Blog Training and How-To Guide for Business Blogging

This week we are focusing on using Digg, Stumble Upon and del.icio.us (favorite social media sites for pro-bloggers) to drive traffic to your blog. For some authors, the value of using social media seems lost, but recently several of our network bloggers have been successful at leveraging the power of StumbleUpon to drive traffic to their blogs.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a magic wand you can wave to just…poof…make social networking work, but we asked our authors who appear to have success with it and there seemed to be a common thread amongst them: accumulating friends in the community.

Without fail every author asked has made some reference to having friends or being part of a group to which they can submit stumble requests. According to Yvonne Russell (SmallBizMentor), the group relationships are all about give and take. Not only does she submit her own articles for reviews and stumbles but she also reviews and stumbles the works of others. Yvonne also notes that the team approach has the added advantage of generating a loyal base of readers. Team members become regular readers because they have to read your articles in order to decide if they want to stumble and/or review them, which helps them become familiar with your topic and style.

Alex Ion (BizToolbelt) recently provided some insight into his own social networking success, again pointing out the importance of networking. Aside from having close friends who are power Diggers, he also divulged some of his other social networking secrets to success. According to Alex, it’s important to only stumble and review a small percentage of your own work. As a new stumbler, it is also important to build a reputation for reviewing quality articles and/or images, and among the smaller websites, there should be a big player such as Problogger, Engadget, or PopMatters thrown in the mix every now and then. Once people become accustomed with your stumbling/reviewing preferences, some will befriend you, and others will even become fans.

Like Yvonne, Mihnea Boiangiu (Gearater) belongs to a social networking group. However, this group takes the form of a mailing list in which author submit articles for votes or stumbles (the group is not specific to StumbleUpon) and the people on the list help give each other’s articles a social media jump start, so to speak. According to Mihnea, “If the article is interesting, it can get thousands of visits.” Currently we are working on a similar type of list for Know More Media authors, we will keep you posted as that project progresses.

So what have we learned from this? One of the main keys to Stumble Upon success is NETWORKING. In addition to networking, you also want to be careful not to over submit your own work (this could cause you to be recognized by the community as a spammer), but that's why it is important to have a group of people you can ask to do that part for you. I’ll not kid you, networking can often be time consuming and for some of you, not worth your time. But for those who can make it work, there is value in promoting your blog this way and having a community to help you do it.