Most of the advice that is being shared, and incessantly repeated, is dated. It’s aimed at a blogosphere where there weren’t millions of blogs in each niche, all working hard to grow an audience. I call this advice aimed at the Oldsphere, whereas you need to be focusing on the Newsphere. Things changed, and you need to know how to deal with them.

Mashable vs Techcrunch

For a long time, TechCrunch was the go-to place for news about startup companies. They’re still one of my favourite blogs, but, in my opinion they failed to capitalise on their brand and position. They remained stagnant in the types of topic they cover and it seems they’re unable to see the conflicting ideas in most of their posts.

With over 4 million RSS subscribers according to Feedburner, it’s clear they’re not struggling. Yet, they are being surpassed. Mashable was the much smaller fish in this market a few years ago, until they adapted what they covered, carved a strong niche for themselves, and focused on a specific audience to help them grow.

Their adaptions, which are helping them to thrive in this Newsphere has taken them past TechCrunch in terms of traffic figures and really put their brand on the global map.

The numbers don’t lie:

We can even look at their social media followers to see a huge difference:

• Mashable Twitter: 2,052,946
• TechCrunch Twitter: 1,417,305
• Mashable Facebook: 254,691
• TechCrunch Facebook: 79,716

The things that helped Mashable experience this growth and dominate their market can also be applied to your endeavours. The rest of this post is totally based on my opinion, but hopefully there are enough examples to help you see that you do need to adapt, if you want your blog to thrive.

Picking a Niche is Pointless

In the Oldsphere, it was very common that the first advice bloggers would pass around is to make sure you choose a niche you are passionate and knowledgeable about. The theory being that if you make your niche very clear in your slogan and the types of places you interact, you’ll attract the right kind of audience for you.

If you agree with this, then let me ask you a question. What niche is ViperChill in? If you believe the tagline I’ve had since the launch of this site, you would say I write about viral marketing. Yet, there’s only one post in over 50 that actually covers viral marketing directly.

Some of you may say blogging; others may say internet marketing or even affiliate marketing. The fact is, it isn’t that clear. Yet, I don’t think it’s hindered me in any way. I haven’t picked a niche, but I have picked an aim: to help people build remarkable websites which other people want to talk about. This is the focus of 95% of the blog posts that I write.

It doesn’t matter what niche I define myself in, it matters what I’m writing content about. This is what will attract a certain audience.

In the Newsphere, people define their own niches. Zen Habits, with over 190,000 feed subscribers, is a blog with emphasis on productivity and minimalism. They were very small niches until the owner, Leo, built a large audience by focusing on them.

You don’t need me to tell you what the blog, The Art of Manliness, is about. With over 70,000 subscribers, author Brett managed to focus on a very small (previously invisible?) niche and dominate it. Even Mashable went away from the typical “blog about startups” angle and defined themselves as the Social Media Guide to the web. Something that clearly worked out well for them.

Trying to put your site in a very common niche is not only a waste of time, but shows that your focus is on the wrong things. Decide what the main thing you want to help people with actually is, and then just focus on writing content about that.

Frequent Posting Doesn’t Matter Anymore

I think I’ve been the biggest advocate of this message and proved that writing more content is not a necessity. My blog grew by almost 700 subscribers last month, and I wrote one single post. I would have wrote more if I had the time – so this wasn’t some sort of tactic – but the results do emphasise my point.

It’s not just happening in the internet marketing niche. Steve Pavlina, the biggest personal development blogger in the world, spent the first 3 and a half years of his blogging life posting 5 times per week, Monday-Friday. Now he writes one or two articles weekly, and it definitely doesn’t seem like his audience has lessened.

Unless you run a news site or you’re in an industry where posting very frequently is crucial (e.g. politics), then you don’t have to post daily. I would be very impressed if people can post 5 killer articles per week in their niche for an ongoing period of time. It’s not only very difficult, but also unnecessary.

To put that into perspective, if I had written five posts per week for ViperChill since I started this site, I would have been able to write the posts I have for a period of eleven weeks, at the most. That’s not even three months, yet this blog has been going for almost eleven.

The reason that posting less has become commonplace is because the web is suffering from a serious case of information overload. Five years ago when the likes of Steve Pavlina and Darren of Problogger were taking off, there were no Facebook, Youtube or Twitter to take up people’s online attention. There were much fewer things to focus on online, so audiences appreciated daily updates.

There is no doubt that there are sites out there which post frequently, that don’t necessarily need to, and do very well. J.D at Get Rich Slowly is a good example of this. Posting just for the sake of posting however, is a total waste of time. If you aren’t writing amazing content for your audience, there will just be someone else who comes along and does.

To test this theory: Next week cut out two of your normal posts and double the amount of time you would spend on one. See if you can make it as detailed, fascinating and helpful as you can. Then, let me know the results. I think I already know what you’re going to say though.

Your Content is Everything

Though the idea of “build it and they will come” does not apply to the internet, great content generally does get attention if you promote it via the right channels. The great thing about building an audience is that the bigger it is, the less you have to do your own effort in terms of marketing, because your readers share the posts for you. Making your content great is the hardest, yet most crucial thing you can do.

I can’t define what great content is, because you must know what your own readers want. If you stick to the focus of what you want to help people with, then it should be very easy for you to figure out. If you want to make people laugh, then great content may be a picture that spreads virally around the internet. If you want to teach people how to play the guitar, then great content may be a detailed video tutorial for beginners.

The point is that you must figure out what you want to give people, and how to make it great.

If you aren’t giving priority to the content you produce more than anything else, then you need to change that right now. In this age of information overload, there has never been a more important time to write compelling content that people will give their valuable time to read.

Doing Something Different (Consistently) Is Your Best Chance of Success

And offering something different is probably one of the hardest things to do in a sea of 100 million “competitors”. With ViperChill, I believe I was the first blog that teaches you how to make money which has no affiliate links or ads. Mashable focused a large amount of their content around Twitter, which isn’t something I like personally, but appeals to a lot of people and helped them grow.

Leo Babauta of Zen Habits was the first blogger to come out and say that you can use all of his articles in any way that you wish. Many others then followed his Uncopyright movement.

I could list many more examples, but there’s a reason why it won’t help. Giving you too much information on what other bloggers are doing differently narrows your own focus as to what you can do differently. Your difference does not have to be something totally “out there”. It can be as simple as offering the best content in your niche, from your own angle.

The Superficial, a popular gossip blog, does this well by throwing in a lot of humour in their posts. Geekologie, a technology blog which is owned by the same company, does exactly the same. They picked two topics which aren’t always humorous themselves, and made both funny and informative websites which have huge audiences.

Recognise that most blogging advice out there, is dated. Learn to adapt to the Newsphere and your chances of creating a big blog are far greater. “Good luck!”

This not only creates impact, but also allows editors to simply snip off the bottom paragraph of a story if they need space for other articles. As the final paragraph is the least important, their editing does not affect the article too much. I’ve already shared how I personally became a much better writer (though I don’t rate myself that highly) and now I want to get into the specifics of how to create compelling content.

Your Headline

Your headline, in my opinion, is by far the most important element of your article or blog post. It of course matters what you say after the headline, but only if you can actually get people to read your article. The job of your headline is simply to get people to read the first sentence of your post.

Your headline doesn’t just need to be attractive to people who stop by your blog regularly. If you use Google Reader in a list format for example – like I do – then your headline determines whether myself or anyone else using the service will click on your listing to read the post. Similarly, if I see content posted on Facebook or retweeted on Twitter, that same headline will determine whether I click through to your website.

The following advice is my take on how to create a headline that draws your readers in and helps your content go viral.

Don’t tell me something I know: If your headline says something like “Why exercise is good for you” or “How to increase your feed subscribers” then I probably won’t read it. It gives me nothing but the expectation that I already know most of what the article is going to share. If you want someone to keep reading, you need them to feel like they’ll actually get value out of the time they’re going to spend doing so.

Headline example: Printer Cartridges Are Expensive

Challenge someones beliefs: One of my most popular posts on PluginID bore the title ‘Smoking is Good for you’. As everyone knows, there are many reasons why smoking is detrimental to your health, so this caused quite a stir and invoked the desire for people to continue reading. I followed up the title with a good twist in the article, which is important if you’re going to write your headline with such an angle.

If you write an article – with the content to back it up – which tells me why “running is bad for you”, “people don’t read blogs anymore” or “[common tactic] no longer works”, I’m going to read the post. Humans love taking in new information, but we hate holding on to information which is incorrect, so challenging beliefs can be a very powerful to get eyeballs on your content.

Headline example: Why Buying Another Printer is Cheaper Than Buying Ink

Offer a hidden insight: This one is very common in the internet marketing space, with titles offering ‘keys’, ’secrets’ and ‘crucial aspects’ about different topics. I’ve used them myself in posts like this one and my article on ‘The Secret to Growing Your Blog Twice as Fast with Half the Effort‘.

This works so well because the title suggests that by reading the article, we’ll learn something we wouldn’t have known otherwise. A year or two ago I did this for a popular topic – how to increase feed subscribers – but in a way that was new and promised value. The title was ‘How to Increase RSS Subscribers (One Method You Probably Don’t Know About)’. Are you more likely to read that article than an article with the same title, but without the brackets?

Headline example: The Real Reason Behind the High-Cost of Printer Cartridges

Ask a question: If the question you ask is relevant and intriguing, people are going to read your post to see why you feel a certain way about something. Headlines with questions are also one of the best ways to get people to leave comments on your posts. The question automatically gives them something to say in response.

Discussions start from questions, and this is a great way to get a conversation going in your community, especially if you make bold statements on a hot topic. There’s a great example of this kind of post at Copyblogger, where the author asks: Is Commenting on Blogs a Smart Traffic Strategy? [Link]

Headline example: Do You Know Why Printer Ink is so Expensive? We Reveal the Truth

I’ve received a lot of praise for the headlines I use in posts and I’ve been asked numerous times whether headline writing comes naturally to me. The answer is no, it doesn’t. I find inspiration from magazine covers, books, and other bloggers along with my own imagination. I also spend quite a lot of time on each title and it’s never something I just “throw out there.”

Keep these ideas in mind, and you’ll soon be writing headlines which capture the attention of your audience and help your content go viral.

Your Introduction

If the job of your headline is to get people to read your introduction, then the job of your introduction is to get people to read further into the post. I believe that if your introduction is interesting and compelling enough, there’s a better chance that people will read your entire post, rather than just skimming through or ignoring it all together.

I definitely have a lot of work to do on my own introductions, but do have some advice to share which I think can help you.

List some interesting facts: I think the introduction for this post, regarding newspaper journalists, would have been interesting for most people. The information it shares must have some value, simply because I was able to remember this myself and then pass it on to you all. If you’ve naturally remembered a small nugget of information about a topic, there’s a good chance it’s interesting.

If your facts are both interesting and relevant then it’s a great way to keep people hooked on what you’re saying.

Offer a teaser for later in the post: If you could easily work out who the killer was at the start of an episode of CSI or figure out the plot of a movie after the first 5 minutes, we just wouldn’t watch them. Smart television and movie producers “sprinkle” teasers throughout the length of the production to keep you hooked until the end where you find the answers.

Promise your readers the answer to something you know they’ll care about, and make sure you stick to that promise, but only by offering small nuggets of information as they get towards the end of the post.

Ask a question: Though questions can make very effective headlines, I personally don’t like to use them in this way. I prefer to use them in introductions. This way, you can both ask the question and answer it to offer value straight away, or you can use it as a hook.

Similar to the last point, you could answer an intriguing question and then promise to answer it towards the end of the post. A good one from the book Made to Stick is the question, “What are the rings around the planet Saturn made of?” I’ll tell you at the end of the post .

Use Reverse Psychology: I recommend you use this sparingly as too much of this tactic will annoy readers rather than encourage them to read your post. I used this tactic in my ‘most important blog post‘ article when I wrote “This blog post is quite long so you probably shouldn’t read it. To the 50% of visitors who are still with me, I’ll say now that less than 1% of you will get to the end so you may as well leave now.”

I can imagine some people will take this too far and tell their readers in every post that they aren’t going to read it or they won’t enjoy it. Trust me, this tactic only works when you use it very, very sparingly. Think of some unique ways you can apply it and you’ll be on to a winner.

The Middle (The “Meat” of Your Content)

The middle of your post is where you get across your main points, provide value to your readers, and offer lessons you hope that they take away from the article. For example, in my post on How I received over 900,000 visits from Google in 30 days, I began by proving my facts and claims in the headline. The meat of the post was exactly how I was able to do that.

Although I mentioned this earlier, it’s very important that even if you have a great intro and a great headline, the meat of your content must match up to those high standards. If you have extravagant headlines and can’t follow them up with great information, you’re just going to annoy readers and they probably won’t come back.

In other words, if you’re going to offer some “secrets”, make sure they actually aren’t that well known.

Be personal: One of the best ways to get your points across is to speak about personal experiences. On the most basic level, this means that you should be open to sharing both your failures and your successes. In my article about generating more blog post ideas, I was more than willing to share that I had been struggling to come up with things to write about.

The reason that being personal works so well is because people can relate to what you’re saying. And, if people can relate to your content, they’re more likely to take your advice to heart and engage in your site. Don’t be afraid to use personal stories to help get your points across. It’s probably one of the most effective things you can do.

Provide concrete evidence or examples: I’m lucky enough right now to be in an industry where people know enough about what I’ve achieved to trust what I say. However, that wasn’t always the case, especially when I was blogging about personal development. In order to get your point across and have your ideas stick, it’s good to have enough information to backup your points so that they really can’t be disputed.

I often include images of ‘roadmaps’ when I talk about complicated subjects like my SEO strategy in big industries, and always try to include examples to help people create a picture in their mind of what I’m talking about. Evidence and examples might not help your post be more viral, but it will help solidify the ideas you’re trying to share.

List your most important points first: I can’t remember where I first read this, but it makes total sense, and it’s something I’ve tried to implement in all of my posts. If you’re writing a list post or ever just listing points in a certain order, put the most unique and/or valuable at the top of the list.

I believe the simple logic is that if you’re going to share points that are interesting and someone hasn’t heard before, they’re more likely to continue reading than if your initial points are just generic and nothing new.

Keep Your message simple: In most cases, it’s best to keep the message you’re sharing simple. Or, if it is complex, at least keep it to one idea. The best blog posts tell you one thing and they tell it well. Seth Godin is a master at this. If there’s a key message that someone can take from your article that they understand fully, then they’re more likely to pass that message on.

An example of this is my post on blogging partners, which was one of the most popular on the site. I said a lot about the subject, and covered it in-depth, but I really just stuck to one idea: If you want to grow your blog faster, find a blogging partner.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” – Leonardo Da Vinci

Your Summary and General Readability

The summary of your post, in my opinion, is the least important aspect of your article. The hardest part of anything you write is to get people to read it, and then continue reading it until the end. Similar to what newspaper journalists learn, your best information should be in the introduction and main sections of the article.

If you rely on the summary for people to “get” what you’re trying to say then you’ve just wasted 80% of your writing, in most cases. Although the summary isn’t as important as the other sections, there are some recommended ways to use it.

End with a powerful statement: The more articles I wrote, the more I found myself trying to end them with a message that left an impact on the reader. Movies do this all the time; if you’ve seen the end of Inception then you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Just because you’ve got your main message out of the way, it doesn’t mean you should get lazy with your article. On two random guest posts that I’ve written, here were two of the endings:

• “Those thousands of subscribers are waiting for you. You’ve just got to be ready for them.” from Copyblogger.
• “Now, can you please promise me you’re going to share your value with the world? Because I can promise you, the world is waiting for it.” from TylerCruz.com

Start a discussion: This will be the third time I’ve mentioned starting discussions and asking questions. I do so because I believe that conversation is really at the heart of blogs, and one of the main things that makes them so different from static sites. Often times, people will want to leave a comment, but they just aren’t quite sure which part of the post to share their thoughts on.

You can use your summary to remind people of the most important points, and ask questions around any of them. This should help to get the comments flowing.

Summarise Your Post: Although very obvious (it is called a summary, after-all), I couldn’t leave this point out of the post. A good suggestion for ending is to pick the most important advice you’ve shared and repeat it in bullet-form. Another option, where relevant, is to give people an action plan as to the steps to take next after reading your advice.

My final suggestion, which is not directly related to making your content viral, would be to offer links to other relevant posts on your site. If people like what they’ve just read (and they probably did, if they made it to the end) then they’re likely going to want to see other articles you’ve written.

Readability

I generally break many rules when it comes to readability, but I still try to include the basics when I can. Even if you write the best posts in your industry, nobody is going to take the time to read them if you just list paragraph after paragraph without any formatting or line-breaks.

There aren’t many things to remember when it comes to making your posts scannable. Here are a few things that I think you should:

• Use Bullet Points: Just like I’m doing here, separate some lists into bullet form which not only breaks your post up into sections, but helps people skim your ideas if necessary
• Use Section Headings: I often use H2 and H3 tags to define different sections of my posts. This way, I have a clear outline of my beginning, middle and end, so visitors can decide to read just one section or all of them combined.
• Bold important sentences: If people are going to skim your posts, make it easier for them to take value from it by highlighting your most important points
• Use clear sentences: Unless you’re trying to appeal to English literature graduates, you don’t need to use fancy words or complex-sentence structures. Keep your sentences simple. And remember: What you say is far more important than how you say it.
• Break things up with images: Another good way to structure your content, without using headings, is to use relevant images to break things up. I like to have one in the introduction, as do many other bloggers, and more throughout the post, depending on the length of it

Many of these suggestions are aimed towards people who aren’t going to take the time to read every word that you write, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The whole point is that they’re reading your content and enjoying it in their own way, and then sharing it if they like it.

Many people will also skim an article first, and if it looks interesting, go back to read the whole thing in detail.

To those of you who read the whole post, and want to know the answer to my question about Saturn, the rings are believed to be made out of dust-covered ice. Are you going to use these tips to make sure that your next article is a hit?

Simply put, compared to other traffic sources, StumbleUpon is terrible. However, because the service sends so much traffic, even leveraging just a small percentage can see a decent increase in your comment count and subscriber numbers. Today I’m going to give an in-depth guide to the service and then give my tactics for getting the most out of it.

StumbleUpon Basics

StumbleUpon is a system that allows you to find new and interesting websites based around your favourite subjects. The more you use the service, the more the system “learns” about your interests which in-turn provides you with more relevant, fascinating content.

This is very different to the usual method of finding news by going to your favourite blogs or entering a search query into a major search engine. Here you’ll find content from all over the web which you know other people have enjoyed, so it can lead to some great discoveries. With StumbleUpon, it’s all about the users and the content that the community enjoys.

How to Use the Service

Traditionally, StumbleUpon utilises a toolbar that you install in a browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox. More recently however, they have came up with a toolbar that you don’t need to install, which shows at the top of the pages you are viewing.

I prefer using the toolbar option as you can customise it and it doesn’t take up any additional screen space. Here’s how it looks (note that my version has been tweaked based on my preferences):

The three main buttons that you should be aware of here are the ‘Stumble’ button and the up and down thumbs. The Stumble button will load a new page in your browser that is based around your interests. The thumbs up button signifies that you like the page and of course the down thumb signifies that you don’t like it.

There are two aspects of this thumbing up and down that affect the system. The first aspect is that StumbleUpon learns about what type of content you like and what you don’t, and then tries to show you more of what you do like when you click Stumble. The other use of the ‘thumbs up’ button is that StumbleUpon tend to show that page to more people if a lot of people are enjoying the content of that page.

With over 10 million active users on the site there is a lot of potential for certain content to get viewed thousands of times. In fact, I had a blog post I wrote for DumbLittleMan receive over 100,000 views from the service. Instead of trying to explain how the system works in just text, I’ve created this small graphic that should help to clear things up:

Becoming an Active User

If you’ve never used StumbleUpon before, let me warn you now that the service can become very addictive and a huge drain on your time. In fact, images that have said “Stop Using StumbleUpon” and shown up while browsing with the toolbar have become a thing of humour because people know how fun the service can be.

The following points are applicable whether you are just starting out in the service, whether you’ve used it and want to get more out of it or you’re an internet marketer looking for more website traffic. Either way, it’s good to take full advantage of all the features available and become a genuine, helpful user of the community.

Define Your Interests

When you sign-up to StumbleUpon you will be asked what topics you are interested in. Of course, it’s important that you select subjects which you are actually interested in so that you’re shown content that you care about you when using the toolbar. When I signed up I entered ‘web development’, ‘internet’ and ’self improvement’ as my favourite topics.

Although StumbleUpon will “learn” about your interests based on your usage of the service, it’s still good to pick topics that you’re highly interested in so you’re not just shown random content when you start using it.

Choose a Profile Picture

No matter what your reasons for using the service are, I believe everyone should at least take a minute to update their profile with a picture (also known as an avatar). Your profile picture will of course show on your profile, but it will also show on any pages where you have reviewed content and it may show on review pages which show users who ‘thumbed up’ content.

In other words, your avatar is going to be seen in a lot of places on the service so pick something memorable. Here are some examples of popular avatars in the social media space:

It is up to you whether you want to use an ‘avatar’ style picture like this or a picture of your face. Both are acceptable and about as popular as each other.

Fill Out Your Bio

Every user on StumbleUpon gets their own profile page which they can customise. Yours will be located at http://StumbleUpon.com/stumbler/username/ (of course, substituting username for whatever username you chose). Your description is there simply to tell the world a bit about yourself. I recommend that you fill this with relevant, honest information, so if people like your Stumbles then they can find out more about you.

Here is a slightly crazy but very honest bio from one of the top users of the site:

A nice touch in the description section is that you can add a link to other websites so other users may check out the links to see what you are about. I’ve made some great relationships through StumbleUpon and turned many of my ‘friends’ on the site into blog subscribers and Twitter followers.

Add People to Follow

I’ve already mentioned that when you sign-up to StumbleUpon you get to pick your favourite interests which StumbleUpon will use to show you relevant content anytime you click the Stumble button. The Stumble button is not the only way to find great content on the site though. You can also find it via your connections.

When you Stumble upon a page, you will be able to see the user who submitted it via the toolbar like so:

If you like what they are submitting you can both add them as a friend and subscribe to their submissions. This means that when you go to your home page on the site then you will see all the recent reviews by your friends. My own profile has 41 people subscribed to my updates.

Note: I have not used the service as a normal user (at least on the ViperChill account) for a long time, though I am going to get back into it. You don’t need to be an active user of the service in order to get a lot of traffic to your website.

Create Your Own Shortcuts

Once you start really getting into the site, you’ll notice that you want to speed up certain aspects of the features available. My current set-up (for the browser extension) is as follows:

• I let Stumbleupon prefetch the pages it is going to show me
• If I click ‘Thumbs Down’ then it automatically loads a new page
• CTRL + Left Arrow on my keyboard shows a new page (Stumble Button)
• CTRL + Up Arrow on my keyboard gives a page a thumbs up
• CTRL + Down Arrow on my keyboard gives the page a thumbs down

This means that I can browse around and find great new content without having to keep clicking on the toolbar with my mouse. You can change your shortcuts by going to Tools >> Toolbar Options >> Shortcuts. If you like the idea of auto loading a new page when you click the down or up thumb then you can change that in the configuration tab.

Getting Traffic from StumbleUpon

If you are not a webmaster and simply want to find awesome content, then the information above should be more than enough for you to get started. However, this is an internet marketing blog after-all, and StumbleUpon happens to be one of the easiest ways to get thousands of eyeballs on your content.

StumbleUpon is known to have the ability to send a flood of traffic to a page in the span of just a few hours. I remember the days when traffic from the service would only have a 30% bounce rate, and while it’s around 80% now, a percentage of visitors still leave comments and sign-up to your RSS feed which is what most people want them to do.

Though the 12,000 visitors ViperChill received from StumbleUpon last month is tiny compared to months where I’ve received over 100,000+ visitors from the service, I thought I would just show some proof of that traffic:

In the early days of StumbleUpon, being one of their “power users” helped you massively in getting traffic to a page. In fact, I could pretty much guarantee that any page I promoted would receive thousands of visitors. If you had a large network on the site you could also use their ‘Send to’ feature to share a page with all of your friends and get more traffic that way.

Nowadays, the power of your profile has very little (if anything at all) to do with getting traffic from the toolbar. It’s all about the content – which is great for you and me.

Write Creative Titles

Although your content should be good, it isn’t nearly as important as the headline it’s wrapped in. The title of your article or blog post is the first thing people see so if it doesn’t entice them to read on then they aren’t going to review or thumb-up your content which would send you more traffic.

The types of titles that work well on StumbleUpon include:

• List / Resource Posts
• Something that is humorous
• Something that is relevant and fills a need
• Something that is shocking and against the norm

A title like ‘Some snails in London get painted’ is nowhere near as interesting as ‘Graffiti Artist Uses Snails as His Canvas’ which was in fact an article which received thousands of views. Of course, don’t write a great title if you don’t have the relevant content to back it up. Just remember that the title is without a doubt the most important factor of whether people will read your content or not.

Want proof? Look at the top rated pages in any category and they will all have great titles. Or, test it out for yourself. Dragos is a great example of someone who knows exactly what the StumbleUpon audience wants — just check out the post titles in his sidebar.

Create Viral Images or Videos

Text isn’t the only type of content that works well on StumbleUpon. For a while in 2008 I ran a demotivational pictures blog and each day I would receive thousands of visitors from the toolbar. Don’t forget that most StumbleUpon users are just browsing around the web, looking for something interesting. Pictures and videos are great ways to catch their attention.

It’s important to note that while images or videos can be great at getting a surge in traffic from the site, it’s far less likely to convert in a way you want it to compared to text content. Unless of course, you’re trying to increase the view count of your videos.

Enter Relevant Submission Information

It’s important that you do not simply keep submitting your own content to the site as I’ve noticed a lot of people do as this is a fast-track way to get your account banned or have your site banned. Even a huge blog like ProBlogger was removed from the service and while the domain was allowed back into the system after a huge uproar, it does show that nobody is exempt from their heavy hand.

You can submit a new page to the system by simply clicking ‘I like it’ and if the page has not been discovered before, a pop-up box like this one below will appear:

If the title of the current article is catchy then leave it; otherwise you can tweak it to help the page get more views. For a description I sometimes just copy the introduction of the article, or you can write your own short review. It’s important that you pick an appropriate category for the submission. If you choose a sports category for a financial article, nobody who it is shown to is going to like it and it will quickly drop out of the queue.

Send the Page via a Re-Direct

I mentioned earlier that it is no longer effective to send a page to all of your friends and ask them for a Stumble. In the past this kind of activity would guarantee you thousands of visitors but now it is rarely the case. If you do want to share a StumbleUpon link with lots of people I’ve found it to be more effective to use a re-direct like this:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/click_redir.php?t=49e34c6117e3f&src=url&u=YOURURLGOESHERE

This reason this works is that StumbleUpon can tell whether you just landed on a page directly and clicked Stumble or they actually showed you the page via the toolbar (much more natural) and you voted for it that way. However if you go through the re-direct – or keep stumbling and land on a page and vote for it – it looks a lot more natural and like a genuine recommendation.

Clean Up Your Site

One thing many people forget about receiving traffic from any site is that by nature, you’re going to turn people away if your site is overloaded with ads, pop-ups, or anything else that deters from your main content. The design of ViperChill is very minimalist because I either want people to subscribe to the RSS feed here or view the content clearly. That’s it.

The attention span of StumbleUpon users is very short so if they can’t see your headline and your post straight away, there’s a very good chance they’re just going to move on to the next article. Getting StumbleUpon visitors to stick around on your site is hard enough so don’t make things harder for yourself with a cluttered website.

Look at What Is Hot

A good way to get traffic from any social media website is to look at what is hot and is working well in that specific community. It makes sense that if you find out what people on a certain website and send them more of it, they are going to stick around on your site as well.

A good way to check what is hot on StumbleUpon is to check the top rated pages for each category. As an example, ViperChill is in the Internet Marketing niche so I would look at the StumbleUpon “hot” page for internet marketing, which you can find here. I can see articles on this topic that have received thousands of visitors from the site which could possibly give me inspiration for future posts

When I was writing for PluginID, I actually had 3 of the most popular self improvement articles ever written on StumbleUpon, all receiving over 50,000 visitors from the service. The number one thing that worked for me was simply writing great articles with even better headlines.

The rest of the advice here may be secondary to that, but don’t overlook it.

Of course, I’m able to do this because I’ve managed to grow the audience to a considerable size here at ViperChill. If you’re trying to get a new blog off the ground, it’s advised that you put in quite a lot more work. Even though I do such little promotion, many posts get hundreds of retweets and comments. The reasons why are quite simple.

Twitter is consistently a top 10 referring source of traffic to this website. Every day I receive targeted visitors from the site who tend to stick around for quite a while. If someone you’re following puts a link out there, there’s a good chance it will be relevant to you because you’re following that person in the first place.

Although you can automate Twitter traffic and get a ton of untargeted visitors, the type of targeted traffic I’m referring to in this post can be massive in helping you to promote your blog.

Comments help you to show a form of social proof that you can’t fake without a lot of time and they allow you to see if people are really interested in the type of content you’re putting out there. If you can get someone to comment on your blog, there’s a good chance you can get them to subscribe to it as well.

Finally, comments also help you drive more search engine traffic to your site thanks to the long-tail traffic that the words in them generate. Anything that shows community on your site is also a good thing in my eyes.

My Own Results

Instead of just talking about things in some roundabout way as most blogs tend to do, I prefer to show results from personal experiences to back up my advice. Without any egotistical intentions, here are some of my articles that received a large number of comments and tweets.

As you can see, I’ve had a lot of success at attracting both. Now let’s look at how you can do the same.

7 Ways to Get More Tweets and Comments

Build a Larger Audience

Perhaps the most obvious – but also the most useful – piece of advice I can give you in this area is to do what you can to grow your following. If I have 100 targeted followers on Twitter then simple logic would suggest that having 1,000 targeted followers would help me to get more retweets.

Similarly, if you have 100 blog subscribers then you’re simply not reaching as many people who can comment as you would if you had 1,000. Although the growth of this blog hasn’t directly correlated with more comments and tweets, it’s definitely had a large effect.

If you need tips on building your current following then I recommend these articles on learning how to utilise social media, optimising your website for search and dominating your niche online.

Be Controversial (In the Right Way)

Controversy creates attention. If someone in your social circle does something way out of the norm, there’s a good chance every member of that circle will quickly hear about it. If even a C-list celebrity releases a sex-tape, every large magazine and celebrity gossip blog is talking about them.

It’s important to know about the different types of controversy, however, before you try to utilise this on your blog. I’ve been to one blogging “seminar” in my life and it was held right here in Cape Town. To say I was disappointed is a total understatement.

One speaker – whom the others agreed with – told the audience of new bloggers to:

• Attack other bloggers for no reason
• Post adult pictures – even if they’re not related to your content
• Call out people in the public eye on your business blog

And other bad advice I don’t want to pass on to you. Needless to say, the type of actions they promote may get you some traffic, but it will be fleeting and not something you could build a reputable brand with. Unless, of course, attacking people or pornography are the focus of your blog.

The type of controversy I’m talking about is writing posts that go against the grain, but only because you believe in something different. I did that in “The Most Important Blog Post You’ll Probably Never Read” which revealed that a lot of bloggers simply make money by teaching other people how to make money.

It went beyond what most people are willing to talk about in this industry but it also came from my heart and was total truth. It hit a nerve with readers and was a very successful post.

Make Both Actions Easy

If I can’t find a ‘retweet’ button on your website and didn’t find your post through Tweetdeck, I’m not going to tweet it. That doesn’t go for all Twitter users, I’m sure, but for myself and many others, we want you to make it easy for us to share your content. It makes no sense not to.

At the top of all ViperChill posts (click through if you’re reading this in a feed reader or your inbox) you will see a large button which shows how many tweets this post has and encourages other people to tweet it as well. It’s provided by Backtype and is available as a free plugin for Wordpress.

I also include a tweet button at the bottom of all posts as well, and there’s a simple explanation for that. Someone is far more likely to share something after they’ve read it, rather than before just based on the title. The button at the top is more of a social proof indicator to show people that the post is probably worth reading.

Draw People in With Your Title

Although you may think this applies more to generating Retweets, it certainly applies to comments as well. As building a large following will help more people see your work, writing the write right title is going to encourage more of those readers to click through to your post.

I’ve said multiple times that your headline is the most important part of your blog post. Just make sure you can back it up with the content that follows. I know with a lot of confidence that many people retweet my posts just based on the title, rather than actually having read them.

Your title can also be used to ask a question so that when people start reading it they’re already in the frame of mind where they’re going to give you a response. If you ask the right questions then people might skip the post content altogether just to give you feedback in the comments section.

Utilise Reciprocity

If I link to the same blogger in three different blog posts there’s a good chance that they’re going to eventually link to me back. If I continually comment on the blog of someone who isn’t too large to notice individual commenters then it’s likely they’re going to come to my site to share their thoughts.

If I retweet you three times it’s likely that you’ll follow me and retweet some of my own posts as well. There are lots of cases and people where this wont work, but it will work the majority of the time from my experience.

The reason I mention three is not because it’s some magical number but it just implies repetition and some form of giving back. Anyone can retweet, comment, or link to you once. Performing any of those actions multiple times shows you’re not just some “Fly-by-nighter” and you actually care about the other persons website.

Many of the people who comment on and retweet posts from ViperChill are actually not people who I have done the same for. To be honest, I’m quite lazy in this regard because most of my time is spent on buying and grow websites; not on trying to grow this blog in any way.

Build the Right Connections

Most posts tend to get around 50-70 tweets on average, depending on what they’re about. When I write a really good post it can spread naturally and get in excess of 100 tweets. However, most posts are pushed past 100 tweets by being tweeted by someone with a ton of followers.

I’m not going to use any specific examples but they’ll just get inundated with requets, but there are two people with 80,000+ followers that I have asked on a couple of occasions to Tweet my articles. They were both relevant to my industry and people I’ve interacted with in the past.

Everytime they do that, my posts get a ton of retweets. They’re now both loyal blog readers and regularly tweet things that I never ask them to which helps get my content seen by a much wider audience. Once you’ve identified and connected with the influeners in your niche, don’t be afraid to just ask them for a tweet.

What’s the worst that can happen?

Learn to Write Magnetic Content

The clear difference between the content of mine which receives a lot of comments and gets a lot of retweets is simply the content that is the most compelling. For example, even though people seem to really enjoy my stats post and get a lot out of the transparency I share, they always get less tweets and comments than any other post.

They’re interesting to current readers, but it’s not really something you want to tell your friends “Hey, go check this out.” Especially when I do one of those posts each month. Instead, if I write something that people find directly useful to them and they think it will help others, then that’s far more likely to get shared.

If not on a conscious then definitely on a subconscious level, people view their own tweets as a representation of themselves. They don’t just want to share anything. So, something that’s packed with value in terms of information, humour, entertainment or news is far more likely to get shared than something generic or overly-personal.

Look at the kind of content that you comment on at other blogs and the kind of stories you share on Twitter. Doing this alone can help you see what it is in other peoples blog posts that you may be missing in your own.

BONUS TIP: Respond to your first few commentors as quickly as possible. People are more likely to join in the conversation if they feel like the post owner will respond to them personally. I make sure I’m online for at least 30 minutes after each post goes live so that I can do this.

I built a celebrity blog which I sold after a month because I couldn’t care less about how Paris Hilton spends her time. I ran a DJ blog which I later let die due to other interests and I even ran ViperChill for a year (a long time ago) without getting one single comment or feed subscriber. I’ve made most of the blogging mistakes you can think of.

Thankfully, I’ve managed to learn from them. I grew PluginID to a readership of over 4,000 subscribers in a year then sold it when it had around 6,500 and of course I’m now having a lot of success with ViperChill and really establishing myself in this industry.

If I could go back in time and give advice to my younger self so that I would have success with blogging at a much younger age, these are the types of things I would want to share.

There’s a Huge Hurdle to Overcome, and Then it Gets Easier

For most people, when they first start out with blogging, it’s hard to gain a decent sized audience. There is the odd exception of a blogger who springs onto the scene from nowhere and gains a large following, but for most people, that simply doesn’t happen.

When I was launching PluginID, I was very confident that I could make the blog a quick success because of my background in the SEO and Social Media space. Without trying to sound arrogant, I really expected to have thousands of subscribers within a few months.

Then reality hit.

I had been blogging for 7 months on that site and gained no more than 500 subscribers. 7 months of producing the best content I could, utilising Twitter, commenting on other blogs and everything else you can think of hadn’t produced results. If I didn’t love my topic, I would have probably given up by this point.

Because it was far more about helping people than how many people I helped, I just continued to do what I was doing. Surprisingly to me at the time, I found that the next few months involved some rapid and easy growth. In fact, within 2 months I had reached the 1,000 subscribers mark. That’s growing 500 subscribers three times quicker than I had previously.

3 months after that, when the blog hit its one year anniversary, I had 4,000 subscribers.

There was not some secret tactic I used to accelerate this growth. It simply becomes easier to grow a blog when there are more people reading your articles because there are more people to help you promote them. As you increase the size of your audience you increase the number of people who are going to be talking about you.

If you can just keep going until you get over the “blogging hump” then you’ll very likely see a similar snowball effect in play.

Your Blogs Success is Totally Your Responsibility

When I re-launched ViperChill, my aim was to write the best content I could and then hopefully get noticed by a huge blog that would send a lot of traffic my way. They would hopefully see how much work I was putting into this site and how I really wanted to help people, and the blog would grow thanks to their referral.

After a few months of blogging here that didn’t happen (and still hasn’t) but that’s totally fine. When reading Seth Godin’s Linchpin he states, “If your business strategy relies on one big company to notice you then you’re going to fail” and while that didn’t directly relate to me, it helped me see that I was looking outside of myself for my blog to succeed.

Everything you need to know about making your blog a success is out there for free. There are guides which help to put everything in one place for you, but they aren’t totally necessary. You may have a harder time at succeeding than other people (Leo Babauta was on the Digg homepage over 40 times which helped quickly propel him to 100k+ subscribers) but if you stick at it then you have no excuse for building a failed blog. Ironically, most people quit at the point where they’re about to experience their biggest growth.

I wrote over 40 guest posts in 2009 because I knew how powerful they were. Most of them were in excess of one thousand words and each took a long time to produce. You could do exactly the same this year, or you could just sit and look at your analytics stats all day and feel like other people have all of the luck.

If you aren’t going to get some random growth spurt from a big blogger or an article hitting the Digg homepage, carve out the results for yourself. I did.

Standing Out is Not a Bad Thing

In the workplace and especially back in school, many of us believe that standing out is a bad thing. If everyone is wearing a certain type of trainer or styling their hair in a certain way, you probably didn’t want to be the person who didn’t go with those trends. It sounds silly to us as adults, but I’m sure you can relate to this from when you were in school.

When it comes to the blogging world, though, standing out is one of the best things you can do. As long as it’s for the right reasons. I want to stand out because I put hours into each article and truly want to help people with my advice. Not because I try and cause controversy and take down big bloggers (there’s a few blogs out there that do this, but they don’t deserve a link).

You can stand out with:

• The length of your posts
• The style of your writing
• The focus of your site
• Your design
• Your posting frequency
• The value you provide to your audience
• Your levels of transparency

And many other things I could talk about here but the list would go on forever. Remember: if you’re blogging for everybody, you’re blogging for nobody.

People Don’t Care About You

Or me. At least not at first. I’m not naive enough to think that you would stick around here if I provided absolutely no marketing value, simply because of who I am or the brand that I’ve built. It makes total sense that people visit your site first and foremost for the content you provide. Isn’t that why you blog in the first place?

If I recall correctly, there was an incident that Problogger – who writes daily – had when he missed posting for one day. He received around 20 emails asking if he was OK and whether a post would be going live. These people obviously cared about Darren, but his content is the reason they keep going back to the site.

The reason I think this is a good lesson to remember is because you can get so caught up in talking about yourself that you actually forget why people come to your site in the first place: To get value in some form. This realisation will also keep you levelheaded once you do start to attain a level of blogging success as well.

I firmly believe that there were a number of people reading PluginID, and now reading ViperChill, that don’t care much for what I produce. They simply read it because they like seeing a big blog case study unfold before them. Similarly, there are a few people who wouldn’t respond to my emails or give me the time of day when my sites only had a few subscribers, but once they reached a few thousand then these people started trying to get on my radar and grab my attention.

Because of that I always try to connect with people who may not have the biggest audience but I believe in what they’re doing so for that alone I’m happy to promote them. You never know when someone who is growing his or her blog now is going to be an A-lister, so I suggest you take the same approach.

Transparency Is So Rare, It’s Remarkable

This certainly doesn’t apply to all types of blogs, but if you’re the main writer of yours and you have personal aspects to the content you produce then this can be huge. In the early days of my personal development blog, I was writing a lot of ‘how to’ type posts and while they gained a lot of traction, I didn’t really feel like I was connecting with my audience.

When I started sharing personal stories of both success and failure, I noticed that those posts would receive a lot more comments and I would get far more email feedback than usual. Who would have thought that being real was actually more interesting to people than writing as if you’re some perfect being or expert on your topic? (Yes, I’m being sarcastic).

You can inject transparency into your blog in a number of ways. As I write about marketing, for example, I wanted to share the stats of this website on a monthly basis because I know that people building websites will be looking at their own. I can’t name any blogs that give away so much information. Even though revealing this much information increases the competition for me, it also helps people see that I’m the real deal.

What if a personal finance blogger started showing their exact income and outgoings each month?

What if a health blogger posted his exact eating habits and weight fluctuations on a bi-weekly basis.

What if a make money online blogger wasn’t trying to be an expert, but just showed their progress on the journey and didn’t try to sell any products to their readers?

What if you did X, that revealed even just a little more than anyone else in your industry?

Social Proof is Crucial

As mentioned earlier, a lot of people would subscribe to my blog simply because of how many other people were subscribing to it. It makes sense that with so many blogs out there, people only want to read the ones that look like they’re actually going to be worth reading.

If I stumble across a blog on marketing with the same theme I’ve seen in 100 other places, it’s not going to get my attention. Yet, if I notice a “11,652 subscribers” feedburner chicklet before clicking the close tab, it’s far more likely to make me stick around.

I made the mistake when starting out by showing that I literally had 7 subscribers to my blog. If you notice that, why would you want to join them? I also clearly displayed comment counts even though they were on 0. Work at increasing those numbers through promotion before showing them off.

Luckily, even if you’re a very new blogger who doesn’t have many subscribers, it’s easy to show massive amounts of social proof. Naomi Dunford at Ittybiz doesn’t show her feed count (though it’s high) but instead shows the number of monthly visitors she gets in a nice graphic.

If you have a few blog posts with a lot of comments, you could install a plugin which enables you to show the number of comments your site has and show first time visitors that a lot of discussion takes place on your blog.

Alternatively, if you’ve built up a popular Facebook page or following on Twitter then you could show off those numbers to gain some trust. You won’t get many opportunities to convert the same person into a subscriber so using things like social proof is a great way to give yourself the best chance.

Just make sure you have the content to back it up when they do stick around.

For those of you who have grown successful blogs, what would you tell your younger blogging self? I’ll see you in the comments…

I’m going to focus on the fundamental of networking and reveal a tactic so underused that it may as well be a secret. I’ve seen so few examples of this that I wonder actually how many people know about it. Today I want to blow the doors open and share something that all of you can use to grow your blog and become a niche leader with much more ease.

I’ll be open and say that this isn’t something I use with ViperChill because it’s not something I’ve felt I needed to do and it doesn’t fit with my current strategy. You’ll see why that is later. However, there really is something you can all be doing to make growing your blog twice as easy and it will enable you to do it in half the time.

It’s also an incredibly simple concept to grasp: You need to form a blogging duo.

To break it down to its most basic form, you need to find one person in your industry who you can work with to help each of you take your own blogs to the next level.

To really cement this idea in your head, allow me share an example from the personal development niche.

Blogging Duo Example in the Personal Finance Niche

Two of the biggest blogs in the world can be found in the personal finance space. Get Rich Slowly and The Simple Dollar both have in excess of 70,000 subscribers at the time of writing this. What you may not know is that the blogs have also been growing at around the same rate for a very long time.

First, if you look at their traffic stats with Compete you can see that they have traffic spikes and dips at around the same time:

Then, looking at feed subscribers, despite the large difference at the start of the graph, their growth rate is on a very similar consistent rise.

This isn’t just some coincidence. These bloggers have helped each other out a lot. As I’m a stats kind of guy, let’s look into some here shall we?

• Get Rich Slowly has mentioned The Simple Dollar on their site 537 times
• The Simple Dollar has mentioned Get Rich Slowly on their site over 2,000 times
• Each of them has written a guest post for the other
• The both started their blogs in 2006

It’s very possible that JD (Get Rich Slowly) and Trent (The Simple Dollar) did not set out to consciously forge this alliance. They may simply like each other’s work and reference it a lot. However, you cannot deny the obvious help this partnership has had on each of their growth.

How would being referenced on a blog with tens of thousands of subscribers, hundreds of times, help the growth of your own site? I’m sure you don’t need me to answer that one for you.

Though their own “partnership” may have been an unconscious one, there are actions you can take to create a conscious one. If you want to make growing your blog a lot easier and possibly a lot more fun, I recommend you follow them.

Finding the Second Half of Your Duo

Though I’ve never purposefully gone out to find a blogging partner, I definitely believe I could. There are a lot of people I’ve created what I like to think of as strong connections with online such as Pat, Tamar and one of my best friends, Diggy. They write in similar industries and I happily link to their posts because I know they provide a lot of value.

Before you go on the hunt for your blogging partner, I will say that to make this alliance work effectively, you will have to link to them. Certainly not on every post; but on a fairly frequent basis. If you don’t like the content that your potential partner is producing then that defies the point of this tactic completely. Make sure you like what they have to say.

Similar to how I believe the connection between JD and Trent formed, I actually had no conscious aim to form connections with Tamar or Pat. I simply really like what they have to say, they’re both very open and friendly, and they’re both contacts of mine on Skype who I chat with now and then.

Sadly, there’s no action list involved in creating an unconscious connection. To forge a conscious one, here’s where I would look:

• Look at the blogs you subscribe to or follow and see if any would be a good match
• Join webmaster or blogging forums to see if you can find people in your niche who are also starting out (if you are) that you can bounce ideas off and work with to grow your sites
• Search for “top [niche] blogs” or “best [niche] blog” in Google to find a list of relevant bloggers you can contact

While there aren’t really any rules to this, you’re more likely to form a partnership with someone who is on a similar experience and blog size level as you. If I wanted to grow ViperChill, for example, it wouldn’t make much sense working with a completely new blogger and then linking to them frequently. They might grow, but I wouldn’t get much out of the partnership.

The only time an example like this would work is if I can see the blogger is growing in an industry and I really like what they have to say. Henri and Everett would be good examples of this for me and I would be happy to “team up” with them if that’s what I was looking for, even though their blogs are a little smaller than this one.

Just because you’ll probably have more luck partnering with someone who is on a similar level (they’re a new blogger and you are too) it doesn’t mean that they can’t help you make this whole blogging process easier. JD and Trent launched their blogs within 6 months of each other and look where they are now.

In terms of pitching the idea of a partnership to a blogger you like the look of, I would say that they really just want to know what they would have to do and what they get out of the deal.

In the next section of this post I’m going to look at ways you can use your blog alliance to help you grow, so to answer the question of what they have to do, simply suggest the ones you like the sound of the most. As far as what they get out of the deal goes, you may want to send them a link to this post so they can see how JD and Trent benefited from such a relationship.

Otherwise, simply talk about how working with you will help them. I also recommend this post from Problogger which I noticed while editing this post that gives some more examples. Rejection is only rejection if you let it stop you.

Utilising Your Blogging Duo

Now that you’ve seen the benefits that a blogging duo can offer you I’m going to look at how you can actually use it to your advantage. Many of these suggestions are going to be about sending traffic to the other blog. You may not like the sound of that, but it’s the exact reason that a duo can be so effective.

If you’re worried about sending traffic to other blogs then you miss the point of blogging entirely.

Everything your partner does to grow their traffic outside of your duo is going to benefit you when they mention your blog again the next time. Anything you do to build your audience outside of the partnership is going to help them grow their site.

Not only can you help grow each of your audiences, but you can create the appearance of authority by having strong connections in the same niche.

Guest Post for Each Other

One of the most effective ways to build a blog is to use guest posting. I’ve written an extensive guide to guest blogging that covers pretty much everything you need to know about the topic.

The first way it can help your duo is by using this method to build your own audience which you can then help drive to each other. To really utilise your duo, you can write for each other’s blogs on a fairly frequent basis.

This will be far more effective if both of you very rarely (or not at all) accept posts from other authors. With PluginID and now at ViperChill I never accepted one single guest post on my sites. That’s not because I don’t value them; they make a lot of sense and the ideas of other people are often worth sharing.

It’s simply that I wanted to really establish myself in my niche and have my own voice and brand stand out, rather than being another typical blog which accepts posts from just about anybody. I also write a very specific type of post here at ViperChill (in-depth, and from personal experience) which I don’t think many guest posters could really replicate.

If you only allow your blogging partner to write on your blog and they do the same for you, that’s going to benefit your audience and drive traffic to each other’s site in the most obvious and effective way.

Link to Your Favourite Posts

If you’ve read this post word for word then you’ll now realise why I suggested only choosing a blogger who’s content you like. Trent and JD wrote very few blog posts for each other. In fact, my search only turned up one guest post each. However, they linked to each other’s posts on a very regular basis and this is the main reason I think they’ve grown at a similar pace.

Authors in the blogosphere have gradually started to link out to each other less and less due to services like Twitter and Facebook being used for sharing content, but I still personally like to link out as much as possible. Because linking out is becoming more rare, it’s even more remarkable, and helps online relationships flourish.

For a while I would link to my favourite posts at the bottom of monthly reports but now I just link to people whenever their content or their blog is relevant to what I’m saying. Linking to each other is another great way to provide value to your readers (if you’re only sharing great content) and to help each other grow.

Partner on Social Media Platforms

As bloggers, we tend to try to promote our sites on as many places as possible. Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon are just a few services that come to mind. Instead of just using your new blog partnership as a way to promote each other on your individual blogs, you could use it to help each other on social platforms as well.

For example, you could:

• Recommend their Twitter account as one to follow
• Promote their Facebook Fan page on yours
• Vote for stories of theirs that you like on Digg
• Retweet their blog posts
• Give their content a thumbs up on StumbleUpon

These are just a few examples, but I’m sure you get the idea. Look at all the ways you promote yourself on these platforms and see if there’s any way you can both help make your efforts more effective.

Comment on Each Others Blogs

Aimed at blogs that are mostly starting out, leaving comments can help you out in two ways. First of all, you’ll each be gaining a small amount of traffic from the link that is attached to your blog comment name. Everytime I write a post here on ViperChill, I notice that the first few commenters get 20-30 clicks on their links which is huge compared to my experience on other sites.

The main reason to reciprocate with blog comments though is simply to help with social proof. Two things that help me get more subscribers here on ViperChill actually have nothing to do with the content I produce. It’s simply that the number of subscribers here and how many comments I get on each posts show people that I must be worth following.

If you’re starting out, try to leave comments on each other’s sites to help start off discussions and make your blogs look more active.

Launch a Product or Service Together

Something I’ve been in talks about with a few bloggers is the possibility of launching a product or service together.

Although I offer the service of coaching which is just working with me, I could potentially bring in someone else for coaching calls so clients get twice the value. Similarly, if I offered site reviews (I have no plans to do this, it’s just an example) I could have someone else give their feedback to customers as well which would benefit them greatly.

Review Each Other’s Products

Not only could you work with your partner on a product, you could help to promote each other’s products as well. Some ways to do this can include:

• Writing an in-depth product review on your blog
• Interviewing one another about the launch
• Sharing the product on your social media platforms
• Promoting it to your newsletter subscribers (where applicable)

You could even give your blogging partner a higher percentage for affiliate comissions. This cross promotion can help both of you to make more money.

Enjoy the Connection

I hope that I’ve helped you to see how effective a blogging duo can be and how you can use your platforms to create an effective relationship. One last point I want to make is that this connection shouldn’t be something robotic; it should be something you enjoy.

When I talk to the likes of Pat, Tamar, Oscar or anyone else, it’s not because I’m hoping to get something out of their blogging audience. I just really love the subject of internet marketing so it’s great to connect with people who feel the same on some level.

Diggy comes to my house a few times per week and besides almost killing ourselves with bacon or using Skittles to help make the weekend a blur (I’m 20, don’t judge ), we spend a lot of time talking about blogging, affiliate marketing and ways to make more money online.

If you view your blogging duo as just a way to grow your blog more easily then you won’t get the most out of it. See it was a way to connect with someone like-minded and you may just see this tactic become the most useful blogging advice you’ve come across.

In a sea of over 100 million blogs, these guys are the exception. It’s certainly not easy or quick to build a blog to reach these income levels. If it were, they wouldn’t be called the exceptions. Many bloggers will tell you that there’s no “one size fits all” strategy when it comes to building a huge blog. Well, I’m going to leave the personal sites alone, and possibly prove those people wrong by examining the Technorati Top 10.

I will first state that these are not the 10 biggest blogs in the world. You might never have heard of any of them and even if you have, you may never pay them a visit. They are simply the top 10 blogs in the world…according to the Technorati engine criteria. That criteria, based on “Authority”, is determined as follows:

Authority is calculated based on a site’s linking behaviour, categorization and other associated data over a short, finite period of time. A site’s authority may rapidly rise and fall depending on what the blogosphere is discussing at the moment, and how often a site produces content being referenced by other sites.

In basic terms, the rankings are based on how many links a site has from other blogs and how many of their posts are receiving links.

I took the top 10 websites right now and decided to analyse them to see if there was anything they each had in common which helped to make them successful. Here are the 10 sites (in order): Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Mashable, Gizmodo, Engadget, Gawker, Boing Boing, The Corner, Hot Air, TMZ.

Analysis

In order to learn how to build a Superblog, we must first look at factors that have helped the success of other top blogs out there. In this section we’re going to analyse:

• The age of the blogs
• How many posts they make per day
• How long their posts are
• The traffic of each site compared to their ranking

Site Age

I used the Wayback Machine to establish when each of these sites started actually looking like a blog. TMZ, for example, was a robot hobby site up until December 2005 when it started to cover celebrity gossip as it still does to this day.

• Oldest Site: BoingBoing – 123 months (10 years and 3 months)
• Youngest Site: Hot Air – 49 months (4 years and 1 month)
• Average Age: 71.4 months (5 years and 11 months)

As expected, the age of a site doesn’t have a direct correlation to where it ranks in the top 10, but it’s clear that all sites have produced content for years to establish themselves as leaders in a niche.

Posts Per Day

I chose one day of the week to monitor each site in order to determine how many posts they were making on a daily basis. I made sure to choose a weekday as the post output of many of these sites decreased substantially on weekends.

• Most Daily Posts: Huffington Post – 193
• Least Daily Posts: Mashable – 21
• Average Daily Posts: 55.2

With almost 200 posts per day, it’s hard to still think of the Huffington Post as a blog rather than an online newspaper or magazine. Yet, they’re still thought of one by Technorati so that’s why I’m including them here. I was surprised to see that so many of these sites are publishing more than 50 posts every single day.

Average Post Length

After establishing how many posts each blog tends to make on a daily basis, I then thought it would be interesting to see how long each of their posts are. I’ve already performed a similar analysis across different industries, but never one for the biggest blogs in the world.

• Highest Word Count: Huffington Post – 1,235
• Lowest Word Count: Gawker – 77
• Average Word Count: 362

It’s interesting that the biggest blog not only writes the most content but also produces the longest articles. For sites that had a very small average word count, the focus of the article tended to be around a picture or a video.

Rankings Based on Traffic

As the final part of my analysis, I wanted to see if there was a correlation between how many unique visitors a site was getting and their rankings in Technorati. I used data from Compete.com which isn’t totally accurate but should give a decent estimation as to how much traffic these sites are receiving.

• Most Monthly Uniques: Huffington Post – 8.4m
• Least Monthly Uniques: Hot Air: 660k
• Average Monthly Uniques: 2.7m

I don’t have a pro Compete.com account so can’t see the traffic stats for The Corner subdomain. Even though TMZ is getting far more traffic than the other 8 sites, it’s back in 10th place. To me this suggests that Technorati have a flawed algorithm or that celebrity sites simply get linked to far less than others. The audience of politics and web news blogs are far more likely to link to content they enjoy, rather than the readers of gossip blogs.

Building a Superblog

I already had quite a few ideas in mind about what it takes to build a Superblog which the research above has confirmed for me. If you are looking to build your own Superblog, here are the exact steps you need to do it…

Pick a Large Niche

The strategy for each of these top blogs is to simply produce a ton of content each day. If you write on a very focused or niche topic, you’re simply not going to be able to do that. The common categories for sites in the Techrorati Top 100 focus on things like general news, politics, gadgets, celebrity gossip, and web news.

These are all industries where there is something new to write about every single day. Not only can you write about what is being said by politicians and their parties, you can also give thoughts as to where the economy is going. You don’t just have to write about what each celebrity is doing, you can cover the wealthiest or who has sold the most records.

Each of these sites can produce so much content because they’re each in industries where there is a lot to say. There are tons of other angles you can take such as movie news, sports updates or even a blog about online games.

The point is simply that you should pick a niche where you’re never going to run out of things to blog about.

Decide on a Brandable Name

Because these blogs write so much, they don’t have as many people coming to their blog via feed readers as you would expect. Can you really take in 50-60 posts every day from your favourite blog in your inbox or in Google Reader? Unless you or other readers have nothing else to do each day, then probably not.

Instead, people come to these sites manually to see if they have new updates. Picking a brandable name means that people can easily come back to your site time and time again via the address bar in their browser or a search engine like Google.

Ideally, pick something that is easy to remember and relevant to your niche. Engadget and TechCrunch, for example, don’t leave much to the imagination about what their site covers.

Produce Masses of Content

This factor of building a Superblog is without a doubt the most important. While your content must be readable, relevant and of interest to your niche, it’s important that you can produce lots of it on a daily basis. The smallest site at 21 posts per day still produces 600 articles in a month. That’s a lot of work.

Because this is a true guide on how to build a Superblog, let me now say that you don’t need to produce all of this content on your own. Nor do you need a large amount of money to fund other people to get involved with you.

There are three options you can take to produce the content for your Superblog:

• Write it Yourself – TechCrunch started out as a one-man operation with Michael Arrington, as did Mashable with Pete Cashmore. They produced all of their content themselves in the early days. Just remember it’s going to take up a lot of your time. Perhaps more than you have available.
• Form an Alliance – If you have any sort of knowledge about what it takes to build a successful blog and know how valuable a huge website can be, you may be willing to recruit others who will trust in you that you can make this a success. Either have them work for free until you all make a profit and split it, or allow them to put ads on only the blog posts they write (there are plugins for this).
• Hire a Team – AOL are employing this strategy right now with their powerhouse of content writers online (they own Engadget, Autoblog.com and others). They have put most of their efforts into pumping large amounts of content out onto the web on a daily basis in order to get tons of search traffic and to make money via advertising

If you can take things a step further then ideally you will have an Editor in place who watches over all of the content that is being produced. Search Engine Land, for example, has someone in place to make sure that a broad variety of content is being posted each day so that at least something appeals to their wider audience.

Some posts on Mashable are large in-depth guides to social media platforms while others are just posts with embedded Youtube videos. BoingBoing sometimes writes long articles but mostly has posts that are image based, video based, or just a few sentences.

Variety is key if you’re going to be producing so much content on a daily basis.

Stay Consistent

As I expected, none of the blogs in the Technorati Top 10 are even close to being new. Even though Hot Air was started four years ago, there was content on the domain in a similar tone for years before that. Anyone who thinks you can build a blog that has an audience of this size overnight is simply delusional.

Many people tell me that the growth of ViperChill is amazing and I should be really proud of what I’ve accomplished here. I really am, and I know the growth is quicker than most blogs ever achieve, but it has still taken over 7 months to get the point I’m at now. I own an absolutely tiny blog in comparison to these heavyweights.

Of course, I limit myself by choosing such a narrow niche and I’m not actually trying to build a Superblog, but I’m sure you get the point. If there’s anything besides not producing enough content that’s going to hold you back from growing a Superblog, it’s going to be giving up before you even really get going.

Tweak Your Approach Based on Engagement

The final step in building a Superblog is to refine what you’re doing based on how your audience responds to your content. Last year TechCrunch were a much bigger blog than Mashable. If you go by RSS feed subscribers and Technorati rank, you might think they still are. Yet, Compete isn’t the only tool showing them to be receiving a lot more traffic than TechCrunch these days.

75% more if their numbers are anything to go by. How did they do it? They refined their approach based on what readers wanted. I personally don’t care for their constant posts about Twitter, but the Twitter community does. Their account has 700,000 more followers than that of Techcrunch and they are on twice as many lists.

Mashable did what offline newspapers should have done a long time ago: They adapted to a changing landscape.

If you’re producing so much content on a daily basis, you’ll quickly learn the types of posts that are a) getting you the most search traffic b) getting you the most social media traffic and c) being engaged with the most by your audience.

Once you know this kind of thing, you can produce more of what works for you and your community.

P.S. We’ve recently been getting a lot of comments asking me to post more frequently. Don’t forget that you can subscribe via a feed reader or your email inbox (it’s free) and get updates every time they’re posted so you won’t have to keep checking back for new posts.

You can find blogs that will give you a few link building tips each week and then I go ahead and write 15 in one post. You will find blogs with tips here and there on Wordpress SEO, and I go and write what I think is the only guide you’ll ever need. Thanks to a very productive hour I spent last week, I’m now no longer worried in the slightest.

Though my biggest feature (in-depth articles) is my biggest flaw (not needing to cover a topic again) I was able to come up with dozens of post ideas after one quick brainstorming session. Don’t think these are just generic articles that you’ll find on other blogs either; I actually can’t wait to share some of them with you all.

As more and more people realise you can make a living via the internet, each niche online is becoming substantially more crowded. On any given day you can literally find the same type of blog posts on dozens of different websites. I went from having over 150 blogs in my feed reader in the last few years to just 12, purely because I was seeing the same content over, and over (and over) again.

Not only will the following tips help you generate tons of post / article ideas for now, but you can also come back to them in a few months and they’ll almost certainly give you a new jolt of inspiration.

StumbleUpon Buzz

A little known feature of StumbleUpon is their popular (buzz) pages for different subjects. These pages show the most viewed articles that the StumbleUpon audience voted for and enjoyed. I’ve said a few times that StumbleUpon isn’t the best traffic source in the world, but there’s something to be said for writing articles that capture their attention.

If you can occupy the attention of someone who is randomly clicking through websites via a browser toolbar, you can occupy the attention of anybody.

Not only will you see the pages that are the most popular, you’ll also see exactly how many visits StumbleUpon sent to them which is perfect if you have lots of ideas from this source but just want to focus on a few. I obviously don’t recommend that you copy titles or ideas directly, but instead think you should use this as inspiration for titles that work well, angles that people in your niche are taking, and the type of subjects that people want to read about.

You can find ideas in literally any niche, with some examples being their marketing, finance, gadget and humour sections. Simply change the tag in the URL to whatever you write about and you’ll find popular content around that topic.

Use Postrank to Find Engaging Posts

When I wrote a post about the 28 items in my internet marketing toolbox, I covered a nifty little service called Postrank Analytics which lets you see your most shared blog posts on sites like Digg, Delicious and Twitter. While the service was a little too basic to pay for, I do still enjoy the company’s Postrank tool.

Head on over to their homepage and enter the niche that you’re writing in or even the RSS feed of one of your favourite blogs and you’ll instantly see their blog posts which went viral. Though some blogs do show off their most popular posts for you (mentioned below), it’s very useful to see what other bloggers are writing about that is grabbing their readers attention.

As an example, you can see the most posts you all enjoyed the most at ViperChill by going here. This tool alone can be very powerful in terms of getting your creative juices going.

Delcious Popular Page

Similar to StumbleUpon, Delicious has it’s own popular page which you can sort by tags which are related to your industry. While StumbleUpon shows the pages with the most thumbs up, Delicious shows posts with the most saves (bookmarks).

I’ve had a lot of success with Delicious on this blog, regularly being featured on the popular pages for SEO, Bloggingand Social Media. Depending on what you write about, there’s a great chance you’ll find inspiration by searching for relevant phrases to your niche and finding the most resourceful content.

Personal Experience

What I noticed when I looked through the Google Analytics account of PluginID last year was that most of my popular posts were ones where I was not only sharing actionable content, but also talking about my personal experiences.

One of the most viewed posts was on the topic of public speaking; something many people are afraid of and want to get better at. I was too, and I totally fine with sharing this on the blog. I also shared the story of how I signed myself up to a speaking club and gave a speech once every fortnight which helped me to overcome this fear.

Not only does honesty and personal experience help readers connect to your work and encourage them to engage via the comments, it’s also a great way to generate new ideas for your blog.

What is something you’ve struggled with in your industry that you’ve managed to overcome?

How did you succeed with managing finances, overcoming anxiety, making money online, becoming minimalist or whatever else is relevant to your niche?

I took some time out to write down the whole process of me going from someone who knew nothing about domains, hosting or SEO at 15 and managed to build a very successful internet empire now at 20. Each step on the way has given me a post idea I can write about.

Popular Posts on Other Blogs

When I removed the categories from my sidebar and instead replaced them with the most popular ViperChill posts, the amount of pages each visitor viewed and the time they spent on the site here greatly increased. Many bloggers are finding similar results, so they proudly display their most popular posts in their footer or blog sidebar.

For example, in the internet marketing niche you can head on over to sites like Copyblogger (sidebar), Problogger (homepage, center box) or Quicksprout (sidebar) to see the posts that their audience engaged with and shared the most.

While it’s more common to see this on marketing blogs, there are probably tons of blogs in your niche too that make it clear which content resonated with their readers. If you can write more posts that people are going to love and be the signal through the noise, you can be sure that you’re on your way to building a very popular blog.

As with StumbleUpon Buzz, I’m not suggesting that you steal post headlines or article ideas directly. Simply use them as a way to get your creative juices flowing and as an indicator to what your audience probably wants to read about.

Google Keyword Research Tool

When Google came out with this tool a few years back and internet marketers could stop guessing which phrases were popular online, it changed the game forever. Especially in regards to my own affiliate marketing strategy. But it’s not only search volumes I use this tool for; it’s also great for content ideas.

Let’s say you have a blog about social media and want to know what topics you can write about. Typing social media into the tool will give you, among others, the popular phrase ’social media strategy’. Now you know people are looking for actual tips on a strategy they can implement when using social media — probably to get more brand exposure and increase their site traffic.

If you know what you’re talking about, you can then simply go and write a post about around this term.

Note: I wrote my post on social media strategy involving 9 experts before I found this phrase. It’s a nice coincidence though.

Simply enter the type of niche you’re in or even the phrases from some of your most popular posts and see what else people are looking for. If people are searching for it in mass on Google, it’s probably safe to say that your blog readers would like to know about it too.

Yahoo Answers

If you don’t want to ask your readers directly what they would like to read, you could browse a popular site like Yahoo Answers and see what related questions people are already asking. If you run a health blog then you can easily see the types of questions have regarding losing weight, sticking to a diet and keeping track of progress.

If you write about finance then you can see people asking which tools are the best to track your money, whether investing in homes is a good idea and how they can teach their loved ones to be more responsible with their cash.

If you take some time on this site, you can literally find dozens of post ideas in just a few minutes by writing on topics that would answer these questions.

Be careful though, your readers might just think you’re reading their minds.

Use Google Forms for Reader Feedback

You may have noticed that for two days I had a link in the sidebar here asking people what you would like me to write about. Because I really feel like I’ve come such a long way on my own online adventure I can sometimes forget what people struggle with on their path to internet success.

Google Forms, which is a tool found in Google Docs, allows you to easily capture data that is entered into a form. I simply asked people the question “What would you like to see me write about?”

Because I didn’t require an email address, I received some requests for me to write about chicken and male genitals so be prepared for some irrelevant answers. To prevent this you could require an email address or ask more questions, but note that this will decrease the amount of responses you receive.

I only needed the link there for two days as I received some great suggestions which I’m going to use as inspiration for future posts. You could also ask your blog readers for post ideas directly in a post and see what they suggest in the comments. I like the forms option as it’s discreet and all answers are instantly inserted into a spreadsheet for easy viewing.

Now, who can tell me which one of these 7 suggestions gave me the idea for this post? (Hint: read the intro)

I did slack on the amount of posts written in April due to my hectic workload and a lot of things happening in my life that I couldn’t control, but that didn’t seem to slow down growth at all. Now let’s look at those traffic sources so you can all steal them (legally) from me, shall we?

Overall Traffic

• Visits: 32,196
• Pageviews: 60,924
• Avg time on Site: 2 mins 59 seconds

Due to a lack of posting the traffic has dipped slightly from last month. I also haven’t had any guest posts go live but the subscriber base is growing strong so that says something about the quality of traffic landing here. The articles written in April, were:

• Reputation Management for Wordpress (Free Plugin)
• 6 Vital Lessons from a $200/Day Adsense Account
• Six Figure Writing: My Journey from English Failure to Blogging Success
• $0-$5,000 Per Month: How to Make Money With Blogs
• Social Media Supremacy: 10 Experts Reveal Their Strategies

Here at ViperChill there are a lot less articles published than most sites, but typically these articles are 2,000-3,000 words and cover topics in massive detail. You could say that we prefer signal over noise.

Top Referring Websites

Here are the top referring traffic sources for the month of April:

1. Direct: 10,943
2. StumbleUpon: 3,677
3. Google (organic): 3,474
4. Twitter.com: 2,017
5. Google.com: 1,633
6. SEOmoz.org: 670
7. Sphinn.com: 638
8. Farbeyondthestars.com: 586
9. 1stwebdesigner.com: 546
10. Smartpassiveincome.com: 350

Top Referring Keywords

There were a total of 3,583 visits via 1,084 keywords this month. The top 10, were:

1. ViperChill: 1,009
2. viper chill: 244
3. guest blogging: 150
4. viral marketing: 129
5. wordpress seo: 68
6. glen allsopp: 56
7. cloud living: 48
8. viper chill squidoo: 48
9. viperchill.com: 38
10. glen allsopp blog: 33

While search engine traffic is still a tiny portion of the traffic that arrives at ViperChill, it is growing steadily month on month with the number of referring keywords increasing by 25%.

Subscriber Stats

Monitoring your subscriber stats is probably the best way to track how well your audience is growing. Although I don’t have any goals for the size of the community here, I still think it is an interesting metric to monitor.

• April 1st: 5,325
• April 30th: 6,239
• Change: +914

In March the audience grew by 988 subscribers and in April by 914 despite the lack of posts here. I think someone out there is conspiring against us growing by 1,000 subscribers in a month. If this rate of growth continues we should reach the 10,000 subscribers mark in around three months which will be a huge achievement for me.

If you’re reading this in a feed reader or inbox, thanks for subscribing!

Personal Update

I recently noticed that ViperChill was regularly being shown on the first page of Google for the phrase ‘viral marketing’. While I haven’t pushed hard to rank for this phrase, I have optimised the site around that term. There are also a lot of people who link to the blog with the anchor text viral marketing which also helps.

The phrase is very competitive and gets around 40,000 exact searches per month in Google so I think this shows that quality content around a topic (which attracts links) is really what Google and other search engines want to provide their audience. I’ve seen the site ranking as high as 4th while most people tell me they see it at 7th or 8th.

Depending on which datacenter you hit and where you are in the world, the position probably fluctuates a lot. Now that I know I am on the right track, I’m going to do some behind the scenes work to get the ranking even higher, and hopefully take that no.1 spot one day.

My 21st birthday is coming up (May 20th) which is a big occassion in the UK and most other countries so I’ll be doing some over-the-top things for that. I took about 8 days off work in April due to some things coming up that I couldn’t control that hit me quite hard. Thankfully that’s over now and I can get back to my typical schedule of providing posts here.

Finally, I’ve just opened up my coaching page and already landed quite a few new clients. I’m really excited to be working with people one-on-one and giving specific advice which I haven’t been able to do for a few years. I’ll explain more about why I’m doing this in a future post but the short version is simply this: I enjoy doing it and it’s one way to monetise ViperChill without using ads or affiliate links (which I hate) and annoying anyone who just wants the content here.

To our success in May!

Or, how when I worked with Bacardi we drove so much traffic to their site that we took down their servers. Twice. I have plans to cover these stories in more detail in the next few months, but to start the coverage of Social Media here at ViperChill I wanted to bring in 9 other experts in the field to share their thoughts on leveraging social media as a whole.

The 9 awesome people that have helped me here are: Tamar Weinberg, Neil Patel, Lee Odden, Neal Rodriguez, Brent Csutoras, Jason Falls, Skellie, Lisa Barone and Michael Martine.

Together, these people have been involved in social media as long as anyone else and discovered tactics to help you get the most out of the services. Not only that, but they’ve helped shape the way that marketers utilise these services and they teach how to do it in an honest, ethical manner.

Facebook

After recently surpassing Google as the most popular site in America and closing in on 500,000,000 monthly unique visitors, Facebook has huge amounts of traffic that you can ethically leverage to grow your business online.

Leverage Facebook advertising to gauge the audience opportunity. Research other fan pages to see what those Facebook users are not getting elsewhere and give it to them. Encourage interaction as you grow
the network and give them a reason to share your updates on and off Facebook.

If you create a fan page, look at how to set-up a ‘welcome’ section like I did for ViperChill. It lets people know what they can expect from following your brand and massively helps to increase signups compared to a normal landing page. The more likes and diverse comments you get on an update, the more homepages it is shown on, so try to ask engaging questions that get people involved.

I would treat Facebook almost as a stand-alone website. Use it to engage your audience (on a Fan Page) with questions, contests, photo and video sharing and sharing relevant content that makes people want to keep coming back to your page. It’s a great place to drive interactions with your company if your corporate website is rather boring and hard to content manage.

Consider creating a Facebook fan page as well as placing a facebook share this button on your website. If you build up your fan page by participating and inviting your friends, you should be able to drive traffic to your website.

Facebook can be a great opportunity for social media marketing, especially if you engage fans on a Fan Page. A recent case study of Dessert Gallery illustrates just how powerful it can be. Offer discounts exclusive to Facebook fans and engage them in discussions and chats. These are indirect ways to make your fans feel that they are appreciated.

Master the news feed algorithm. Just because people Fan (or now, like) your page on Facebook, doesn’t mean they’re seeing everything you do. If you want people to see what you’re posting than you need to get that piece of content touched by as many people as possible. Post content that asks questions, that’s eye-catching and that people will want to pass on. Because Facebook filters what appears in a user’s news feed based on comments, shared friends, recent interactions – the more hands you get on something, the more likely it is users are seeing your brand and content.

Facebook for me is a lot of work, for a small audience of people who are not in the learn, buy or convert mode. So although I have a profile on Facebook, I do not use Facebook for marketing to people. Maybe that is why I still have so many friends.

Twitter

Twitter founders recently revealed that their site has over 110,000,000 accounts and the site is growing by hundreds of thousands of users per day. Twitter is a great way to bring a personality and voice from your company out in the open.

Use Twitter as your company office hours. That means setting aside time to answer community questions, point people to resources, and find ways to be useful to your audience – whether that’s educating or simply entertaining them. Twitter is the one social network where you can really be someone’s “friend”, as cheesy and rainbow-filled as that sounds. You’d be smart to create that relationship by balancing out the informative tweets with the i-love-Glee tweets. The best way to get more out of Twitter is to treat it like your office break room. Same rules typically apply.

The great thing about Twitter is that anyone can sign up and easily find his “community.” It shouldn’t take too long to monitor the streams via a search tool to find the people who talk about things that are interesting to you. Build relationships first, then promote your content.

Somewhere in its evolution Twitter turned into a link-sharing service, with most of the tweets I see now just links to elsewhere. This kind of tweet can work well, but you won’t build a following based on the links you share. You need to balance this with some personality, so you followers can get to know you.

Share good content around your niche or industry and engage in conversations with smart people on the subjects most meaningful to you. Do that and you’ll gain the right followers at the right pace.

For both Twitter and Facebook, do the homework on the end consumers and influentials you’re trying to reach. Create profiles or personas of their characteristics, behaviours and preferences. Then target those personas in your friend and follower tasks to grow a high impact network. Search.twitter.com can be very handy to find who you’re looking for or you could use tools like tweetminer.net. Grow a network, execute on a plan to provide value and opportunities for the network to do what you want them to do whether it’s to upgrade to a more commercial relationship, spread the good word about our brand or recruit others to join the club.

Twitter is one of those sites where having 10 really good followers is better than 10,000 bad followers. In order to retain the audience of meaningful followers, you need to provide value in your updates. Find one thing, preferably not from your own site, that your audience would find helpful and share it each day. Maybe it is a comment about something you learned, a question that engages them in a meaningful way, or a link to a news story they would find interesting, but providing quality updates will keep you on people’s follow list.

Twitter is like a party. It’s all about fun while providing value at the same time. Spread links that help your audience (and that you know they would like to spread on to their own network). Include your own blog post links but make sure it’s mostly other people’s stuff. By promoting others over yourself, you grow your Twitter following with engaged people and drive traffic back to your blog. Use the @ feature to reply to folks when you can. Links should not always have to be about your business topic: have fun and watch massive traffic roll in.

Digg

Though you hear Digg talked about less and less by marketers, it’s still a site which can get you a huge flood of traffic and hundreds of links if you manage to make the homepage of the site. With the recent announcement that all previously banned domains are now unbanned, it’s an open playing field.

More than any other social site on the web, with Digg you have to participate in all aspects of the site. You need to have a good profile, vote, comment, network, follow trends, and submit a wide variety of content. AND you have to do all this with moderation. If you really want to succeed in Digg, then treat it like a real life social community. Pretend you are actually in a room with the people on Digg and you will go very far.

Digg is a great source of traffic to your site but it’s also incredibly difficult to get your story on the front page. The best performing content is content that jives with the Digg audience, so you really need to study out what has performed well on the front page for weeks, if not months. Digg, however, is really hard to “game.” Your best chances come from knowing a power user who can submit on your behalf.

Pay a submission marketer to get your stuff on the front page. Otherwise, let the gamers have it.

To understand what works on Digg and how content goes ‘popular’, you really must be an active user of the service. You’ll learn the formulas that work, the topics that are hot, and you’ll make connections who can help you out with submitting and promoting your articles. If you don’t understand Digg, it’s very tough to have success with it.

To make Digg work for you, you really have to study the top headlines in your category. And if your category isn’t on Digg, don’t bother, or you’ll just be beating your head against a brick wall for nothing. It helps to have an army of friends to vote you up and it can take time to build it. Leverage your friends from other networks on Digg if you can.

StumbleUpon

One of my favourite time wasters and ways to find new websites, StumbleUpon, has over 10 million people who have installed their toolbar and are actively using the service. While it doesn’t send the best traffic in the world to your site, it can send floods of which some will convert.

StumbleUpon can send you huge amounts of traffic. The name of the game is curating. Find the BEST links for the topics your CUSTOMERS are interested in (not just your peers). Use the messaging system in SU to actively promote your links. Never post links to your own blog posts or articles in SU. Have your friends do it for you (and you do it for them, of course).

StumbleUpon is one of the most forgiving social sites. Since it utilizes a tagging system and a toolbar, the majority of people who see your content should have an interest in it. So if you really want to do well on StumbleUpon, try to pick the most popular tags for your content, but make sure they are related. If your content is in the most popular, but wrong category, you will get nothing from it.

When you channel surf, you’re looking for something to immediately grab your attention on the screen. StumbleUpon is a way to channel surf the internet, so the same principle applies – your post needs to hook readers in immediately to be successful on StumbleUpon. For a post to do well on StumbleUpon you’ll need a great title, a very good intro, and ideally an eye-catching visual element (a photo, video or infographic) to draw the eye.

StumbleUpon drives a fair amount of traffic to websites, especially among the more active users of the service. If you genuinely show that you want to participate in the community and give of yourself rather than take, you’ll get traffic. Whether it’s targeted or not is another thing, but you can always look at the types of people who consistently stumble certain websites to find out if they’re the types of people you want to be friends with.

Like any submission website (even Digg.com), you have to spend time on it, commenting, voting, submitting and what-not to get any traction out of it for your own site. But I’ve seen more traffic influx from StumbleUpon when I do submit my own material there than from any other site because I’ve build up some level of trust that I’m sharing good content.

Blogs

Many marketers today forget that social media isn’t just about sites like Twitter and Facebook, it also includes blogs like the one you’re reading right now. Though the social aspect of blogs has veered off onto other communities, you can still get some great results by understanding them properly.

Develop a blog alliance. Problogger had a great post on blog alliances not so long ago. The idea is that bloggers are stronger in numbers and when they can leverage each other’s communities. Create a network where you can share ideas, brainstorm content strategies and develop a comment strategy. Once you have your alliance, find your blog enemies. Your blog is nobody until somebody hates it.

For many, blogs are a home base — it’s where you can establish your identity but also use it as an opportunity to show your readers other sides of you by pointing out other social network outposts and other subjects of interest. Blogs are a way to communicate directly with people who are interested in your offerings. They are a way for you to get to know the people around you as they converse about what you have to say. Of course, blogs also drive traffic to your website, especially when you optimize for the long tail.

It’s no longer enough just to write content on a consistent basis. There are so many content producers in every niche online now that you really have to become the signal that cuts through the noise. To do this you need to write compelling content, be an authentic representation of your niche and interact with your community as much as possible. Make everything you do about the reader, and you can’t go far wrong.

To get the attention of another blogs audience leave comments on them and connect with the authors on other platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Only after you’ve given back to that person’s community should you ask for something in return.

Not only should you be posting comments on blogs that talk about things related to your industry, but you should build relationships with bloggers. This way if you want them to blog about you, you can email them and ask them for a favor.

You can respond to your blog or company’s audience by comment functionality or email. So when members of your audience say they don’t believe that a crack pipe will burn off the hairs on the chicken, you could link them to the viral video of the crack head turning the crack pipe into a blowtorch and burning needles off a porcupine.

You can add a wide variety of media to your blog: video, audio, written word. You can use your blog to respond to topics covered on other websites. The other site may post a link to your site and direct some of its audience to your website. You could increase the chance of acquiring those links by guest posting or notifying the other site’s webmaster or stakeholder of a response to their topic.

Blogging wins when it’s full of passion and helpful information at the same time. Blogging about topics your customers care about and find helpful is key. Making personal stories into lessons wins big. Resources your customers find helpful, like reviews and links all win big. Tutorials are helpful. Although it may feel scary, getting personal while making it into a lesson is potent content.

Figure out which search terms you want to win or rank well for and build content around those. 80 percent of a corporate blog’s visitors are first-time visitors. You aren’t writing for a community of fans.You’re writing to win search results and drive referral links from other sites. Identify keywords and go after them with your content. Just also be sure to give those first-time visitors something to do once they arrive!

Take the time to create a plan for the audience, keywords and business goals you’re trying to reach with a blog. Develop a content marketing strategy that allocates resources for SEO, network development,
content promotion off the blog, commenting on other blogs, quickly responding to comments made on the blog, automatic distribution and syndication, repurposing of content and encouraging social popularity. One
of the most important tips for a new blog is to have patience and to watch web and social media analytics closely for both progress and opportunities.

Be consistent, stick with it for the long-haul, write for a specific audience, always try to improve the quality of your content and have a plan – know what your goals are and constantly evaluate your progress towards them. Do all these things and blogging will be really rewarding for you.

Forums

Message boards are really the first internet form of social media, after IRC. No matter what niche your business is in, there’s a great chance there are a number of active forums on the topic which you can participate in.

An earnest desire to help others and be with like-minded people is the key to driving traffic from forums. A simple signature link is all that’s needed. Don’t be sales-y. Forums are also a great place to lurk and listen to what your customers are saying. This helps you improve your marketing and your offer, which will in turn get you more highly qualified traffic instead of “tire kickers.”

With forums the goal is to not just interact with the community on a regular basis, but you want to add a forum signature so you can get links back to your website. You also want to do this for relevant forums because it will drive more traffic than irrelevant forums.

The greatest thing about forums is that there are SO many of them. We think we’re being overwhelmed by social networking sites. Forums predate social networks and still thrive. If you find the right forums, you can really make a difference. As always, though, build real relationships — don’t just go there to spam or self-promote. Most forums let you add a signature to the bottom of the post where you can identify who you are and why you’re there.

Be part of the community first and foremost to be part of the community. Leveraging forums ethically tends to take a long time although what you get in return often makes the time investment worth it. Try to build up a strong reputation as a helpful user before trying to promote anything for your own benefits.

Be helpful, promote others more than you promote yourself, and behave like a leader. If you’ve got a link to your site in your signature, you’ll naturally get traffic through that link if your forum contributions are really good.

Forums may be used to respond to your target market’s inquiries and comments about your industry. If a former dope head in Siberia needs some bitter as a lemon rind chocolate, which only your company sells, you could instruct him on how to sign over his mortgage for a box of cacao.

You can create responses on your site to direct traffic to it, if the forum allows it. So when forum members ask where can they get the best bungee jumping instruction, you could link them to your video of pygmy tribemen jumping off of 200 ft wooden ladders with vines tied to their ankles.

You could respond to questions to position your brand as an expert resource in the industry the forum covers. You could have your company’s Einstein break down the theory of relativity to 16 yr old 11th graders who want to cheat on their regent state exams.

You could ask questions, the answers to which can be used to compose a blog post, article, or application that have a greater chance of having webmasters point links to your site and the traffic which comes with it. Such a web page can also be used to influence your existing audience to complete an action, which helps your website meet an objective.

Find the ones that offer the most value (read: Other smart people are there) to you, but that you can also contribute to. And carve out 30 minute or so each week to pay attention to them. Remembering to go check in is the hardest thing about forums.

If you liked the insights provided here then I encourage you to go and check out the websites of each expert. I want to thank them all again for taking part and I hope you all learned something from the post.