How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog with StumbleUpon and Twitter

Social media drives traffic to your blog. Period. But there’s better ways and not-so-better ways to do it. In this (late) audio post, I go over in some detail exactly how to use StumbleUpon and Twitter to drive traffic to your blog. I know that sounds a bit mercenary, but when you hear the details of how I do it, you will see that it’s really all about helping others.

My entire social media marketing strategy could be summed up in two words: value and engagement. More completely: provide value and be engaged. It is the most unselfish way of all to gain from social media.

My rough notes for the audio are below. You’ll have to listen to get all the details.

Strong social media presence extends your reach, like being in many places at once. You own first page of Google search results with all your social media profile links.

Difference between. Marketing and just using? SMM has a purpose: drive traffic back to the blog.

This is done thru 2 main methods: offer value and be engaged. Do not think about what you’ll get, think about what you can give.

High return social media sites: StumbleUpon and Twitter

For StumbleUpon:
Sign up and install toolbar.

Spend some time stumbling some sites and giving thumbs up to generate activity so others see you’re not completely new.

Do up your profile page–add a picture.

Do not submit your own content.

Add friends who share your interests–many will reciprocate.

Use the “send to” feature to send your blog posts to your StumbleUpon friends, but make sure to also send other quality, relevant links from time to time.

Be the first to stumble sites because you’re given “discoverer” status and people are more likely to click through to see who you are (remember, that’s the purpose purpose of social media marketing as I’m describing it)

Create arrangements with other friends so that you continually submit each other’s content to SU. Make sure you do this with real friends whose content you enjoy. You want to build up a list of quality stumbles, because that’s how other stumblers decide to be your friend.

For Twitter:

Get a twitter client such as Twhirl or TweetDeck – makes it easier

Provide value and engage means that you:

• Submit cool links
• Be useful
• Be timely (breaking news, first to alert,)
• Be relevant to your followers
• Be funny – let your sense of humor show
• Have conversations (by the way, I hate it when people say convos – ick)
• Don’t be rude or get into arguments
• Get email notifications on new followers, check them out, follow more of them than you think you should (give people the benefit of the doubt, you can unfollow them later if turns out to not have been a great idea).
• Help others
• Ask questions Just to engage about a subject
• Unscientific market research
• Promote others
• Retweet
• Promote their blog posts
• Suggest your followers follow a particular person you admire
• Promote your own posts
• Mix this in with the other stuff
• Key to twitter is variety — mix it up

I have no idea why all the Twitter points wound up as a bulleted list.

Between StumbleUpon and Twitter, I get thousands of visitors every month. Using both of these services is easy (though time-consuming). The difference between getting a little or getting a lot out of them is only a few things. Just remember to provide value and engage and you should be seeing traffic to your blog increase.

UPDATE: Seems silly that I would post this and not give you the URLs of my profile pages for these two services, no? Here they are:

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/remarkablogger

Add me as a friend on StumbleUpon: http://videofabulous.stumbleupon.com