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Link sharing with StumbleUpon and digg.com

Olaf — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 09:56:35 +0000

The basic idea of each social link community is that people share their discovered links with others via the Internet. Actually it’s only allowed to send those links to your social community friends. Having a lot of friends with the same interest like yourself is something very valuable to generate a lot of traffic to your website or weblog. We all know that both communities digg.com and StumbleUpon are good for big traffic if some story became hot in these communities. A listing on the digg.com main page is good for many 10K of visitors. Let’s have a look on the link sharing features which both communities provide:

StumbleUpon (SU toolbar fun)

Each SU member can add friends while stumbling other member pages. Members of stumbleupon use a browser toolbar for voting and navigation (stumbling), will say you need to send links to your friends via this toolbar. Your friends will notice your “shout” because of some tiny red number in their SU toolbar. After they stumbled your page they see your message and it possible to send some message back. If you have some active SU friends and they like what you send them via the toolbar it’s possible that this “Stumble” becomes hot and the stumbled page becomes a hot item and is presented more often to other stumblers.

Bad points; There is a limit of 200 friends, you can’t add more! Sure this is still enough because you need to send each link to your friends one by one. Only the tiny red number is a notification that a friend has send you some link, I think it’s to hard to notice.

Good points; Less spam, because the sender need to select each friend one by one (yeah that also a good point). Because of the interface (send back a message) the system has a great community value. While selecting your friends it’s very easy to select only those friends which similar interests, this way you can create your own small community (groups) and the links you send to others are more interesting for your friends (yeah right, this is up to you).

digg.com – become famous on their main page.

Adding friends at digg.com was not so important in the past because it was not very useful. Since a while this is changed; you can send stories submitted to digg.com with the share option to all your friends with only a few mouse clicks! Since this feature is introduced, digg.com members are making a lot of friends and it looks like that there is no limit (at least I didn’t noticed one yet). Okay, what to do with all those friends? A lot of webmasters are dreaming of a listing on the digg.com main page, while sending a shout to hundred of friends (and maybe some of your friends will do the same) a lot of digg.com members will notice your story and maybe the story will get enough votes and will reach the main page. Is this GREAT?

Bad points; Digg is sending an email to each member if a new friend or shout has arrived, this could become a problem if mail services like Gmail will flag those mails as spam. While adding friends you need to click a lot to find friends from your interests (digg.com is based on news submissions and not on the members). Voting and sending a comment to the link sender is very complicated (it’s all web based, yeah digg.com needs a toolbar)

Good points; Sending a link to your friends is very easy and fast. Because with each shout a mail is send to a member and your submission becomes more visible. Digg.com has this great vote button for your website. You can disable the “shout” function to stop your friends sending shouts to you (I think thats very important soon)

At the end…

Both social communities have their good and bad points and both sites invite to abuse the system. While SU has some logarithm which is used to decide which story is hot or not the cheater is often not very successful. With digg.com it’s different because the stories rank on the digg.com website is a result of the digg users. If the group of digg.com users is big enough to promote a “boring” story to the main page the other users need to search more to find the good stuff between all the entries… Now I have to stop because I need to look to get some more friends Similar Posts:

This generation web advertising

Olaf — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 21:21:47 +0000

After writing last week a short review about the advertisement site 43ads.com I got some interesting comments about other nice Web 2.0 styled advertising ideas.

bla.st
This is a nice combination of free and paid advertising, in the beginning you will get a spot on the first page of common key words like “web-design”. Interesting at this site is, that your ad is live after submission and the possibility to get a direct information how much a bid will raise your ad on selected pages. The website is really clear and you get the chance to have a 270×165 pixel banner ad for free.

ispuare
I found this advertising site via other blogs about the popular “Web 2.0 advertising thing”. Placing a link is for free and after that I got the invitation to get also a free “square” in exchange for a link. Sure the websites idea is very “original”, but I’m not sure that this is the “coolest” way to surf the internet. Placing a square inclusive an extra text link is € 50 at the moment.

At the end I’m asking me, who will visit all the websites behind the ads? In these days there is a lot of traffic because of all the blog posts but what about the real visitors a website need to sell products?Similar Posts:

Link trades with link admin programs

Olaf — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 22:05:35 +0000

In the last years link trading becomes an important position in search engine optimization market. Why? Because a high number of quality inbound links will raise your Google PageRank. There are a lot of companies offering link trades as a kind of SEO service and there are also several companies offering online tools where webmasters can handle their link trades with minimum of effort.

One of these service providers is LinkMarket.net, on of the larger websites with a link trade directory of many thousands of websites and millions of successful link trades (according the number on the website).

Getting a membership is easy and happens without the help of human hand. Just add a reciprocal link and you can start with the free but limited service. Because the new member sites are not human selected, the quality of websites offering link trades is not the best. Often the link trades are started by Mirrors sites, non unique affiliate sites, websites made for Adsense or categories (sub domains) from bigger sites.

Because of the large number of link trade requests and the work I got to handle them, I decided to upgrade my membership to get all the features from the program. This way it was possible to filter some (useless) request and also the amount of link trades started by myself was unlimited now.

After a while I noticed that my submitted website a link directory was placed in a not related category. I posted my first e-mail to their support department with the question to move my website directory to the right category, no answer until now.

A few weeks ago the number of daily new link requests went down to zero. I visited the website to check what’s happened and got the information that my account is suspended and I need to contact the support. I wrote an e-mail to their support department and never got an answer until now. The fee for the premium membership was almost 25 USD, a lot of money for 2 weeks using their service…Similar Posts: