AVINASH 2.0

5 Ethical Ways to Get More StumbleUpon Traffic

Steven Aitchison, one of my StumbleUpon friends and the author of Change Your Thoughts has written a good article on attracting more StumbleUpon traffic. Though I’ve never been much interested in the “increase your blog traffic type articles”, I like the honest points that Steven makes in this article.

Steven writes that every StumbleUpon member likes getting reviewed and once you leave a nice review, there are chances that the person you’ve reviewed will review you back. It has happened 4 or 5 times with me that I left a review and earned a nice review in return. The more reviews you get, the better. But, the main question is: Is reviewing others with the sole purpose to promote your self-submitted content an ethical behavior?

Personally, I won’t do that. Neither will I suggest submitting your own blog links unless you feel you’ve written something that others will really, really like and find useful. Even if you have written a quality article, avoid submitting your own pages to StumbleUpon. Self-promotion is liked under a certain limit and it applies everywhere, be it Digg, reddit or StumbleUpon. I used to submit one or two personal links/week back in March when I actively started using StumbleUpon but stopped doing this pretty soon.

If you really want to attract lots of StumbleUpon traffic, here are the 5 points that have been pretty useful for me:

1. Fresh & Quality Content Discovery
2. Fair and detailed reviews
3. Relevancy
4. Trying to understand what your friends/fans like the most
5. Promote your friends, get promoted

1). Fresh & Quality Content Discovery — Quality content. Submitting any content won’t help. You’ll also have to focus on the quality of the article that you’re submitting. The rule is simple. Support the community in discovering quality articles, the community will automatically support you. Have you ever noticed why there are a few people who have submitted just a few thousand links but have over 5 thousand fans? Do you ever try to notice why there are a few stumblers who have liked more than 100,000 pages and still have only 5 or 6 hundred fans?

Quality, my friend. It’s the quality that matters. Nobody cares about the numbers. The best way to attract more fans is by concentrating your mind on discovering good articles.

2). Fair and detailed reviews — Just hitting the “I like it” button isn’t going to help. If you’ve time, try to leave a review for the article that you’ve just discovered. Just writing something like ‘good article. I like it.’ isn’t going to help either. I’ve come across thousands of such stumblers who leave these type of reviews. Some profile pages are full of “great links. good stumbler” type of posts.

If you want to attract others, you’ll have to write a review that is unique and insightful at the same time. You should leave a review like you leave a comment on any blog, i.e., if your main aim is to attract traffic. If you follow point #1 and #2, you’ll end up attracting lots of fan. It’s guaranteed. Just try these points for a week and you’ll see if I’m right or wrong.

3). Relevancy — Relevancy is the key point. Always avoid adding irrelevant people in your “mutual friends” list because they are not gonna help you in this generate-traffic mission. Always remember that you can make only 200 mutual friends.

4). Trying to understand what your friends/fans like the most — When you realize that you’ve started attracting new fans, you should visit their profiles and spend sometime trying to understand their likes/dislikes. If your interests match, send some high-quality links their way. I’m assuming you already know how to send links to your friends.

Here your main goal should be to make the link popular that you’ve just sent to your friend, even if the article is not from your own blog. How does it help? Well, if your friends really like the article, they’ll leave reviews for sure. 4 or 5 reviews and there is 70% chance that you’ll gain a few new fans.

5). Promote your friends, get promoted — If you find something interesting on your friend’s profile, don’t hesitate adding a link to his/her profile in your review. Something like ‘Discovered@ ABC’s profile‘ will do the job.

If your friend maintains a blog, visit his/her blog, read a few articles and if you find something interesting, submit it to StumbleUpon. Try doing this for a few weeks and you’ll realize that your friend has started doing the same thing for you.

Just try these 5 points for a few weeks if you really want to attract tons of traffic.

Lazy Bloggers Cry

Some of you may already be aware that I’m a feed maniac. Very few people read so many blogs as I do and the main reason behind reading thousands of blogs is my goal to know almost every social media business trick before I actually become serious about making money from this blog. Currently, I’ve better things to do in life so just storing information in my brain. Knowledge never hurts, right?

One more major benefit of reading thousands of blogs is the opportunity to see how deep in the water are the other bloggers. I scan their blogs and try to notice both the pros and cons of their blogging style. You can’t become perfect in blogging if you try to catch only the strong points. The weak points are equally important. Take a simple ‘RSS link’ as an example. Many bloggers spend hours writing quality articles to gain more subscribers but can’t add a simple RSS link in their sidebars/navigation bars. And when they see their FeedBurner subscriber count increasing like a turtle, they cry.

If you’re a blogger and feeling too lazy to add a simple RSS link in your sidebar/navigation bar, you better add one today ’cause you’re losing potential subscribers by not displaying a RSS link.

Random Pearls [5] on Online Success, Development, RSS, SEO,etc

• How to Become an Online Celebrity by Emulating Jay Leno — Steve Rubel has written a great article on online success. In this article, he makes 5 strong points that are pretty important for creating a successful brand.
• Don’t Complicate the Solution — Steve Smith, the author of Ordered List, writes: “Make your solutions simple. If looking at your code, your interface, or your users reaction makes your head hurt, your solution is probably way more complicated than it needs to be. And sometimes you can�t simplify the solution by reworking the same problem. Sometimes you need to rethink the whole scenario, including the problem itself.” I recommend reading the article+comments left by other designers/developers.
• How to Take Notes Like an Alpha-Geek is a great article on note taking, written by Tim Ferriss.
• The Cosmo Headline Technique for Blogging Inspiration — Ever come up completely blank for a blog topic? Then read this article written by Brian Clark. I’m a big fan of his writing tips.
• RSS is still in its infancy and now there’s proof — Udi, the Feed Each Other developer, writes on the scope of RSS-focused online businesses.
• The Blogger’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization – by Aaron & Giovanna Wall

Blog Hungry? Check Out The List Of 45,000 Blogs

If a few thousand blogs weren’t enough for you, here is a list of 45,000 blogs. Just remember that this single page may be bigger than 6MB in size.

Some Bloggers Displaying Visitor IP Addresses in Their Sidebars – WTF?

Face the truth: Running a blog, having a few hundred/thousand subscribers and getting a few thousand uniques/day doesn’t give you ANY right to ruin our privacy. Day by day, the “Show Your Visitor IP Addresses” trend seems to be going out of control. Bloggers are adding the “display visitor IP addresses” type plugins without caring about the visitor privacy.

If you use any plugin that reveals visitor IP addresses for the world to see and do any friggin thing with it, I kindly request that you remove such plugins pretty soon. If you ignore my request, I’ll create a list of all the bloggers who are using such plugins and request my readers to stop visiting such sites. I’ve also planned to start a campaign on this topic and I believe that when you start a campaign for a good cause, your friends certainly support you. Visitor Privacy is a serious topic and we bloggers will have to do something to stop ‘em who are ruining our privacy.

Once again, I request that if you care about your blog readers, please stop revealing their IP addresses.

p.s. I’ll highly appreciate it if these wonderful bloggers take some time out of their busy schedule to write on “Visitor Privacy”:

• Chris Garett
• Ben
• Andy Beard
• Yoav
• Ronald Huereca
• Muhammad Saleem
• Mr. Chip
• Meg
• Pearl

I’m sure that I haven’t added many people in the list but if you aren’t in this list, it doesn’t mean you aren’t awesome. (: There are a few hundred people who should be in this list but it’s just a start. I want to know what these bloggers have to say on “Visitor Privacy”. If you think that whatever I’ve written is wrong, feel free to ignore this post.

p.p.s. If you’ve already written any article on this topic, please let me know. (The comment form is open for this post. It’ll be automatically disabled after 30 days.)

IT Exam info for IT students
350-001, certification exam is very significant for the sponsorship of the technical skills of IT professionals. 350-030, Microsoft certification exam is specifically designed for the assessment of technical expertness of IT professionals. 640-802, Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) is very helpful for upholding the occupational capability of system analyst and networking administrators. 640-863, certification exam is very influential to improve the qualities of cisco networking administrator and engineers.

9 Shades of Blog Posts – Essential Read For Every Blogger

Being a blogger myself, I find it hard when sometimes, nothing seems to inspire me and I go out of ideas for my blog posts. That should be a tough situation for most of the bloggers in the blogosphere. If you come in this category of bloggers, what do you do when you realize that you’ve nothing original to post on your blog?

Collis over at NORTH x EAST has written a pretty detailed article on how to recover from such situations. He has explained 9 types of blog posts that will help to fill the gaps while still delivering quality content to their readers. Take a look at these 9 types:

1. The Speedlinker – You see these type of posts on many popular blogs now a days. A type of post that is usually a good collection of external article links.
2. The Quoter – When you find an article pretty interesting and want to discuss about the article on your blog, you put one or two paragraph of the original article in block quotes with your personal opinion attached.
3. The Entertainer – As the name sounds. You can see these type of posts over at TechCrunch. These posts are meant to be entertaining and usually contain an attractive image, cartoon, jokes, video and things like that. These types of posts are important for a change. We humans start to feel bored reading the same thing every time!
   
4. The Questioner – Many times, I read posts on blogs like ProBlogger that contain an interesting question. Questions help in sharing ideas and learning something new from your readers.
5. The Updater – You’ll find these type of posts over at ShoeMoney. He usually shares personal stuffs that he knows his readers are going to like. Take his big AdSense check as an example.
6. The Newsreader – If any news attracts you too much, you want to post it on your blog. Posting news is good as far as it’s relevant to your blog topic. Going off-topic will scare your readers away!
7. The Recycler – If you have been blogging for months, you’ll find that an idea that you discussed about months ago, has become more interesting. In such situations, you should re-post the same idea with some new, *interesting* points.
8. The Guest-Poster – These type of posts have become trendy now a days in the blogosphere. From Blog Herald to ProBlogger, you can find posts that were posted by guest bloggers. These type of posts improve quality of your blog (if the guest blogger is not a newbie).
9. The Announcer – The blogosphere is full of these type of posts. Almost every blogger announces about upcoming features/updates on his/her blog.

Though the points have been taken from the article originally written by Collis @ NxE, the explanations are my personal thoughts. Your thoughts may vary depending on the type of blogger you are. If you have anything to say/suggest about these 9 points, please feel free to leave comments!

I also recommend to visit NxE and read the original article. Read Collis’s thoughts and see the live examples of 9 different types of posts.

If you follow these 9 points, you won’t have to worry about lack of ideas in the future.