Today’s Site Snapshot is BroadbandSuppliers.co.uk. The first major problem is that there’s a whole lot of text on the page and very little organization. ISP’s are shown multiple times, and AOL is the number one offer shown. Now, I may be more into affiliate marketing then the target audience, but most people know AOL has a bad reputation, so why not put that as a secondary or tertiary offer and gain more credibility, or throw in a few ISPs that aren’t as well known and don’t obviously have referral prizes?
They do have some good articles, such as “How to Get Cheap Broadband” and “What is broadband?“, which is a good step to gaining the trust of a visitor, as well as decent link-bait to attract more links. As for their link profile, Yahoo! and Google show drastically different numbers - 30,300 to 200, meaning they have a lot low-value links, but this still puts them #4 for “cheap broadband” on the Google.co.uk search, which is pretty damn good. This site proves that a large quantity of low-value links are still useful in gaining good rankings.
April 30th, 2007
posted in Site Snapshots |
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Looks like Geico is tring to create a new arm of their Caveman marketing campaigning, giving him more backstory, as well as promoting their partners with a new flash site: Caveman’s Crib.
The idea behind it is that you can explore the Caveman’s (named Joe Dyton) house right before he hosts a party. Exploring the site, I found an iPod with a few songs, and profiles for nine artists in the magazine (who also had music on the iPod):
- Royksopp
- Napoleon da Legend
- The Fabulous Entourage
- Â Arthur Loves Plastic
- Riding Paper Airplanes
- Rick Davies
- Corina Bartra
- Particle Zoo
- d-fuse and Hiratzka
As well as ads for Cairo Jeans, Philippe Frais (fake ad?), and Flory Company (also fake?). You’ll find an article on Joe Dyton starring in a new movie called “Smart Casual,” a TV with a Geico Gecko commercial, a computer with the Caveman’s intelligently pompous blogs. Heck, you can even voyeuristically pop into the bathroom and watch the caveman shower, help him get dressed in the bedroom, or read annotated versions of “War & Peace” and “Don Quixote.”
Notice anything about all of these activities? They’re boring as hell. Sorry Geico, you’ve been doing well, and you’ve put a a lot of work into this site, but for those of us that don’t already love the caveman, give us something more interactive than just reading.
April 25th, 2007
posted in Geico, Top, Marketing |
one comment
So for the last article in the StumbleUpon series, I’m going to write about a couple of black-hat services that exist solely to game StumbleUpon. These are Stumblexchange and and AVUW (no link juice), which both act in the exact same way: to exchange Stumbles between people and increase SU traffic.
Once you sign up, you’re given a list of sites to go and Stumble positively. Once this has been done, the system goes over to SU and checks whether you’ve accomplished the list. While you’re doing this, you can also submit your own links - Stumblexchange only allows one link, AVUW allows you to add as many as you want. Theoretically, people then will Stumble your page positively and attract more Stumblers.
However, in a test, StumbleUpon was surprisingly effective in filtering out traffic. I chose a page that had already been heavily Stumbled before and was still receiving a small amount of traffic, so I expected a small increase assuming that it would be Stumbled positively.
Looking at the logs, Stumblexchange sent me 2 extra visitors (although not necessarily thumbs up), and AVUW sent me about sixteen. My increase in traffic? 0 - it had been an average of 2 a day, and it remained 2 a day - AVUW sent me more direct traffic in that time than StumbleUpon did!
There are two possibilities as to why this happened: StumbleUpon had no one else interested in the topic that hadn’t already visited it OR the Stumblers were essentially discounted by the algorithm, because their voting interests were unlike anyone elses, and often stumbled positively really bad content. Most of them are also most likely using a secondary account without much of a Stumbling history.
Hence, the Stumble effect of these services is minimal, and isn’t a significant risk to destroying the quality of the content added to StumbleUpon. At some point, I’ll have to try this service on a new page and test the effects. Maybe after eBay confirms their purchase of StumbleUpon?
April 23rd, 2007
posted in StumbleUpon, Social Search, Top |
no comments
Today, we’re starting a new feature: Site Snapshots. Basically, we’ll be looking at a site and critiquing it from an overall marketing and monetizing perspective, including general site design, linkage and SEO, navigation, as well as pointing out any unique assets this site may have or major flaws that may have been developed.
The first site in this set of features will be a language learning website. At first look, they seem to have adopted a friendly blue, slightly 2.0-ish theme. They miss the idea of 2.0 cleanliness though, and their front page is a little busy with a lot of extraneous information (recent clients, 6 step program that doesn’t immediately take you to it). Their menu has 12Â items on it, with 6 of them dropping down into an ~80 item submenu that goes past the bottom of the page, and is essentially replicated for each of the items. This could be condensed into a single search rather than 400+ menu items. Then they also have 4 additional menu options below this, giving the user literally hundreds of options to go through (475 internal links from this page alone - talk about spread out link love).
That’s a big mistake - you want to guide your visitors, especially if you’re selling a product. The less work they have to do, the better. The .co.uk version and .com version target appropriate audiences, but this separation of sites could be replaced by simple geo-targetting and they could then be melded together, creating for a consolidation of link value and content (each of these home pages has a PR of 5). An internal organization of pages would also be beneficial, as Google, Yahoo! and MSN (who index between 500 and 4000 of this sites pages), show mainly very specific pages as the highest ranking ones, and most have significant amounts of duplicate content.
Google only shows 73 backlinks, whereas Yahoo! shows 1190. This suggests that a lot of these links are low value - for higher organic search position, this site should focus on getting more prominent, high value links. This will also help their traffic as well.
The focus on the business market could be taken advantage of through linkbait to get large amounts of free advertising. Perhaps an article on “The 21 Biggest Language Snafus” would grab a lot of attention - such as when President Kennedy proclaimed “Ich bin ein Berliner!” Rather than showing solidarity, he had just claimed he was jelly donut.
So the overall recommendations are: a reorganization of the navigation to make it easier for the user as well as consolidate multinational sites, an increase in marketing targeting high value links, and a humorous contentbait campaign to draw out the business crowd.
April 23rd, 2007
posted in Site Snapshots |
no comments
A recently released report ranked the top 100 brands by taking the earnings as determined by brand loyalty. Millward Brown Optimor used primary (research data) from over a million consumers and 40,000 brands as well as financial data to determine how much of the yearly income is due to the brand of each company.
Here are the top 10:
1. Google with $66.4 billion
2. General Electric with $61.9 billion
3. Microsoft with $55 billion
4. Coca-Cola with $44.1 billion
5. China Mobile with $41.2 billion
6. Marlboro with $39.2 billion
7. Wal-Mart with $36.9 billion
8. Citigroup with $33.7 billion
9. IBM with $33.6 billion
10. Toyota Motor with $33.4 billion
The sources:
April 23rd, 2007
posted in Microsoft, Branding, Google |
no comments
I really should try Twitter, but being so ultra-connected just doesn’t seem worth it. Not to mention the hidden dangers as posted by Muhammed Saleem.
Danger 1: Loss of quality and relevancy
Danger 2: Hidden Costs
Danger 3: TMI: Too Much Information
And then there’s more recent Tweet that said too much by Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion (which is a blog I also follow).
Oh, and Jason Calacanis’s (who’s blog I don’t follow) $237 extra phone bill charge for 2367 extra text messages. 2400 text messages - I barely have enough time in my life for what I’m already doing, much less reading 2400 extra messages.
Just to do the math: @ 10 seconds per text (to open phone, read, put phone away, and distraction time), that’s 24000 seconds of used time. Or 6 hours 40 minutes. At a cost of $50/hr, you’ve basically spent about $600 in money and productivity on this service. I’m sure Jason is earning closer to $100 per hour, meaning he lost about $900 this month.
Are the benefits worth this? I see few.
April 18th, 2007
posted in Twitter, Social Search |
no comments
Couple of articles that claim and discuss this over at TechCrunch and GigaOM.
TC: High-flying startup StumbleUpon has been rumored to be in acquisition discussions since at least last November. Recently we’ve heard that talks have heated up again, with Google, AOL and eBay as potential suitors. A source with knowledge of the deal now says the company has signed a term sheet with eBay to be acquired. The price is somewhere between $40 - $75 million.
Giga: By marrying the toolbar to Skype client, eBay can do an end run around Google’s dominance of the search business. A simple search box inside Skype client is all it would take. It is not that far fetched: Skype has been slowly integrating various different services (including PayPal) into its client, and slowly becoming eBay’s desktop backdoor.
April 18th, 2007
posted in StumbleUpon |
no comments
I feel like all I’ve been writing about is StumbleUpon recently. I promise that I’m almost done, but things just keep popping up that are nothing short of “WOW.”
Take, for example, Google’s new toolbar button. You click on it, and it takes you to a site that your search history would suggest that you like. Hmm… does that sound at all like StumbleUpon, where you click on a thumbs up or thumbs down, and it takes you to a site that your voting history suggests you would like?
However, an initial use of this tool suggests that it still has a long way to go before the quality of the sites is anywhere near that of StumbleUpon. My initial 20 site spree took me to sites which I recognized why I was visiting (text-link-ads, local newspapers, a few mmorpg sites as I’ve recently picked up Guild Wars). However, none of these sites were actually interesting to me, and it fails as a discovery service.
The question is, could it work in the future? With Google’s toolbar power and reach, it stands a chance. It all depends if the content delivery is as exciting as that of StumbleUpon.
April 18th, 2007
posted in Google Toolbar, StumbleUpon, Social Search, Top, Google |
no comments
There’s always been a lot of confusion as to the difference and meaning of “Audience” and “Fans” in StumbleUpon.
“Fans” are pretty easy. It’s the number of friends you have, plus the number of people that have subscribed to your pages (which they’ve done by friending you, or possibly just by thumbs-upping your SU profile).
Audience was a weird one. Sometimes mine would only go up by one or two, then it shot up by hundreds, then dropped hundreds. My closest guess is to assume it was an expression of an internal algorithm that showed your SU Karma or vote weight.
And now its gone, which is a good thing. That was a useless (although) fun bit of information that confused the hell out of a lot of people. And people were obsessing about it. And people were trying to increase it, likely by not honestly stumbling pages. Overall, this should now create a better user experience and better stumblers.
April 17th, 2007
posted in StumbleUpon, Top |
no comments
I don’t often praise FireFox plugins, but this one is really sweet - I’d call it the Swiss Army Knife of SEO plugins.
It’s SearchStatus! Here are some of the sweet things about it:
- It’s lightweight. I can’t stand things that slow down my computer - I’m way too ADD for that.
- It’s not a toolbar. I HATE installing toolbars because they take up too much screenspace. Most of my work I do on my travel laptop which measures about 14.1″ diagonally.
- It shows Alexa and Google ranks at a glance. This means I can get rid of the Google toolbar too, since I already have a smaller searchbox standard with FireFox.
- It boosts your sites’ Alexa ratings. Yes, Alexa ratings are bullshit, but some people still use them, and a higher one is better than a lower one, always.
- Highlights nofollowed links.
- Quick Keyword Density Analysis
- Easy access to Whois, Archive.org, meta tags (no looking through source code!), robots.txt
- Indexed page and backlink checks in MSN, Yahoo, and Google
- Quick link report on links on a page
- Again, it’s lightweight. Another good SEO plugin is SEOBooks Tool, but it’s very heavy and useful more for intense market research rather than just getting a snapshot of a site’s popularity.
So if you’re interested, I’d recommend installing it. Enjoy and happy surfing!
April 16th, 2007
posted in SEO, FireFox Tools, SEO Tools, Top |
no comments
Nothing too major, just a rearranging of elements. It’ll take a little while to get used to, but I’m liking the changes so far. Everything is organized in a more sensible manner, although I still feel it needs a little tweaking - the way the content overlaps the header is messing with my head.
Click to see full screenshot.
The changes include:
- A navigation and profile simplification— This is a decent change. Everything is organized more logically, but it takes more clicks to get to certain areas that you were able to get to in once click. However, it is a necessity for future features.
- The introduction of “Inbox”— Messages and Shares are now combined. This is a great change as before it really made no sense in the way it was designed.
- Network Pages— This is probably the coolest thing of all the changes. Basically, it’s kind of a network social hub which shows people, events, etc. for an entire network on one page and gives a more cohesive feel. It has a lot of extraneous information which may prevent it from becoming a true ‘network hub,’ but it’s a good start and a nice snapshot of the networks that you’re part of. Click here to see yours.
Here’s my FaceBook profile - send me a message or poke if you’re on it.
April 11th, 2007
posted in Facebook, Social Search, Top |
no comments
During StumbleUpon Week here at MikeBogo.com, I interviewed a few of the top Stumblers (people that SU has rated as the top users. The first is StarSpirit, the #1 top Stumbler who has rated positively over 111,000 pages and has 1266 fans - very impressive! Another is RChobert, who is the founder of VirtualVideoMap.com. Finally, we have GSSPP5, who is from Philadelphia.
Check out what they had to say about StumbleUpon:
Mike Bogo: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
RChobert: My professional background is in education and has morphed into the e-learning field. I know enough programming to make me dangerous in regards to developing some radical new ideas on the web, such as virtualvideomap.com. I enjoy developing web sites that give the user some kind of experience.
StarSpirit: I’m a woman from Arizona. I started stumbling in January of 2005.
GSSPP5: I am a 25 year old guy. I am into sports, movies, etc. I also want to know everything and I get bored very easily.
MB: What got you involved in StumbleUpon in the first place?
SS: One of my favorite blogs went on vacation and left a comment page open, and somebody mentioned Stumbleupon. I had a science and a art blog myself which I soon dumped after joining StumbleUpon, which I found easier, more fun, and friendlier.
GS: I got involved in stumbleupon through a buddy of mine. It wound up working out well. It generally only sends me “good” sites and it allows me to forward most of the sites that I like to friends who are working.
RC: My Video Map was submitted by StumbleUpon user “ChaseLightning”. Never heard of SU until then (June 06). Signed up, started another blog that corresponds with my StumbleUpon blog, which is virtualmagic.blogspot.com. This blog has videos of various topics of interest. My StumbleUpon blog leads visitors to each “video topic” on Virtual Magic. I’ve also blended in two other blogs, comprisal.blogspot.com and blendedexposures.blogspot.com. All three blogs are integrated with each other so the user does not feel he/she is leaving the site. This was due to the fact of the homepage on Virtual Magic becoming too large. My StumbleUpon blog was not always this way though. I started off photoblogging like most users.
MB: How did you get into the top Stumbler position? Did you actively try to get there, or did it just happen?
GS: I did not know I was a top stumbler until you told me so I guess it just happened.
RC: I am not sure how StumbleUpon determines their “Top Stumblers”. Basically, I was just browsing that page one day and saw myself listed, so it just happened. I do believe, however, that one thing I have started doing more often just since I got to be a “Top Stumbler” is stumbling and thumbing up my friends pages. This must be important.
MB: StumbleUpon has a lot of different features and aspects to it. Which features do you like best, and which things annoy you the most?
RC: I like most of the features I guess or I wouldn’t use it as often as I do. I think the search tool is probably underutilized my most people. Lately, I’ve found myself searching SU instead of Google because of ALL the spam web pages on Google.
SS: I like the comments, sometimes they’re hilarious, and I like to see who visits. (I wish they would expand that because I miss some sometimes). The stumble video is very annoying.
GS: I like the way it allows me to email directly from the page I am on. What irks me to no end is that every couple of days I have to reenter the email addresses I send to.
RC: Which things annoy me the most? The 200 friend limit. Why not just have fans or no limit at all. Makes no sense to LIMIT friends. This is an annoying feature and I hope SU will do something about it soon. And what is the “Audience”? Does anybody ‘really’ know? What also annoys me is not knowing how it is determined what submissions are shown to others right off the bat after submitting them. I’ve submitted some pages, and they are NEVER stumbled by one person. I know not all of my submissions are going to go viral on SU, but how is it determined that NO ONE views a submitted webpage? Does SU management filter submissions???
MB: The social aspect of SU is something that isn’t necessary, but is an interesting feature. How much time do you spend interacting in the StumbleUpon community?
RC: I spend 0% of my time associating with the StumbleUpon Community. Besides thumbing up their blogs I like and maybe adding a friend here and there, little or no regular communication is going on. It is very nice to receive comments, though I rarely comment on others SU blogs. I am happy to thumb up any SU blog though.
GS: None.
SS: It ‘IS’ necessary. It all depends - I have spent several hours cowriting poetry, joking around, or arguing about the latest issues, but usually a half hour a day in email. I spend more time on IM with fellow Stumblers than email.
MB: Free write time - anything else you’d like to say about anything?
RC: Thanks to the regular readers. Thanks to for the nice and encouraging comments.
SS: I think drugs should be legalized and anybody in prison or jail for simple posession should be released.
I think the top ten polluters in the world should be closed down every month till they get there act together with help from all the scientific communities and a paypal fund.
I think birthmarks are a result/scar from the sperm entering the egg.
And, even though the founders of stumbleupon are very handsome, I’m WAY cuter.
Thanks for all of the great responses! Happy Stumbling!
If you’re interested in more info about StumbleUpon, check out the StumbleUpon Resource List or the other articles written during StumbleUpon Week.
April 10th, 2007
posted in StumbleUpon, Social Search, Top |
no comments
I’ll be trying out Kontera, which is a integrated advertising system that turns certain words (like AdSense, Photoshop, etc) into embedded links, for which you’re paid per click.
There’s apparently a 2-week ‘ramp-up’ period in which Kontera is figuring out what your site is about, so I’ll let you know in about two weeks whether this service is useful or not.
April 9th, 2007
posted in Kontera, Top, Monetizing |
no comments
So I ran a test with AdSense on my blog, knowing it would be disappointing, especially since Guy Kawasaki reported earlier that he only made $3,350 from his blog in all of 2006.
In my test run, I was making $.37 eCPM. That isn’t worth the space that AdSense was taking up.
Someone might argue, “But Mike, you didn’t place them properly! You need to place them squarely in the middle of your content!” And uglify it beyond belief while simultaneously destroying usability? That may be acceptable on a random junk site I’ve made, but not on a site that has my picture on every single page! Especially in a highly competitive market like web marketing and monetizing.
AdSense is easy, but it’s nothing more than a starting point.
April 9th, 2007
posted in Top, Google Adsense, Monetizing |
no comments
If you were given a last meal, what would you wash it down with? Would you choose Coke, Pepsi, or something completely different?
Obviously, it’s difficult to do a study of this nature as killing people in the course of research would be slightly unethical, and you’d have a tough time disposing of bodies (trust me - it’s not easy to make bodies disappear).
However, the state of Texas, in all its wisdom, posted on their state site the last meals of all the people executed from 1982 to 2003. This information is no longer available from their site, but it has been copied and can be found here.
The results?
Of the 301 inmates listed, 52 declined the last meal. Of the 249, 37 chose Coke as their final drink (14.8%). Only 3 chose Pepsi (1.2%). I’m impressed Coke has so much market pull, and a smart marketer would take advantage of this - either side can spin it favorable.
Coke: More people choose Coke as their final drink than Pepsi!
Pepsi: Death row killers are 10x more likely to drink Coke than Pepsi!
Of course, the entire ad would have to have sort of a parodied feel to it - something like this:
Quick photoshop job, but something along these lines would catch people’s attention. Incidentally, Dr. Pepper was served 13 of the 249 last meals (5.2 %), beating out Pepsi, despite a much smaller market share. Dr. Pepper is made by DPSU, Inc (Dr. Pepper / Seven Up). They can easily grab a share of this marketing and can go in either direction - especially if either one of these companies picked it up.
What’s the lesson? Coke has fantastic branding, and branding is powerful enough that it will even be on people’s minds in their last moments. Brand on!
April 6th, 2007
posted in Humor, Top, Marketing |
no comments
AlexKnibb posted a list of tricks to improve the number of friends and reviews you have on StumbleUpon. Here’s a few, and these will work on almost any social networking site.
Part I - Setting up your profile
1. You are female. Even if you’re not, you are now.
2. Your age should be higher than 15, but lower than 30.
3. Find a picture either of yourself (if you’re female) or of someone else (if you’re not, and remember you are now) which meets the following criteria:
–a. It’s slightly ambiguous (i.e. not just a standard head shot, unless you do happen to be devastatingly attractive)
–b. It’s slightly flirtatious (looking up into the camera helps)
–c. Hotpants help (see putain.stumbleupon.com)
Check out the rest of Alex’s tips here!
April 5th, 2007
posted in Humor, StumbleUpon, Social Search, Top |
no comments
In part 1 of this series, you learned about the basics of StumbleUpon, so you should be able to answer these questions:
- What is StumbleUpon?
- How do I add pages to StumbleUpon?
- How do I make my vote more influential?
In this portion, we will answer the following questions:
- What kind of pages do Stumblers like?
- How do I get even more visitors from SU?
- How can I convert a Stumbler into a regular visitor?
- What are five big mistakes people make with StumbleUpon?
- How does StumbleUpon make money?
Let’s start off with the last one, since it will help you understand the average Stumbler better.
How Does StumbleUpon Make Money?
SU makes money by delivering advertisers’ web pages directly to the user. Every few times that you click ‘Stumble’, you are actually visiting a website that paid five cents to get you there. A big tipoff of these if you’re taken to the home page of a commercial site, since they don’t do their homework and just assume all pages will have an equivalent return.
Most stumblers know this, and so they’re very wary of paid-stumbles. They’ll often go out of their way to give a thumbs down, preventing any free visitors from coming in. As a result, anything that has a whiff of commercialism is going to do poorly, and you’ll lose that visitor and more in under five seconds.
What kind of pages do Stumblers like?
The last paragraph gave you an idea of what the average Stumbler doesn’t like. Home page, commercial products, anything that seems spammy. Keep away from that.
What do they like? Eye-catching content. If your site looks boring and doesn’t have an article with a catchy, off-beat title, they’ll hit the button and move on. Seriously - their mouse is already over it, and it’s so much easier to go to the next page than figure out what they should be looking at.
Definitely put the best content above the fold. But what kind of content works best? Stumblers are perusing the web without a purpose - they’re channel-surfing the web, so you have to catch their attention immediately. A funny photo, or a video with a good title. A ridiculous or original headline, or something truly unique - like dontclick.it, a website designed entirely without the need to click. Concept websites like dontclick.it are perfect for SU.
Whatever it is, it’s crucial that the Stumbler can tell what the site is about and be interested by it without having to work too hard at it, and without scrolling down.
How do I get even more visitors from SU?
You already know that stumbling, rating, getting more friends, and adding new pages that other people like will increase your Karma and make your vote more effective, so it makes sense to vote for your own pages. There’s no taboo against adding your own pages, and there’s definitely no taboo in voting for yourself.
But how do you get even more visitors?
Add additional tags - if your page is in the category of website development, add a tag for anything related - perhaps website design, websites, blogs, anything that may be related. SU will see these added tags and send people that are interested in blogs, but may not have listed website development as one of their interests.
Send it to your friends. They’re most likely to vote positively for your site, and more positive votes (especially in a short time period) will mean more visitors. 10 votes in 10 minutes are more valuable than the same votes in 10 hours.
Make sure that you only Stumble the best pages on your domain. SU takes into account the average quality of pages Stumbled, not to mention that visitors will also remember bad pages and hurt the branding of your site, preventing them from exploring further.
Finally, rate positively any sites or pages that link to your pages. The massive influx of traffic on their page will be good for them, but it will also mean that some of those visitors will click on your link and go to your site. This may seem like a unrewarding work, but it means the other site is filtering out the Stumblers that were going to leave anyway, and you only get the highest quality visitors.
How can I convert a Stumbler into a regular visitor?
One thing that you need to accept: most Stumblers will leave immediately after they first see the page. You’ll lose the majority, guaranteed.
However, SU sends so much traffic that if even a small percentage of these visitors are converted, you’ll add quite a few subscribers or repeat visitors.
Here’s how to do it:
- Have an RSS button and email subscription form clearly visible above the fold.
- Have an RSS button and email link clearly visible at the end of whatever content you’re presenting. Pretend the Stumbler is the laziest person you ever met and has a horrible case of ADD - make it as easy possible for them.
- Give them other places to go at the end of the content
- If you’re noticing StumbleUpon traffic, mention it if you can. Many Stumblers love their service, and if you acknowledge it and welcome them, you’ll be seen as part of the in-group of Stumblers.
Easy tactics, and the first three are tactics that you should already be doing, but it’s even more critical for SU visitors (as well Digg, Reddit, and all the other social sites). The fourth will significantly increase your conversion rate because it will make the site more personal and human.
Finally, the big one:
What are five big mistakes people make with StumbleUpon-bait?
- Stumbling the home-page. Big mistake - if I have to look for interesting content, I’m already gone and assuming it was a paid advertisement
- Lots of intrusive advertisements, especially above the fold. If it looks like AdSense is your primary content, I’ve already gone on to the next site. I will not scroll down to look for the good stuff.
- Tons of unbroken text. Boooring. Unless you have something really hilarious or important, I don’t care. At best, if it’s extremely educational, I’ll bookmark it and go back to it later.
- Mis-tagging or mis-categorizing. That’s a thumbs down, and no, I won’t recategorize it for you.
- Pitching a product. I’m not in the mood to buy something. If it’s really, really cool and fun, show me a video of what it does. Tell me a story. I’m not in a purchasing mood when I’m stumbling, but if it’s something unique and you entertain me, I may come back to it later.
This should get you well on your way to getting more visitors and more conversions with StumbleUpon. Look for another article coming up in a couple of days - this one will look at some of the other features of SU that are newer, such as StumbleVideo and StumbleBuzz.
April 4th, 2007
posted in StumbleUpon, Social Search, Top, Articles |
no comments
Playing around with Google Maps (yes, because I do things like playing with Google Maps), I tried to see what would happen if I asked Google how to get from Providence, RI (where I am now), to get some good italian food in best place to get it: Rome, Italy.
Surprisingly, it gave me an answer! And it would only take me 29 days, 17 hours to do, traveling a total 4,524 miles! Google assumes that I can swim about 6.25 mph - personally, I’d rather take a rowboat. Spending that much time in the water would make me all pruney. Click to see the full image.
It’s a nice little easter egg. What I’m more impressed by, is that if I’m going from a European countery, it gives me kilometers instead. I have to give Google points for paying attention to other countries customs and making sure that they’re following them. It’s a much better usage policy than assuming everyone knows how to use miles, feet, etc., (none of which makes any sense anyway).
Can Google get sued for this? I’ll bet someone will try, when a family member drowns trying to get to Paris.
April 3rd, 2007
posted in Google Maps, Humor, Top |
no comments
There’s a good chance you’ve heard of StumbleUpon. There’s been a lot written about it recently, but if you haven’t, then you need to know about this program. It has the potential to drive tens of thousands of targetted visitors directly to your website, and if you don’t want to take advantage of that, you’re missing out on a major potential traffic and link-building source.
The Basics of StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is the channel-surfing tool of the internet, with over 2 million users. It allows people to quickly and easily visit and “discover” new webpages that they otherwise never would have.
The process: You install a toolbar (see below), you signup, and then you hit stumble. Pick some interesting topics, ranging from photography, web development, humor, gardening, and hundreds of others, and Stumble will start giving you pages that other users have rated positively.
Over time, as you rate pages, Stumble will learn what you like and match you up with similar Stumblers, giving you pages that they’ve marked as “thumbs up”.
You’ll end up finding amusing, interesting sites that you otherwise would have never even thought of looking for.
How it Works
StumbleUpon gets to know what you like when you rate web pages, and matches you up with similar users. Additionally, when you add new sites that are quality, you start getting good “Karma” and future sites that you submit and your votes will have more weight.
Adding a site is easy - just give a page thumbs up that hasn’t been stumbled yet, and it’ll be added to the database, and you’ll get credit for it.
Then there’s the entire social network aspect. To be honest, this isn’t a thrilling aspect, but it could be interesting for some people, since it automatically matches you up with people with similar interests. If you invest more time, you can make “friends” with other users, and they’ll be more likely to see your pages.
How to make it benefit your site
Stumble your own pages. There’s nothing against the code of StumbleUpon that says that you can’t Stumble your own pages. However, you have to choose content that will attract Stumblers’ attention, and keep them on the site for longer than a few seconds.
The ease of stumbling also leads to one of the downsides of StumbleUpon - it makes it really easy to leave sites.
In the next article, learn how to capture a Stumbler’s attention and how to convert Stumblers into regular visitors. Read it tomorrow!
April 2nd, 2007
posted in StumbleUpon, Social Search, Top |
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This week, I’ll be taking a long look at StumbleUpon and the power that it has to bring visitors in, how to maximize the conversion rate of these visitors.
I’ll be posting about:
Look for these articles coming in the next few days!
April 2nd, 2007
posted in Top |
one comment
Today’s Site Snapshot is BroadbandSuppliers.co.uk. The first major problem is that there’s a whole lot of text on the page and very little organization. ISP’s are shown multiple times, and AOL is the number one offer shown. Now, I may be more into affiliate marketing then the target audience, but most people know AOL has a bad reputation, so why not put that as a secondary or tertiary offer and gain more credibility, or throw in a few ISPs that aren’t as well known and don’t obviously have referral prizes?
