Promoting Your Own Content Online Heaven Hell or in Between

Why write an article on promoting your own content when you are not sure of the answer. Because the question of promoting your own content is vital to anyone who wants readers online. Promoting your own content is a natural impulse if you operate alone, have no support network and care mainly about the creation of content instead of networking and otherwise filling time with anything but writing or doing whatever you do to create.

What I have done here is explore some sites that seek to answer the question of promoting your own content. If you want the short answer, I will give it in advance. And it is just my opinion, informed to some extent by what follows.

I will continue to promote my articles to Digg and to Stumble Upon but I will observe a general 10-1 rule. Ten favorites stumbled on Stumble Upon for any one thing that I post. And ten Diggs for every piece I post to Digg.

I will also avoid posting promotional links. That would be a post on my blog that references a content piece I have on AC. I will promote the actual content period.

I should also add that, until I am proved wrong, I shall continue to assume that the best way to promote is by getting my submissions listed on Google and Yahoo and Bing and getting hits that way. As far as I can tell these are the source of most hits I get.

Here is my research, with source links and annotations following each entry:

StumbleUpon Etiquette - Is it Okay to Stumble Your Own Posts?: "1. Only "stumble" posts you think are "stumbleworthy" - i.e. if someone stumbles upon your post, and it is not interesting or useful, you are wasting their time. You only have a few seconds to get a reader's attention.

A thumbs down is not good. A negative review is worse. I know we can't control people's opinions, but the post is an advertisement in a sense for would be visitors for your blog, so make it a good one. Make it count.

2. Don't only "stumble" your own posts, and don't do it too often. This is spamming, and is very obvious.

3. "Stumble" other excellent posts, particularly in a related area. This is like linking. Those people will visit to check out your blog. They may become a regular visitors."

Promoting Tour Own Content Heaven Hell or in Between. A survey of conflicting information on whether or not to submit your own content to Stumble Upon and Digg. The answer is I still don't know.

Stumbleworthy may mean something "hot". Entertainment, celebrity and other hot categories may be the main potential sources of interest. I am not sure. I do know that having the correct category is important. Also, this note validates my 10:1 ratio rule.

10 Sure-Fire Ways to Get Banned from Digg: "#6 - Submit every single one of your posts: This may seem like common sense to most of us, but just as a warning to those people who are new to the world of Digg and social media in general, if you submit every single post that you published, don't be surprised when your Digg account is no longer valid!"

This is the first of two notes on Digg. It sounds right to me. Again five diggs to each submitted content piece seems a reasonable response.

10 Sure-Fire Ways to Get Banned from Digg: "#2 - Submit 5x more stories than you Digg: Although it is not as complex as the Google algorithm, Digg definitely has a very interesting algorithm. Therefore, if you think that you can get dozens of your own stories to the front page without ever participating by Digging other stories, you are lying to yourself."

The source of my 10 to 1 mantra. I think five is not enough.

Can I use StumbleUpon to promote my site | StumbleUpon Help Center: "StumbleUpon was created to help people share and discover interesting content, so if you have a personal, non-commercial site that you'd like to share with others, you are permitted to submit it to StumbleUpon. There are limits in place regarding how many times you can submit a page from a single site - if you approach or reach that limit, you may be identified as spammer."

This is direct from SU. I hit this limit evidently. But I am still around in good standing and have far exceeded a 5-1 ratio. But I am not sure whether I am in SU's good graces or not.

A Comprehensive Guide to StumbleUpon: How to Build Massive Traffic to Your Website: "Expect an average of 100 to 8000 daily unique visitors for a specific web page that is stumbled. I've stumbled several post pages on Dosh Dosh as an experiment and the best performance was 2000 visitors in 6 hours for a very short post on Dovetail.

The number of visitors slowly petered out as the day went on. I'm actually amazed that it received so many stumbles because the article in question was only a short news piece. Perhaps this indicates that brevity appeals to Stumble Upon visitors.

According to this article at SEOmoz, Stumble Upon outperforms Netscape and all other social networking websites by sending 12000 visitors to a specific webpage in one day. The article in question was buried in Digg so there wasn't a way to make an actual comparison."

This reminds me of stuff I used to read when I was doing Web business. Such numbers would be lovely. When I see them you will be the first to know.

How to use Digg effectively onecoolsitebloggingtips: "SearchRank made five suggestions on social media friendliness that may help you be Dugg in a big way.

1. Remove Blog Name and/or Sections From Title: all you need is the title of the post.

2. Include Appealing Descriptions (Stay Within Character Limitations): if you want to practice writing tighter copy, and you should, sign up for Twitter and practice summarizing your post in 140 characters, including a link.

3. Submit to the Most Relevant Category (Avoid Multiples if Allowed): stay on topic; to be specific, stay on one topic.

4. Stay Within The Topic of the Social News Site: SearchRank noted how sites like Sphinn and Small Business Brief cater to a dedicated niche. Your submission to these sites should do likewise. At bigger sites like Digg, keep to the most relevant category.

5. Will Others Find Your Submission of Interest? Boring only gets clicked when the facts are truly staggering; think about the recent revelations about major leaguer Roger Clemens and his friendship with country singer Mindy McBride."

I think the above is eminently sensible and applies to most submissions to most places.

The *Real* Reason Digg and Reddit Are In Trouble | danielmiessler.com: "Most think blogspamming is when you repeatedly post links to your own original content, hosted on your own website. But that's not it; blogspamming is when you take someone else's content, put it on your site, and then post the link to YOUR page instead of the original source. It's truly disgusting behavior."

Salient.

Digg and Reddit: It's Not Wrong to Create and Submit Your Own Content. In Fact, it's Necessary. | danielmiessler.com: "The filter for good content on these sites is the voting system, not the source of the article. The approach that is best for the community is to get as much content into the system as possible and allow the voting to work for us. We cannot afford to discourage high-quality writers with foolish source-based filtering."

This is a fair point of view when combined with the caveats noted above.

Stop digging your own blogs posts - Blogopreneur.com: "Since the start of the blog, I've emphasised that the best way to get good traffic is to do it the right way - through genuine linking and helping other websites achieve what they want to achieve. Think about it, if YOU set up Digg, would you like bloggers to start submitting every post to you everyday?"

And this is also important to think about.

I will add one thing. I have been on Twitter for a while, long enough to create a following of over 14,000. I have posted mainly my own content there. I have never had a complaint. Traffic depends entirely on the same factors that obtain at AC. If I post something hot, the response rises ten times and more. If I post something I care about but which is not hot, I can nudge the results by mingling the two varieties. And it is for that reason alone that I do the hot stuff along with what is closest to my heart, will and intent. And I manage to lard the hot stuff with what I care about from time to time.

Promoting Tour Own Content Heaven Hell or in Between. A survey of conflicting information on whether or not to submit your own content to Stumble Upon and Digg. The answer is I still don't know.