I have recently did a guest post for Daniel from DailyBlogTips.com. This article continues the topic about StumbleUpon spring cleaning I have already tackled. After banning users that only stumble upon spam and commercial content, StumbleUpon is now going after spam websites.

Seems that the social media environment will be a cleaner one.

You can read the full guest post at DailyBlogTips. I would love your feedback.

I am trying to get a constant rate of updating this blog, but I am caught up with some other projects I am really excited about. But have some ideas in mind, I’ll keep you posted!

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting, come back soon!

I have recently heard news about StumbleUpon banning several accounts because the users submitted comercial content. Here is the message these unfortunate stumblers usually received:

Regrettably, your account privileges have been suspended due to a breach of our TOS. I respectfully draw your attention to our Terms, particularly with respect to the clauses which forbid the use of personal accounts for the promotion of a business, product or service, and also with regard to the sending of ’spam’ messages to other members.

Our terms can be found here: http://www.stumbleupon.com/terms.html

Under the circumstances, the restriction is unlikely to be lifted.

Read rest of story…

I was browsing a SEO forum and going through my feeds and just saw a bundle of services that, coupled with my reads, got me thinking. There are a lot of BS services out there that guarantee you getting on the first page of Google or getting a storm of visitors on your site. In fact, few deliver what they promised and you might get stood up, a few bucks shorter. Here is a quick breakdown of some services that might not be what they claim to be:

Read rest of story…

I wrote this article a while ago for someone that didn’t want it anymore, so I thought I’d give it some attention.

If you’re part of the web savvy audience, terms such as „diggin’” or „stumblin’” will be very familiar. These are some of the pieces that form one giant puzzle called social media marketing. As opposed to the classic link building strategies, social media optimization targets the readers, creating something new that will convince them to linking to the material.
This trend is constantly changing, websites optimizing their look and content to fit the puzzle. As usual, every community has its top players. If social media was a planet, then Digg and StumbleUpon would be the asteroids hovering around it. If you play it safe, you get, apart from traffic, constant readers, subscribers and backlinks. But which tops which? What should be the strategy to achieve success in both of these communities? Here is a breakdown of the two giants, with all their ups and downs:
Read rest of story…

A change was recently implemented on digg, namely the removal of the white stripe next to each digg button. I am not sure as to why it was done, nothing official was announced but I was used to the way every button looked like.

Once you get many friends, the stripe will appear at almost each submission that gets on the upcoming list. But I can live without that. What I really miss what the small window that appeared when you scrolled over the button, showing you the friends that recently dugg the story. It was fully removed, as I noticed: when you see a webpage with that digg button, the green stripe is still there.

I guess from now on, we will have to use the digg alerter.

later edit: just a bug in digg’s system!

In a response to my friend Lyndon and his article about digg not being social media marketing, I want to give you my take on the issue. The chat was long and productive, even though it started from a plain hello.

Considering the recent algorithm change, I had the chance to reconsider what digg really means for the virtual environment and why everyone is  struggling to get on the frontpage. And yes, what it comes down to is finding those 100 people in the 50,000 visitors you receive upon getting frontpage. Those 100 people are your target audience, the ones that will acknowledge your article, your brand or your website.

But isn’t there an easier way to get to that small crowd? If you look at it from a different perspective, it is. Social media goes deeper and offers the platform for any niche communities to stay in touch and share their opinions.  So if you’re promoting - let’s say - some new get-thin recipe based on fruits you need to go to the website treating weight issues, to bloggers that frequently write about the subject.

It’s a lot more work, I know, researching, investigating and involving yourself in the community but the outcome will be much bigger. Still, for a more targeted audience, StumbleUpon is the answer. And if you wanna go deeper than that, you know about social media website for niche topics such as fashion, environmental issues or tech.

It all comes down to time and how little we have. How much time are you willing to invest in your work? And these days I don’t have that much to do what I want. But it’s all for a noble cause. I learned a lot of things and I’m still learning.

Well, it was about time. Alexa finally put its things together and re-ranked the websites according to the traffic for the last 2 weeks. I was beginning to think that Alexa won’t upgrade anymore and we have to switch to other websites, with the same degree of reliability as the above mentioned. All in all, only Analytics can give the exact stats.

Got around to reading Matt Cutts’s predictions for 2008 about the face of the internet. Some interesting points raised, ones more realistic than others…

2008 will be the year that hacking and search engine optimization collide in a major way - got that right! just woke up two days ago with a website invaded by a Turkish harker. But this won’t go far enough. If you’re on a secur server of a well-established hosting company, you just need to replace the password with a random one. So take this opportunity and secure all your accounts with a tight password.

The most exciting product/start-up of 2008 will not be a Web 2.0 company. Instead, it will concentrate on improving email productivity. - Can’t really see this happening. Social media is ever growing and it has to make up for all the niche topics and communities out there. The web will continue to develop around social media and not e-mails. Just my 2 cents.

An RSS startup will add the ability to take a normal RSS blog feed and produce a “best of” feed that picks only the most popular/controversial/interesting items. - Since you are already subscribed to the RSS of a website, then you are interested in most of the articles if not all posted there. I’d like to have the opportunity to pick the best posts, not have an algorithm do it for me.

Domains for $4 - I can see this happening. I just caught an offer from my hosting company that sold domains for 6 bucks. Why not discount it more? Imagine all the domains that will pop up and the spam you’ll get.

If you’re interested in the rest of Matt’s predictions, check out the post. As for my thoughts, I think environmental blogs will grow even further, some new social media website will arise and SEO will turn more into SEM. Looking forward to see what the web will be like this year.

Seems that Alexa has been stuck for over 2 weeks now. While many advertisers and publishers do not fully rely on Alexa rankings for deciding the value of a website, it still proved useful in many cases.

Here is an excerpt from their blog, proving that they have acknowledged the issue:

As some of you have noticed, our traffic data is a few days behind. We are working hard to catch up, and you will see new data appearing over the next several days.
Thank you for your patience!

Posted on February 21st, it seems that several days for them means over a week. I hope their system isn’t down for good. In the meantime, here is what you can use to measure traffic to your website or blog:

Compete - http://www.compete.com/

Quantcast - http://www.quantcast.com/

And if you still haven’t found out about this, here is the tool used to measure traffic stats and Google PR - SearchStatus.