What Has Digg Done for You Lately?

Digg and Stumbleupon traffic — who cares? No, really, tell me — I’m asking — WHO cares?

• your loyal readers?
• your subscribers?
• your ego?

Do you have an amazing social bookmarking success story?

Ok, before you jump to the reply button and tell me your blog just received 100 hits from Stumbleupon yesterday afternoon — let me qualify my question by asking a more specific one:

How many of those visitors converted to subscribers or purchased something from you?

If your traffic isn’t converting, then you basically threw a nickel’s worth of bandwidth down your hosting account toilet. So what? No biggie. Exactly — no biggie whatsoever. It’s comparable to throwing a coin in a wishing well. Would you gas up your car and spend a half an hour driving across town to a mall JUST so you could toss a penny in the fountain? Would you even make that special trip for your four-year-old, just so he could do that? Or would you wait until you happen to pass that fountain while on another mission?

Hope is not a plan. Wishing wells are not effective marketing strategies — unless you’re running a mall management company; and even then, I think one store’s RENT probably trumps the coins you might scrape off the bottom. Maybe it amounts to a tip for the guy who collects them once a month.

Look at a few examples from my own feed traffic logs:

• Yesterday, I received a small flurry of raw traffic to this blog from Stumbleupon — 94 people in an hour. Guess how many of those visitors subscribed — will continue to read my posts or ever return? 2 people. I’m grateful for both of them.
• A few days before that, 40 people dropped by after clicking my name in a comment I left on another pro-blogger’s blog. 12 of them subscribed to this feed — 6 of the subscribers chose the email delivery option. 2 of those new subscribers purchased my Problogging 101 tutorial the NEXT day.

Do the math:

• 90 first-time visitors stumbling in — 2 converted to subscribers — $0 revenue
• 40 first-time visitors from a single comment on a blog in my niche — 12 subscribers — $120 revenue

If you were me, and you had five minutes to promote your new post — would YOU spend that time on Stumbleupon tacking up links to your own post or leaving a comment on a peer’s blog?

It can’t HURT, right? Yes, it really can — if you use your precious online time or fill your editorial schedule with so many little things that “can’t hurt,” they will crowd out better options. A bunch of crap that “can’t hurt” does NOT equal the impact of a few known best practices.

Stumbleupon, Digg, del.icio.us, etc, etc, etc — General Big Pond Social Bookmarking — does NOT result in targeted traffic for Self-improvement, Spirituality, New Age, Religion, or Lifestyle blogs.

Who are the predominant Technorati and del.icio.us social bookmark users?

• programmers
• tech guys
• web developers
• blogging-about-blogging bloggers
• a huge bunch of random wankers

If you blog in the self-improvement / spirituality niche — those guys are NOT your target audience.

Leverage
“But” you say “Steve Pavlina’s posts get bookmarked and dugg!”

Well, then guess how your time would be better spent reaching that audience? Let Steve filter the traffic masses FOR you — let him weed out the truly targeted from the random stumblers — go get in front of the ones who are interested enough to click those links by leaving a meaningful comment in Steve’s forum!

Stop standing outside the heavy metal rock arena trying to hand out Bibles. If you want that audience’s attention, go inside, stand on-stage, and hand out free CDs of music in the same genre.

If you want to hand out the Bibles, go to a freaking pizza social at a local church, for God’s sake!

Do you have a string of social bookmarking icons studding your posts like a gaudy necklace? Are the sites you’ve chosen to represent sending you a ton of the readers you want?

If not, then it looks like what it is — a desperate person wearing a gaudy necklace standing outside a rock concert handing out free Bibles.

You’ve got to execute smart specific actions in the right environment.

• Do you have a pattern of search terms resulting in Google traffic? Write another post targeting those keywords.
• Is your largest referring domain the blog of someone you know with a shared audience? Write a guest author post for that blog. Spend some time leaving an authentic comment.

Where’s our niche?
One of the problems with a lot of social bookmarking sites — even the niche social media sites — our shared lifestyle, spirituality, self-improvment niche is rarely represented!

I’m not alone in my criticism of sites like Digg. Don’t take my word for it:

Recently I had 160 hits from Stubmleupon and NONE of them signed up for our live help service.

So, personally, I think that 10 visitors from a niche social bookmarking site (above) that sign up are still better than 1,000 from Digg or Stumbleupon that just come by and go.

If you know that high-traffic blog marketing models, advertising revenues, and getting Dugg is your definition of pro-blogging — that’s not my strategy. If you do decide to go that route, then by all means, listen to someone else — you might want to pay particular attention to the fact that you must write FOR that strategy. Different rules for copywriting, blogging, and link-baiting social media apply.

“But there ARE some great social media options in our self-improvement niche!” You say. You’ve sent me invitations to join them. They’re … nice. They’re time-consuming and additional work and I’ve yet to see the payoff that warrants the attention. I’ve got to be brutally honest with you — the amount of time I spend setting up a profile for some of these communities is not a focused activity that results in new subscribers. There’s nothing wrong with the groups I’ve joined such as Spiritual Entrepreneurs — it’s entirely benevolent and the group is filled with great people — YOU’re there with me.

And that’s the part I don’t get — you’re already here; we’re already together without going somewhere else… It’s kind of like you and your closest friends all throwing parties on the same night at different locations. It’s one more place I have to go to see the same people? That doesn’t … compute for me.

• What conversation is taking place in these group blogs that isn’t available on our own?
• What content can be found there that’s not available on your blog — which I already visit and read?

I’m sorry, but it’s a little bit like going to a dating service and finding out all the members you’re compatible with are your exes and closest friends!

I would love to know if you discover a social media site that transcends this “let’s be a clique just cuz!” motivation — until then, have fun! I wish you well — I’ll still see you — at YOUR place. If you meet someone new and cool you’d like to introduce me to — I’ll be dropping by YOUR blog. Or send them to mine, as you’ve been doing.

Get clear about your blogging goals. We all need to work smarter, prioritize, squeeze the most out of the fewest online activities:

• Focus.
• Do the math — look at what works, and do more of THAT.
• Stop prioritizing searching and experimenting with everything that MIGHT work; put what you KNOW works at the TOP of your To Do list.
• Look at where you’re spending the most time and ask What are the results, per hour spent? Quantify.

What are you sacrificing so that you can run around marketing like the chicken with its head cut off?
All those site sign ups, internal messages, friend requests, positioning third-party code, links and icons in your templates, visiting to rate something, or bookmark something — performing all those little activities, all over the place, add up to your sacrificing the creation of a brand new original post that other bloggers can link to and that will live in Google indefinitely.

Not to mention, a valuable, interesting new chunk of content from you is more desirable than going to a site where I can see your profile, the picture of yourself you already have on your about page, and ultimately a link back to your blog. Why drive all that way for directions on how to get back…

Think about it — between you and me:

• How did you find this blog?
• Why are you here reading this article?
• Where did you come from?
• Who introduced us?

If you just so happened to stumble upon me and you digg it — Welcome! Serendipities and synchronicities and divine coincidence are awesome things — they are rare and special phenomena.

Serendipity is not a pro-blogger’s marketing plan.

Slade Roberson is an intuitive counselor, ATP®, professional blogger, and the author of Shift Your Spirits, Automatic Intuitive Response, and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Slade on Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and blogging strategies with other personal development writers, coaches, and healing arts practitioners.