As some of you may already know, Sphinn is the Digg equivalent for the SEO, SEM, and SMM (search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and social media marketing) industry. To many of us industry types, its really important.

Benefits of Sphinn:

For the most part, Sphinn serves many functions;

a) its a training ground for SMM, before we move up to Digg, Reddit, Propeller, Mixx, etc.

b) its a good tool for getting known in the industry, and for starting to brand yourself

c) its good for developing relationships with other industry types, many of which can be leveraged on other social media (hint, hint)

d) its a great tool to stay in touch with the latest news and opinions on industry matters.

Notice however, that 3 of the 4 identified benefits are heavily influenced by one’s ability to have posts ‘go hot’ and appear on the main page. This of course means, many people in our industry stand to benefit greatly by hitting the main page of Sphinn. As is typical too, a few account for a disproportionately high % of the ‘gone hots’.

So, as important as it is, how does someone new to the industry start to hit the homepage of Sphinn to experience all the above benefits and elevate their profile? Its a chicken vs egg dilemma really. Fortunely, Danny and crew have made some changes recently to make it easier for everyone to hit the homepage … if you just know how to use them to your benefit.

So What Has Sphinn Changed? Actually, Sphinn has made a number of changes, but the two biggest are:

1) The addition of the “Top 10 Most Sphunn in What’s New” table to each page

2) The “Latest Comments” table to each page

How Do These Changes Affect Front Page Tactics?:

Essentially, the above changes accomplish Sphinn’s goal, and do make it easier for everyone to make a story go hot. You still need to follow the standard practices (for a great post on these tactics … check out ‘How to Dominate Sphinn in 4 Easy Steps‘), forging friends, voting, commenting, submitting the stories of others, and in general being part of the community, but now there are more tools in your toolbelt. Specifically, here’s how the most recent changes at Sphinn can be used to your benefit.

1) if you’ve got 10 to say 15 votes for your story already and it seems to be lagging (remember you’ve only got 36 hours from time of submission to make your story go hot), call in a few favors to get the minimum number of votes needed to show your story in the “Top 10 Most Sphunn …” table. Once there, and assuming the piece is good quality, I’d suggest 95% of stories go hot. I’m not an advocate of calling in favors on Sphinn, but when you’re new, sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do … just until your profile is elevated somewhat.

2) Use the comment section to your benefit. The first place I goto whenever I goto Sphinn is the Comment table, and I know others do too. Don’t know why, but I love to look at the comments. So … use that to your advantage. Comment more. By commenting more (obviously well thought out comments rather than generic one liners like “nice post”), you draw more attention to yourself and your submissions. At the same time, make certain your comment is catchy, and stands out from the rest of the comments. Ideally, the comment would begin with a catchy ’sound bite’ that entices people to click on it (see screenprint below … which grab your attention? 2 are mine. Hint … one uses multiple ‘!’s, and the other talks about ‘magic beans’). If you comment on your own submission, you can then draw more attention to it once it begins to stagnate.

Summary:

In the end, these are only tactics, and are no substitute for being a valued and active member of the community. The fundamentals are still the same … participate and make friends. While trying to establish a name for yourself though, sometimes its necessary to resort to more agressive tactics such as those mentioned above.

Drop me a note and say ‘hi’ next time you’re on Sphinn. Happy Sphinning!

The preceding post was guest authored by Jeff Quipp of Search Engine People. Any guesses where I became acquainted with Jeff?

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!

Link Baiting – with the paid links debate clearing up, it’s clear that obvious link purchases will result in penalties to your site. Reciprocal linking holds very little weight too these days so alternatives must be suggested for a link building strategy. I won’t go into exact details of link baiting but even a simple piece of interesting information can result in hundreds of one way links to your website.

Blogs – That’s right, corporate and e-commerce websites should have a blog associated with the business name. It’s 2008 and blogs are bigger and stronger than ever online, creating and managing a blog will open up opportunities for one way links, returning traffic and updated fresh content (“yum yum” says Google). More companies are starting to do this as it’s also a nice experience to offer some sort of relationship to your customers. I know I’d prefer to buy a product from someone I had some degree of trust with, be it through brand recognitions or online relationship – writer to reader.

Social Media – I’ve been blogging about this for a while too so just to cover this briefly. Create profiles on all social media/bookmarking websites and hire someone to manage the accounts all day long. It’s an investment that should be considered for a long term strategy, branding, relationship building and link generation are all positive outcomes from investment.

On site optimization – Still a very important investment from an SEO point of view. Seomoz recently posted a great update on title tags, Meta data and URL structures. All traffic increasing methods and should be maintained to the highest standard.

Analytics and traffic analysis – In my honest opinion you don’t need to fork out for highly priced analytic programs. Google Analytics offers a very comprehensive package for the amazing price of…nothing. An investment should be made into setting up clear goals for your website and then using the data to optimise your site structure and content. An increase in sales or conversions will be a guarantee and a clear understanding of where your traffic originates can help producing domain traffic reports.

A bit premature at the moment as it is still technically 2007 still. Anyway I would just like to say thanks to everyone for making me personally feel so welcome in the SEO community. As mentioned before this blog has only been around for 6 months and in this competitive industry it’s hard for the “new kid on the block” so to speak.

To keep my faithful readers updated with what to expect in 2008 in regards to this blog I will let you in to a few of my side projects which I hope to keep people up to date with. These include:

1. An SEO awards website, all voting will be user based and include many different SEO categories to look in. This site will be live at the end of January I hope (still bug testing and creating a new design)

2. I recently created my very own Social Bookmarking website called VoteItFly - I will be documenting the joys and struggles of managing such a site and marketing it online, hopefully bringing a bit of useful insight for a few others!

A lso I would just like to thank a few individuals that have encouraged me to continue writing and investigating aspects of SEO:

Wayne Smallman
Jeff Quipp
Nick
Impavid
Technical-Itch

Don’t drink too much tonight everyone!

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!