Stage 1 - Research

The first stage of a successful social media strategy should involve identifying industry related areas of the web that will provide opportunities to create a buzz online for your clients industry. These include looking at niche social bookmarking sites, blogs, forums and social networking sites. You should have records kept on file of what sites work well for which industries, this will save you time in the long run, this file will eventually get very large (trust me!).

Stage 2 – Registrations

Once sites have been identified that meet the projects criteria the long registration process entering clients details in profiles takes place. This will usually involve entering a “homepage” URL, company logo and a brief summary of what the company’s goals are. Any additional promotional material would also be useful to help build up the brand within the different communities.

Stage 3 – Building trust

The key to creating a successful social media strategy is the relationships you build and the trust that you earn. When suggesting sites or information it should not immediately be the clients site or link bait, it should consist of industry related material. Commenting on related blogs, starting forum threads about the industry should also be created. This should be maintained for a period of time before moving on to the next stage. You should take a genuine interest what you comment on and write about, no-one likes a fibber!

Stage 4 – Release link bait

Once there is a level of trust associated with the company profile that is the time when the link bait or urls should be posted. Using this method will ensure that the information that is posted will not be labeled as spam by the various site administrators or site owners. By this time the profiles created will already hold some weight within the various communities which will ensure a level of traffic.

Stage 5 – Generate traffic + links

Once the urls and link bait have been posted this should immediately create incoming traffic to the client’s site or landing page. The secondary goal of such a strategy or possibly primary goal depending on client will be the natural links generated as a result of such a strategy. If like minded users find the link bait interesting then by all accounts they should then bookmark the link on their own social media site, be it a blog, social bookmarking site or forum. This will additionally create more incoming traffic to the site and generate a number of links that will help with the clients search engine positions for selected keywords.

Stages 3, 4 and 5 should be maintained over a longer period of time to keep impacting the search engine results positions. If this is not repeated throughout an extended time period then the increase in search engine positions will only be temporary.

By the way it’s my Birthday today so wohoo to me!

SeoUnique’s StumbleUpon guide

Welcome to my unofficial Stumbleupon guide from an SEO point of view. I would like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to write this for those of you that want it. Feel free to use any of the material and screen grabs I have created for your own use but please remember to give me a little mention.

What is StumbleUpon?

First I will show you the extract taken from the StumbleUpon homepage:

“Channel surf the internet with the StumbleUpon toolbar to find great sites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. StumbleUpon learns what you like and makes better recommendations.”

Now what exactly is StumbleUpon? Well for a start I’m going to tell you that an abbreviation for StumbleUpon is “SU” you will see this being used a lot in the SEO industry so don’t be confused by it.

Essentially what SU lets you do is bookmark your favourite sites on the web, write reviews about them and share these with your online friends. Its that simple. SU is different from older sites like www.digg.com or www.reddit.com as SU first thought up the idea of a “thumbs up” and a “thumbs down” idea. This is the method that lets your online friends know whether you liked or disliked a webpage.

Every page that you like or dislike is displayed on your very own profile page, which contains other contact and personal information.

How do I create a useful profile?

There are a few sections that should be considered when creating a profile, doing this well will gain you more or fewer overall page visits and its very simple.

1. Profile Picture – It depends what you want to get out of SU, if you want to be part of the overall community and build up a list of personal sites – put your own photo up and let people know its you – its good to put a photo to a name. If you are looking to be included in an industry community i.e. “Cars” – put a nice image of a kick ass car up there, something that will attract like minded people to your profile.

2. Profile Layout – If you click on “preferences” on your profile this will bring up a preferences page that includes sub pages; Personal information, My interests, Public profile. Click on “Public Profile” this will allow you to enter any websites you may have and let you change your background colour – white is a big no no.

3. Profile Information – Part of the whole learning process with SU is that you have to realise it is mainly reputation and community based and the people on SU respect the laws. It’s not like digg and the attitude of its users are certainly more mature. So take this opportunity to tell as much as possible about yourself, your goals and your business ideas, this is vital!

How do I create Targeted Traffic?

A lot of people have told me that the only way SU produces traffic is through the small “Stumble” button on the downloaded toolbar. For those of you that don’t know what I mean, download the toolbar and press the “Stumble!” button, see what happens, I dare you! Anyway, there are different methods to ensure the traffic you receive on sites you SU are target for that industry.

It’s really quite simple, if you start stumbling pages about cars, paint jobs, Top Gear etc you will attract like minded people to your page, connections are then made through friends or fans. I would not say just stumble one category or industry, if you are generally interested in a few topics, like myself I always look for people that have stumbled the same pages as myself.

Make sure when you submit your stories that you assign appropriate tags to the stories, this way when other stumblers look for certain topics your stumble will be listed, the more you assign, the better the results. Doing this will also categorise your stumbles and put them in your tag cloud on the right side of your profile, this lets you identify like minded people quickly, bigger the word, the more topics in that category they stumble.

What do Friends and Fans Really do?

I see a lot of people sometimes with only 50 pages stumbled and 500+ fans – to me this is an obvious attempt to try and cheat the system, well sorry boss it aint gunna work! I know for a fact a lot of people either setup up multiple accounts or add random people in the hope that they accept to be friends – it won’t work because people have to be genuinely interested in what you stumble!

You can become anyone’s fan by clicking on the “Add him/her as fan” by doing this you are stating that you like what this person stumbles. From now on, every time that person stumbles a page and reviews it, the story will appear on your “What’s new page”. If they accept you as a friend back it means that they are a like minded person because of the stories you stumble. So people who do it themselves will not benefit anything from this, certainly not in the long run of things.

What and where are Buzz pages?

If you look at the top of any stumble page and click on the tab “Websites” it will bring up this page: http://buzz.stumbleupon.com from this page you can see the most popular stumbles of the day. This can be broken down into categories on the right in the “tag cloud”. Having a story linked on this page often opens up opportunities on websites that feed from the results. So this creates natural backlinks and additional traffic to the original page.

Donate to Stumbleupon why exactly?

Many of you are probably not any wiser that this option even exists but I does here: http://www.stumbleupon.com/sponsors.php.

The point and reason people do this, which is completely voluntary by the way – is because of the community vibe of SU. You can donate anything from $1 to $$$ and this gives you a few little extras that normal SU members don’t get.

· Pages We Both Like feature to see what you have in common with other stumblers
· Unlimited stumbling within favorites of your friends
· See People We Both Like when visiting other stumblers
· Ability to Create New Groups (see the Group Directory)
· Have copies of all your messages emailed to you (both sent & received messages)
· Longer message history on your inbox and contact tabs
· Ability to Turn off Sponsored Stumbles

You also get a nifty little icon next to your name which is personally my favorite, when I did this I got an extra 10 fans in a day because you get your profile avatar posted on the donate page.

Where does the stumble traffic come from?

If you have a page you want to promote on SU then it’s a good idea to understand exactly where the traffic is coming from. I have seen a lot of posts and discussions (mainly from Digg lovers) remarking on the fact SU traffic is not targeted and people leave as soon as they visit the page. This is not the case.

1. You will get traffic from the “Stumble!” button on the toolbar that you download, this is the least desirable of all the traffic, its random as far as I can tell so people that come across your page will not be looking for anything in particular, if it’s a good subject you may receive a few additional “thumbs up” but that’s it.

2. The good traffic comes from your friends and fans. When you stumble a new page and review it and you have a good reputation and a genuine fan base you will get targeted traffic from your friends and fans and almost certainly get the page reviewed and thumbed up – this will in turn make your fans fans see the same story and so on. You can see on the diagram below how the traffic works. This was also posted on a previous post.

3. The SU buzz pages list the most popular stumbles per day, other websites, as mentioned before link to these and use them as content, traffic can be high from this if you’re lucky!

Is StumbleUpon traffic maintainable?

The simple answer is yes! The majority of my traffic originates from SU and is maintained. This is because of the following reasons:

1. My friends are all genuine stumblers and share the same principles of StumbleUpon that I do, this means everyone who looks at pages I submit will be interested in the topic to a degree.
2. If you get a good reception when you initially submit a page you know your content is of good quality, therefore next time a like minded person gives you a thumbs up, the process will start again. I often get peaks in stories 2-3 weeks after I Stumble them.
3. You get lucky and a “Stumble Whale” - before you ask a “SW” is a person who has been on SU for a long time and played by the rules every day. They keep their friends a respected crowd, many of them other whales. One “thumbs up” from them and you’re laughing!
4. If you want to keep the traffic constant over the months it’s important that you keep people interested in your profile, if you have one of your websites pages stumbled and then not another for a few months you may not see the kind of traffic you would get if you received new stumbles every week. The traffic from the new stumbles give people the opportunity to look at your profile and look at related stumbles.

What about the sites which charge me for stumbles?

It’s money down the drain I’m afraid. As mentioned before you will only succeed in SU if you are genuine and make the effort. Paying $5 for 200 stumbles will get you 200 page views and nothing else, don’t do it please!

I’ve had a lot of people ask me - Why is SU so good? - Where does the traffic come from? Will the traffic be targeted? Plus another 101 questions, so I decided to do a bit of explaining (with diagrams woohoo!!).

Why is SU so good?

SU is different from the other players in the online social industry. People as a whole can customize what news they can see on their profile page each day. By becoming a fan of another stumbler you will in effect receive updates each time they stumble a page. I obviously like to know about SE’s and SEO so most of my friends or people I call a fan are in that industry. So you can see that in all other social bookmarking scenarios you are not targeting a themed audience but “the whole world” - In SU you make your audience whatever you need them to be - very unique indeed.

Where does the traffic come from?

Like I mentioned I have created a simple flow chart thingy (excuse the technicalities) - First is a simple explanation of how you actually get visits to your website from SU:

Don’t be fooled into thinking however you can sign up to SU and add 10,000 friends and you will start getting more traffic than God himself - it ain’t gunna happen! You need to create a reputation online, review fans stumbles if you genuinely are impressed, PM people, generate a tue fan base, this way you know everytime you stumble a page your fans will click on it!

For a more detailed look on how you get big volumes of SU traffic:

I hope this helps people understand a bit more what SU is really about and how it works.

I have always promoted stumble as much as possible because I do honestly think the traffic good quality. The bounce rates are low, you always receive good friendly reviews and you generally get a good vibe, something that I honestly feel is lacking from Digg, Reddit and other social bookmarking sites.

The second wave

This is from my personal experience, when I initially make a stumble I usually expect to see a traffic range from 100 – 5000, depending on the topic of course. A lot of other people have also seen these kind of figures from a simple click of a button. However a lot of people believe that stumble traffic is a one time affair and dies out pretty quickly, this is not true. There seems to be a “second wave” of stumble traffic that occurs around 40% of the time when my site is stumbled.

This usually happens a week or so after the initial stumble and can produce some good numbers once again. This seems to be cause by a high ranked stumbler giving the thumbs up to one of your submissions. Once again the bounce rates are low and the traffic is again of good quality.

What about after the “second wave”?

Well personally I continue to get between 10 – 100 hits per day on this blog, from various other stumbles made on the site. So to answer the critics, stumble traffic is not a one time affair and is well worth pursuing.

I was going to write a piece on this subject when I came across some findings on Search Engine People. According to a recent survey by Prospero Technologies, nearly 9 in 10 marketers already using social media said they plan to “increase” or “increase significantly” their spending.

As you can see by these results 88% of people expect to spend more money on social media spending in 2008. I had already suspected that business heads and directors of small and medium sized businesses had started to catch on to the social media “craze”.

So how will it work in terms of SEO companies making money?

Well, like most blogs, including this one explain, it’s really not hard to get traffic from these sites – it just takes time. I do currently control social media campaigns for various companies which are still in the early phases of development and the clients are purely billed on time taken on the project. As well as time you may need to kit your blog/website/feeds out with social bookmarking options, this can cost a small amount if you need custom layouts etc, but generally the price will still be low.

I personally think you will start seeing a lot more “seo” companies offering numbers for cash, for example 10,000 hits via social media for $1000 or something as equally unrealistic. Like all good seo methods the social media and bookmarking requires constant attention and time to build up relationships with users and profiles. Of course its no good if you sell health insurance that you buy 100 “Diggs” either – you have to know what kind of users view each different social media site – you have to know your audience.


If any reading this is considering creating a campaign please don’t be tempted with quick fixes, you won’t see a ROI – it’s simple. Speak to agencies or trusted seo workers that charge you by there hourly rates and provide you with proposals and reports on all results. Remember if they’re good they will get large amounts of relevant traffic, not all at once but on a gradual increase.