meant “no friends in general”. However, that obviously is SU included so I’d definitely appreciate some friends to Stumble around with.
I actually found a great site that has a long list of SU-related articles. http://socialmediatrader.com/the-definitive-stumbleupon-resource-list/
I’ve already learned a few valuable things.
For business, I use messngers to just stay connected with people, and use Twitter in phases. Sometimes I’ll use Facebook and MySpace to create small amounts of traffic by adding to FB groups, and creating a MySpace page to go with a site.
Thank you for the “invite”!
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July 8th, 2008 at 11:07 am
BTW guys, I’m SuiteJ on Twitter (add me!), Stumble, and Digg. I need to add some profile stuff and I’ll get active starting with your sites.
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July 8th, 2008 at 11:42 am
*bangs head against wall*
I feel like I’m getting no where with Hostgator. They blocked my website because I got 5000 hits in a couple of seconds.
It doesn’t matter how much bandwidth they used (they used about 60megabytes)… I think that’s shocking - everytime I get a surge of traffic my site can be disabled?
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Bryan Clark reply on July 8th, 2008:
Jovana, if you can’t get it sorted out, send me an email with your user details and I’ll contact them for you. I’m pretty good at handling customer service people.
And if you got 5,000 hits in a couple of seconds, someone was TRYING to bring your site down. You can do this by hitting the refresh button repeatedly, or holding F5.
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July 8th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Hi Bryan,
Thank you so much - I got it sorted out. I eventually got so fed up, I called them (it’ll probably bite me when I get my telephone bill at the end of the month) but I got a wonderful supervisor called Justin who helped me sort it out.
I will definitely complain about the two consultants I talked to. I’m also surprised - I’ve only had wonderful service from Hostgator consultants, really. I bought a product that had to be installed on the actual server because I couldn’t get it right, this wonderful guy spent almost an hour with me walking me through
And in the end, I was so useless, I sent the ebook and files to him and he uploaded them for me *g* It was wonderful! Anyway, Justin has reaffirmed my faith in Hostgator.
Yay - and suprisingly enough, I just checked my stats on CP and a lot of that traffic was from Stumbleupon, today I had 183 unique visits and yesterday 370? Does that count for anything?
Lol, I have no idea
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July 8th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Wah, so I thought I had installed google analytics but when I went to go and see what it was about (I’ve never used it before) it says it’s not installed.
Can anyone maybe help me put this in my template? Bryan? Pwease? :/
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July 8th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Hey Jovana,
I use a wordpress plugin that makes it pretty easy.
http://www.semiologic.com/software/marketing/google-analytics/
Info here and the plugin download is at the bottom of the page.
Hope that helps
Jay
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July 8th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Jovana:
You can also just add GA in a widget, instead of fumbling with the tmeplate/theme. I have done this on some of my blogs. I’m pretty scattered brain, sometimes im not super consistent.
On some blogs i have GA on the theme/template, and on others, i have it on the widget.
P.S. Thanxs to whoever stumbled my NEW! blog. I got like hundreds of uniques the other day. Too bad i didnt have more content on there. But thanxs to whoever stumbled it!
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July 8th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Im also writing a post with the wordpress plugins i use. In case anyone is interested.
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July 8th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Hey Missy, Yeah, I use the GA plugin mostly because it’s one of the of my plugins from a list that I install with “every installation” now. That way it all becomes a “routine setup” and gets faster each time if it’s always the same - for me anyway - I need structure to focus! lol
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July 9th, 2008 at 12:22 am
Oh Thanks so much Jay
That makes it so much easier for me *g* I’ll keep that plugin for future keeps.
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July 9th, 2008 at 1:53 am
Stumbled you all last night! But I’m not taking the credit missy….I think there has been lots of mutual stumbling going on!
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July 9th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
whew! I have finally made some rounds and gotten a few comments out to you guys. Some I missed (couldn’t find the comments area - maybe I missed it?). So I’ll make up by stumbling everyone right now.
If anyone is interested, you can join ASCbuzzgroup -http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ascbuzzgroup/ to get some love. You can only submit once per week, but it does generate some interest. One caveat - while it’s nice to get 30 people stumbling your stuff, remember you’re going to have 30+ people asking you to submit their stuff to various links. It can be a tad overwhelming if you don’t have time. Just weight the risk/reward. I use them and like them.
Bryan - I FINALLY have content! woo-hoo! Right now, I have it forward dated to fill the rest of this week. Do you recommend I forward date my posts to fill the rest of the month, or backdate my posts to fill the blog with content now? Yeah, yeah, I know. BOTH. Just no time for both! LOL.
Marceia
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July 12th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
I have some questions for the group. I have had a constant unique visitor stat of around 100 for the last few days. Yesterday all of a sudden I was down to 6. Now today back up.
I have done everything the same. So what gives? Why such a large change?
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July 12th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
@ Coach: It’s funny how this internet things has a mind of it’s own. In the last two days, my stats have been lower, but not nearly as low as my comments.
I notice that it happens in trends. People tend to slow down at the end of a week and sort of get burned out. Come Monday, it’s back to norm again.
I wouldn’t worry about it, but if it does pose some worry, you can always track your site referrals. In your stats area you can see where your visitors are coming from. if you monitor it twice a day and make a little post-it note on the numbers, you can learn where most of your major traffic is originating from.
I noticed on my blog the other day that one site in particular stopped sending traffic. As it turns out, they changed domains and their theme. Now, my link is no where to be found. It’s a bummer, but at least the drop in traffic isn’t a mystery.
Hope that helps!
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July 12th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
You guys are whippin’ my ass in the traffic dept.
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July 12th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
wow, you’re not alone Jay! I need to get cookin!
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July 15th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
I don’t use Stumble as much as other services,so I didn’t realize one could buy some of their traffic. It makes since because they specifically deal with blog traffic. This would make it a bit more targeted.
I realized your fifth point some time go,but you do have to digg /submit other other than your material to balance it off!
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November 10th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
This is an interesting article with lot of valuable information.
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Taylor
Social Bookmarking
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