As with other social community sites, it’s important to be an active user by making friends and contributing new discoveries. Here are a few other tactics that could increase your stumble popularity.

1) Use relevant tags

It’s important to pick the proper tags as it will increase relevant stumbles found either using the search function on their website or toolbar.

2) Choose the right topic

After choosing a site to submit, you are asked to pick a topic to submit it under. Picking the right topic can make or break your Stumble. If you submit the page under a wrong or unrelated topic then people who stumble may be less likely to give it a thumbs up. Opt for general topics versus specific keywords to broaden the search.

3) Receive Help From Your Friends, Family, Network Buddies

StumbleUpon allows you to send your stumbles directly to a friend, whom would be highly likely to enjoy your site and give you a thumbs up – although don’t abuse it!

4) Use Groups and Forums

There are groups covering just about any topic. You are allowed to join up to 63 groups. Some groups allow you the ability to post relevant links to share within the group, depending on the setting created by the moderator.

5) Highlight your blog in StumbleUpon profile

This is very easy.  Enter your blog URL as your website address and it will be displayed above your image on the main page of your profile.  You can write a short blurb about yourself and include your website with a link.

Taking care of the little details like submitting your pages properly, could give you that extra edge and help you gain more traffic with even more links to your site. But of course, the content itself has to be interesting and useful – and sometimes the more entertaining the better!

Who did well? Here were my top 20 traffic sources during the past 30 days:

1. StumbleUpon
2. Direct Traffic
3. Google – Organic
4. MyBlogLog
5. Smashing Magazine
6. Silent Bits
7. Enkay’s Blog
8. Facebook
9. John Chow
10. Marketing Deviant
11. Blue Jar
12. Cash For Comments
13. Shaun Low
14. Design Walker
15. Blogging The Movie
16. Blogosquare
17. zm0ney
18. Blog Rush
19. MySpace
20. Technorati

I also just checked my MyBlogLog account and I was happy to find that I currently have 297 members – not too shabby for a new blog that started in July. Its number is almost reaching one of my other blogs, Got2BeGreen, which has about 365 members.

How to increase your traffic?

It definitely helps to be involved with other blog sites by commenting and networking with fellow bloggers, especially the ones within the same niche.

As far as MyBlogLog, one great way to gain readers by visiting profiles to leave a sort of ‘cookie crumb’ trail. The author will see you stopped by and will usually return the kind visit, resulting in a prospective new contact or member to your site.

You can take further advantage of this opportunity, by focusing on a specific niche and checking out all the members within that similar community.  :)

But there are also a number of additional directories available to further promote RSS feeds to help you increase visitor numbers. I found a list of RSS Directories supplied on DotSauce through a post on Money Making Scoop. The original list is a few months old and include a few urls that no longer work. So I poked around and pulled 36 of the 55 RSS Directories which are functional and easiest to submit, including an addition of my own: Blog Burst.

These RSS directories receive visitors and submissions fairly frequently. I highly recommend checking out #36, Blog Burst. Feeds are manually approved and any blog accepted should receive quality traffic through this service, as some of their clients include Reuters and USA Today.

1. FeedFury
2. FeedBomb
3. Plazoo
4. RSS Micro
5. 2RSS
6. FeedsFarm
7. RSS Feeds
8. Feeds4all
9. Postami
10. Feedest
11. MySpace RSS
    
12. DaytimeNews
13. RSS Feeds Submission
14. MillionRSS
15. Yahoo RSS
16. More News
17. Find RSS
18. Feed Base
19. RSS Motron
20. Octora
21. Blog Digger
22. Feed 24
23. Findory
24. Feed Boy
25. Chordata
26. Golden Feed
27. Read A Blog
28. Newgie
29. Jordo Media RSS
30. RSS Network
31. Ice Rocket
32. Blog Pulse
33. Feeds2Read
34. Feed Shark
35. Feed Plex
36. Blog Burst

If you’re not familiar with Alexa it tracks the frequency of visits daily to various websites over a period of three months from users who have the Alexa toolbar installed. The traffic is based on “reach” (number of times an Alexa user visits a particular site in 1 day) and page views (number of times a page is viewed by Alexa users).

If you haven’t already, it’s quite easy to download/install the Alexa toolbar which will send data to the central server while you surf the web. Each time you visit a web page utilizing the toolbar, information is sent to the server indicating your IP and the page you are visiting from all users.

Is It Really That Important?

Too many people mistaken concentrating entirely on improving their Alexa ranking.  Getting a low Alexa ranking gives the impression that your site gets a lot of traffic.  Thus, the #1 spot would mean that your website would essentially be receiving the most traffic in the world, which is currently being held by Yahoo.

It seems that if you manage to make it in the top 100,000 it’s a sign your site obtains a reasonable amount of traffic. Currently SusanSuarez.com is currently ranking at 140,260 but I’ve been wondering, is it really worth anything?

Alexa numbers can be wildly misleading and manipulated. How so? Alexa’s free toolbar is used to report back tracking of those utilizing the toolbar. Since not every Internet user has the toolbar installed, Alexa will multiply the number of visitors by a specific margin to estimate the total number of visitors a site may typically get.

For instance: For every Alexa toolbar user that visits a page, Alexa may assume that another nine non-toolbar users visited the same page. For every 100 toolbar visitors, Alexa may estimate 900 non-toolbar users are also visiting the same page within the same 24-hour period.

Can you see where this goes? If you happen to drive a higher percentage of traffic from Alexa toolbar users vs non-toolbar users to your site, you can increase your Alexa rating faster. Alexa doesn’t account for users preferences or habits. Toolbar users tend to visit particular types of sites more frequently…users like webmasters or internet savvy marketers. So if you are an internet entrepreneur and you attract similar people to your website, most likely they will have the toolbar installed which would inflate the Alexa rating.

To sum up, here is a breakdown of pros/cons of using Alexa:

Pros

• It helps advertisers and webmasters determine the real marketing potential of your site. Blogs and ordinary websites get ranked the same way
• Useful tool to compare against a competitor’s site to measure marketing efforts and popularity

Cons

• Fairly small sample size of audience (those that have the Alexa toolbar installed) to measure marketing efforts
• Due to the small sample size, there are millions of websites that may get a lot of traffic but are not ranked by Alexa
• Many people feel that Alexa traffic can be “gamed” to therefore show inaccurate results.

Ways To Improve Ranking

Since there are programs such as TextLinkAds that utilize Alexa ranking, it may be of best interest to amuse yourself with using it. Once installed, here are a few ideas to boost your Alexa ranking:

• Download/Install the Alexa toolbar and surf your own website
• Place the Alexa widget on your website to entice visitors to use it.
• Write on topics that internet-savvy individuals would read and promote it on webmaster forums or social networking sites. Or include your url into your forum signature. There is a higher probability that they have the Alexa toolbar installed
• Write great articles that could gain you a Stumble! or a Digg which could open you up to a network of even more Alexa users
• Get your friends to download the Alexa toolbar
• I haven’t used this before, but I’ve heard you could use an Alexa redirect. Placing http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect? in front of your website’s url will get Alexa to take into consideration clicks on redirected links if the visitor doesn’t have the Alexa toolbar.

Even though the results may be inaccurate due to the requirement of needing the Alexa toolbar installed, a lot of individuals feel that it is valuable for direct advertising and useful for monetizing a site since Alexa focuses on traffic rather than the number of links to it.

There are a few easy options to create a poll, like using BuzzDash.com or a wordpress poll plugin. There is also another highly-customizable service called PollDaddy, which allows you to create free polls to place on your site, blog, Friendster, Myspace and share it in many other places.

PollDaddy stands out from the rest because of its unique options to display a poll using Javascript, a direct link, widget, RSS or Flash. The RSS option is quite unique as it allows you to follow an interesting poll closely by just subscribing to it. BuzzDash has just released a similar option but it only gives you the option to look a random “buzzbites” from iGoogle.

In comparison to other poll services, some of their other features are golden:

• It’s never too late to edit a poll
• Multiple choice answers are available
• The option “Other” allows users to enter their own answer
• Choice to turn or off the poll on PollDaddy’s site

Customizing the look of PollDaddy to match and blend into your site’s design is very nice. If PollDaddy likes the ways your customized poll looks, they may even approve it for public use.They’ve just recently won a top 10 spot in their publishing category with CNET and now serving over 14,000,000 polls per month.

Here’s a short list of some of the top social communities:

1. MySpace – Create a community and share photos and interests. Most importantly connect with their growing network and get involved in ‘groups’.
2. Facebook – Facebook is a very popular social service connecting your to friends, past co-workers or people you attended school with in the past.
3. LinkedIn – LinkedIn is an online network of more than 14 million experienced professionals from around the world.
4. MyBlogLog – Connect with readers and other blog authors.
5. Yahoo Answers – A community to ask and answer questions. In the source section, sometimes conveniently add your url as the ‘source’ (although, don’t overuse to avoid spam issues).
6. Google Groups – Discuss online. It is fairly easy to ‘drop’ references.
7. Twitter – You can add links with your twitter posts, which can result in traffic to the linked site.
8. Zimbio – Share stories and even add links to other users pages.
9. Blog Catalog – Social directory connecting bloggers.
10. Digg- A very popular news community to vote for stories and leave comments.
11. StumbleUpon – A great service that allows you to submit new sites to the community to receive a thumbs up or down rating.
12. Reddit – Bookmarking source for popular news and stories
13. Diigo – A social bookmarking service that allows adding sticky notes, highlights and easy sharing amongst users.
14. Blogowogo – Add news to be rated by other bloggers. All daily posts are automatically posted to the community by using your RSS.
15. Del.icio.us – Another popular bookmarking service that is currently going through a makeover.
16. BlinkList – Save bookmarks and share with the beta community.
17. Simpy – Bookmarking service allowing you save your favorite websites.
18. Clipmarks – Highlight sections of web pages you enjoy and share with the growing clipmark community.
19. Blue Dot – Share web content with friends and family.
20. Truemors – A Guy Kawasaki site based on posting ‘rumors’
21. Dzone – A free link-sharing community amongst developers.
22. Blog Carnivals – Participate and be a part of organized collection of good posts.
23. Bumpzee – Submit blogs and articles
24. Thoof – Submit articles/postings
25. Sphinn – News, Discussion, Forum

In addition to ‘regular’ social networks. There are social communities that allow you to gain a share of the community revenue that can also be used to drive traffic. You can make money not only from visitors to your site but from the activity on your social networking account itself.

26. MyLot – Thrives on an active community to carry discussions.
27. Gather – Share thoughts and ideas. Ad revenue is shared amongst users.
28. Flixya – Share videos and photos but also have a chance to earn.
29. Xomba – Write postings on their site and get paid through Google Adsense
30. Dada – Social community and earn through Google Adsense by revenue sharing.

Here are 8 of my personal favorite tools:

1. Google Adwords Keyword Tool – “Site related keywords” can help find phrases most likely used by competitors. Adwords Link
2. Google Trends – Is great to use after you discover a few good keywords. This tool will display onto a chart the search volume of each keyword researched. Google Link Hot Trend Link
   
3. Yahoo Buzz – It’s similar to Google Trends and has a handy log of top movers/leaders by subject. Yahoo Link
4. MS AdLabs Search Funnels – An unique tool to view how people search particular keywords to observe their search behavior. MS AdLabs Link
5. SpyFu – Want to know what your competitors are up to? Type in a keyword and a list of websites using that particular keyword phrase on Google will pop up…including the average price paid. You can also type in domains to view a list of keywords that the domain uses on Google Adwords. SpyFu Link
6. NicheBot – Lists keywords and phrases by count, predicted counts by using information from wordtracker. Niche Bot Link
7. Lycos week’s top 50 – Top searches from Lycos on a weekly basis. Lycos Link
8. SEObook Google Suggest Keyword Suggestion Scrapper Tool – This tool grabs Google Suggest to display results. SEO Book Link

Adwords appear on the right side and top of Google’s natural search results

Yahoo PPC ads appear on the right side and top of natural search results

If you’re not familiar with PPC Advertising….

If you place the highest bid for a specific keyword or phrase, you will rank #1 in paid listings. If someone clicks on your PPC ad/listing, you will be charged the amount you setup. So if you bid $.10 cents per click and you’re the highest bidder, you’ll show up first in line and if 100 people click on your listing, you will be charged $10.00. Competition for keywords can drastically be different depending on the niche market.

As example in Adwords:

As of 9/10/2007:

Blog Help = $.62 – $.87 CPC
Diets = $1.49 – $2.09 CPC
Make Money = $1.94 – $2.68 CPC
Mortgage = $10.95 – $16.33 CPC

PPC can cost a fortune for a new user as bidding wars can erupt quickly over a popular key phrase and can get expensive in a big hurry and sometimes cause your ROI (Return On Investment) to get out of control if visitors leave your site to never return.

PPC Can Be Risk Free

PPC can prove to be beneficial and work to your advancement especially if you find a low bid keyword niche. It can even be a no lose situation to utilize many of the PPC programs out there that are giving out free paid clicks for new account holders, ranging anywhere from $10-$50 in free credit. In this case, PPC can generate traffic to your site at no cost. Just remember to turn off/pause the PPC campaign when the free money runs too low for comfort.

There are a few programs I’ve personally tried and have netted some good results. It didn’t cost me any money, so ROI wasn’t an issue for me or my pocketbook.

Some of those I found giving out free clicks are:

1. Bidvertiser is giving out $20 worth of Free Clicks
2. Yahoo is giving out $25 worth of Free Credit (If you sign-up with Blue Host you can sign-up to Yahoo’s Search Program for $50 worth of Free Credit)
3. Ad Marketplace is giving away $25 in Free Clicks
4. Microsoft Ad’s Center is giving a small amount, but Free $5 to start
5. Search123 gives you $25 in Free Clicks after initial deposit of $50.
6. Miva is giving away $25 in Free Clicks after initial deposit of $50.
   

The overall rule of thumb at succeeding at PPC marketing?

Focus and Research. Pay-per-click advertising should be handled with short term goals in mind to start and should be handled with great care, with quantifiable goals. Using free clicks from services gives some beginners practice in distinguishing the value in conversions vs getting clicks and help you fine tune your campaigns to bring in the traffic you want. It also relieves any curiosity to the world of PPC marketing….

They say that curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back

What Choices Do You Have?

Usually you’re left with 5 options, the first 3 being the most typical:

1) Renew the domain and do something with it

2) Renew it with the intention of doing something, but really don’t do anything with it

3) Don’t renew and let the domain expire

4) Sell the Domain

5) Park the Domain and utilize advertisings on behalf of hosting company

Sedo allows you to park your domain on their or GoDaddy’s servers and make money from it, but you also have the option to also sell the domain. Parking the domain allows you to keep the domain and have Sedo show related adverts, which you will get a percentage. It is an excellent way to get something in return while your domain is sitting in limbo – unused and unloved.

Selling your domain is fairly easy and you can list any domain you want to sell. They will take care of the whole transaction. Of course, if you want a good price for your domain, a little promotional effort doesn’t hurt. You could always include it on your blog site.

There are only a limited amount of invitations available to get a sneak peak of the new delicious site which is currently under-going thorough testing.

Their navigation system is to improve by organizing the site 3 easy main sections: Bookmarks, People and Tags.

The new tag bar is pretty nifty to allow you to quickly navigate your bookmarks by tags and allows the ability to sort your tags in a variety of ways, such as popularity including an action box with a list of commonly used actions for the current page.

This is a neat enhancement I haven’t seen before – it allows the ability to quickly view a fellow users bookmark collection of top ten tags within the sidebar, giving you a quick assessment of other users profiles and what they tag.

I’m definitely looking forward to the new Delicious look and technology as it’s a currently minimal site especially in comparison to the other services out there.

Why should you care about the site redesign?

Delicious can bring many visitors to your website by getting on the popular or hotlist page.  When the new design goes live, Yahoo will more than likely promote the new design to many online journals/sites/websites and you will want to be on that front page.  Even being on the front page now would yield good traffic since they are actively contacting sites about testing the design.

How to get on the popular or hotlist page?

• Complete your submission thoroughly – Don’t be too quick to submit a short description and tag.  Take the time to add a good description and relevant tags to help others find your story to increase the chances of bookmarking it.
• Popular Tags Rule - Take a look at the tag cloud to determine what users like or dislike.
• Include Bookmarking Buttons – I use AddThis for bookmarking (in sidebar) but if you are not using any bookmarking buttons, try using Delicious buttons on your website to gain votes for your popular page.