Thanks to an initiative from websites to incorporate social media sites into their articles and blog posts, social websites are more popular that ever when it comes to sharing content online. The Guardian, a United Kingdom online and print newspaper, reports that UK newspapers are getting about one third of their traffic from online aggregators and social media sharing sites like Digg, Facebook and Stumble Upon.

Read Full Story: How Social Sharing Spreads News

Social Media can be a bit of a difficult space for an affiliate business. An affiliate website acts as a conduit to a merchant website; thus by that very nature much of “the story” belongs to somebody else. It must therefore seem to some that the only opportunity is the following: create multiple profiles – use automated software, or rent-a-fan packages to generate an audience of followers – publish automated messages containing links to your site – get clicks.

Read Full Story: Social Media Readiness Tips for Affiliates

Being good at social media is a lot like being at connecting with people in real life.

We’re a little too focused on collecting humans like marbles.

Our fans. Followers. Subscribers. Impressions.

Once upon a time, numbers like gross circulation mattered a bit more, because the available channels and paths for information were somewhat limited. So by putting yourself visibly in one of them, chances were pretty good that you’d actually be seen, and command a fair bit of someone’s attention, at least for a few moments.

Read: Going Beyond Social Media Reach

Over the last few years I have been few active on a number of social bookmarking sites including Digg and StumbleUpon. I have picked up a number of tools along the way that have helped me with staying active on a number of communities with ease. I thought it would be a good idea to share those tools with you, so it can help you with your social bookmarking.

Read: 7 Social Bookmarking Tools You Should Know About

One of the biggest concerns of Internet marketers is how to get quality one-way backlinks to their websites or blogs.

While there are many ways you can go about this, there are 3 particularly very powerful ways of doing it.

Article Marketing

When you write an article and submit it to an article directory or an online interest group that you are a member of, like Yahoo and Google Groups, two things happen.

One, you get very targeted traffic from the place you submitted your article to. Remember, that you are submitting to a forum in your niche, an interest group that you are a member of or the right category and subcategory of your favorite article directory. Your visitors will therefore, be very targeted.

The other thing that happens to your site is that you get very high quality one-way backlinks to the website or blog that you are promoting. And a lot of time the Page Rank of the site you submitted to will be passed back to your site, putting your webpage in the VIP seats of the search engines.

Learn more about Article Marketing

1. Video: Article Marketing: How to craft a great title
2. Video: 3 most important parts of article marketing
3. How to get Traffic Day 18: Article Marketing
4. 4 Tips That Make Article Writing Easier
5. Advanced Article Marketing
6. Article Marketing – How To Choose The Best Topic For Your Niche
7. 2 Great Article Writing Tips – Readers Have Short Memories
8. Stop The Article Madness & Start Making Cash!

Social Bookmarking

These are sites where web surfers go to and submit lists of their favorite web pages. It is like the regular bookmarking function on your browser tool bar.

The only difference here is that you are adding them to a site online instead on your computer, and it is viewable by other surfers. Normally when bookmarking your web pages, you categorize them under particular “tags” or keywords, so that the pages could be viewed by others searching that site or from the search engines.

Once you add your pages to these sites, links to your site are bound to stay there forever. Plus, you get to receive a lot of traffic from these sites, which include StumbleUpon and OnlyWire, among others.

Learn more about Onlywire

Forums

There are literally tens of thousands of targeted forums online catering to people of all backgrounds and interests. One good thing about these forums is that they are also a good (read that ‘reliable’) source of targeted traffic and quality one-way backlinks to your sites.

There are two ways that you can take advantage of the forums that you are a member of.

One, you can post a link to the site or web page of your choice in your signature files (basically a bio box). This way, whenever anyone reads your posts and find them interesting, they can click over to your site. The link also stays there for as long as you want, if you don’t abuse the terms of the forum and risk getting banned.

The second way to link back to your site(s) from these forums is to include your website address in your profile. Every forum worth its salt provides its members with a way of posting basic information about themselves on their profiles. If the forum happens to be a high PR one, you just got yourself high quality search engines-favored backlinks to your website.

Whatever niche you are in, you can take advantage of these three ways of getting quality one-way backlinks to your site.

Learn more about Traffic From Forums

Note: this was originally published Feb. 22, 2008

Recently I have received questions from various people about stumble upon. In this post I will answer the most common questions.

If you have a question that isn’t answered in this post please leave your question in a comment at the end of the post.

And don’t forget to get Free Stumbles For Your Site from me.

What kind of things will get traffic from stumble upon?

Websites that get a ton of traffic from stumble upon usually fall into one of these categories: funny, breaking news, inspirational, incredibly useful, or free stuff.

Funny
Jokes and funny videos seem to do really well with stumble upon. People find it enjoyable to have a good laugh and will frequently give funny things a thumbs-up.

Breaking news
When Michael Jackson died a little over a year ago the social media scene went crazy when the initial reports came out. Twitter was overloaded and so were other forms of social media including stumble upon. It’s all people could talk about.

Inspirational
When someone posted a YouTube video of Susan Boyle’s debut performance on “Britain’s Got Talent”, the video went viral. People were e-mailing it to their friends and telling their coworkers about this video that they “just had to see”.  Things like this do very well with stumble upon.

Incredibly useful
Blog posts that truly surprise readers with the content and the value they provide are 100 times more likely to get a thumbs-up from stumble upon.

Last December I published a post on How To Build Back Links Super Fast and submitted it to stumble upon. Because of its great value many other people gave it a thumbs-up.

Free Stuff
I have had a couple different blog posts give away something for free and because of this they received quite a few stumbles.

The posts are Free Back Links To Your Site and Free Stumbles For Your Site.

When you give something away for free you cannot have any strings attached. There cannot be any hoops to jump through.

So your page where you give away a free e-book if people join your e-mail list is not going to get a lot of stumbles because people have to do something (join your e-mail list) before they can get the free e-book.

Will my one post continue to get viewed or will this taper off?

The short answer is yes. Your traffic will most likely taper off.

But it really depends on how many people continue to stumble your post. As long as you keep getting stumbles periodically your traffic should continue though it may not be as much as your initial amount.

Is it okay to post all of your pages to Stumble Upon?

I routinely submit new blog posts to stumble upon. But I never submit more than two or three each day. I also make sure that I give a bunch of other pages (not on my blog) a thumbs-up.  I don’t want to stumble upon to the think that I only submit my own stuff.

As long as you do something like this you should be fine.

What influence does SEO have on how many stumbles you get?

As far as I know search engine optimization should have no influence on how many stumbles you get.

However, if you have good SEO it may lead to more traffic from Google and other search engines. This in turn may result in more thumbs up (because you got more traffic). And more thumbs up means more traffic from stumble upon.

But as far as I know there is no direct connection between search engine optimization and traffic from stumble upon.

Can you have multiple stumble upon accounts and stumble your blog posts using those accounts to get more stumbles and more traffic?

I would strongly advise against this. Stumble upon has excellent statistical tools that look for and will detect this kind of behavior.

They have no qualms about disabling an account that they believe is trying to cheat the system. I should know because I did it once before and had my account disabled.

Did I miss any of your questions?

If you have a question about stumble upon it was not answered then please leave a comment below with your question.

Andy asked,

What’s the most traffic any of your sites got in a day and how did you get that spike of traffic? If you don’t want to reveal direct numbers a % boost would be interesting to know.

Is there any good trick you can recommend to generate a spike of traffic?

Here’s my video response

Super Fast Backlinks