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

With the inception of web 2.0, a lot of marketers geared up for a whole new way of marketing. The audience was, after all, sitting there and identifying their interests through groups they would join. Savvy marketers had to make a few minor adjustments and they could access a pre-identified target market.

On MySpace, for instance, a number of “add a friend” automated programs appeared so that a group of people could be identified as having an interest in your product and messages sent out to all the thousands of friends that the automated program added to your MySpace profile.

This was about as close to perfect as could be for marketers. After all, the money is in the list.

Facebook had similar vulnerabilities that allowed people to seek out friends, to use the term loosely, based on their identified interests.

On Squidoo, the iframe tag that was part of the html function of the text module allowed marketers to include links and marketing techniques that pulled their message into the Squidoo world.

These web 2.0 sites tightened up their security, adding in features that required human intervention. Squidoo simply deleted the iframe capability.

The clampdowns have had a twofold impact. One is that the social networking sites’ efforts to block marketers from essentially spamming users has endeared these sites to people who appreciate the protection offered by the social networks. The clampdown is typically viewed by users as a pro-user effort.

This means that marketers, even the good white hat ones, who might have used the social networking sites as places for easy targeting of a new market segment, have the fallout of being viewed as annoying.

While this was not the intention, all marketers fall into the “them” aspect of the we-them dyad created when the social networks set up ways to protect their users.

A second factor is that, as Google recently noted, “social-networking inventory is not monetizing as well as expected.”

Google made a $900 million ad deal with MySpace a year and half ago. It backfired, to be blunt about it. Users go to the social networks to get away from the old ad-driven world. Already jaundiced by the experience of being added as friends and deluged with unwanted ads, users of social networks seem to reject ads in general. They go to these social sites to escape from the pressures of commerce.

Introduction

There is one essential aspect to using StumbleUpon as a top marketing tool.

While it is important to take all the right marketing steps, the end goal is to have your site ranked on one the StumbleUpon engine.

Yes, it’s a short learning curve to get StumbleUpon working as your intense marketing assistant. Hooking up with other people helps get the word out. You can get a higher StumbleUpon rank by having a good strong profile and a wide range of tags.

Since your tags allow your site to be pulled up by users who have specified their interest, the more tags you have, the more interest choices you will attract. Of course, you have to be careful to make sure that your interest tags are relevant to your page.

There was an old trick that marketers used in the early days that involved putting high interest words in their keywords – you know, words like “sex” and “money” – in order to draw traffic.

The catch was that the sites had nothing to do with sex or money but somehow the marketers thought that if people came to the website, they would stay.

However, people who follow a trail offering information related to, for instance, sex or money and find a site that offers information on something else are going to have a bad taste in their mouth.

This translates into a very negative feeling towards that web site.

This brings me to the essential aspect.

The fact remains that if what you are offering as your own page is not up to a high standard you may have many visitors but not many thumbs up. Even worse you might get thumbs down.

An odd thing happened as I was about to enter my website into my profile – I took a look at it. (No, that’s not the odd thing!) What happened was that I saw it from the perspective of the StumbleUpon user.

Yikes. There were some problems that might seem tiny but anything that can put off a user can get you a thumbs down. I gave that particular site a good tweak.

There is that old cliché – you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink. You can lead the user to your site through a carefully planned StumbleUpon marketing program. But if your site offers nothing, not only will they not stay. Yours peers will thumb you down.

This comes back to the “content is king” rule. Have something lively, vibrant, and informative that will make them want to share the site with their friends.