A few days ago I talked about making money with mini sites. Whilst I am still looking to make money using this method, my priority at the moment is still to monetize and promote Blogging Tips and if I have more time, I want to start getting Electric Bandits off the ground.

One of the most effective ways to promote a blog is through social media. Although I’ve read lots and lots of articles on the subject, I still consider myself a novice in social media promotion as I have found it difficult to become active within these sites. To be perfectly honest, I find it time consuming and I don’t like requesting votes for my articles. Most of the bloggers I know buzz me for diggs and stumbles frequently so clearly this is one important aspect of getting traffic from social sites.

A few months ago I decided to give the social media site Sphinn a try. I checked Sphinn most days as it’s a good place to find news and tried to be active too but after a while I got frustrated with it. I saw some really poor posts getting loads and loads of votes because the site was from someone who is very active in the community and saw some great posts only get a few sphinns (I honestly believe some people spend 5-10 hours a week on the site!). And there were a few blogs where every single post was submitted and it got lots of votes, regardless of the quality.

Perhaps this comes across a little as sour grapes. I did find this frustrating however I understand that this is how 80% of social media promotion works. It’s a ‘Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ environment.

I haven’t given up on social media though. I just don’t think Sphinn was for me plus the traffic which I did get from the site was low. Digg and Stumble on the other hand, bring me a lot of traffic.

A good example of the traffic Digg can bring

I don’t use Digg often but I am becoming more and more aware of the traffic it can bring. I do use StumbleUpon and give the thumbs up to many pages but I’m not actively making friends or voting for their blog posts. Clearly I should be trying to be more active on both sites.

Last month I had a reminder about the traffic Digg can bring. Whereas StumbleUpon traffic seems to be more stable, Digg traffic usually comes in large bursts. This happened last month on BloggingTips on 22nd October.

Here’s a screenprint of the traffic burst from Webzlier and analytics.

Webalizer : I’ve removed most of the months data and just showed the days before and after the digg traffic burst.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics Traffic Sources from October 22nd 2008

The traffic from Digg was from the post It’s a bad time to buy a blog but it’s a great time to sell!. This post was written on September 12, 2008 but more than a month later someone found the post and submitted it to digg and it racked up 360 diggs (which I assume got it on the home page or close to it).

The whole thing has given me a much needed rude awakening. I need to use this promotion medium more and start taking advantage of these social sites. Whilst I am still going to continue writing the same kind of posts for the blog, I am more aware of what posts do well on Digg and StumbleUpon so I will write more ‘digg’ like posts from time to time.

I’ll talk more about my experiences with these sites in the next few weeks and hopefully show you some examples, as I think it’s more helpful to learn from what works and what doesn’t. In the meantime, if you have any practical tips for promoting a site through Digg or StumbleUpon I’d love to hear them

Thanks,
Kevin