Okay, take some deep breaths.  Although trying to find a hosting provider looks intimidating, there’s some simple decisions you can make right now that will make your life easier in the long run and ensure you make a smart choice in choosing a web hosting provider.

Bandwidth – can you ever have enough?

It’s easy to start thinking that you need to order the biggest hosting plan that will allow you the most possible bandwidth. After all, your site could grow to become a huge success. You may have the next Amazon or TMZ on your hands, right? I’m not out to crush anyone’s dreams here, but you should think realistically. If there’s a lot of data (as in large images and downloadable files) on your site and you think lots of people will be viewing your site and downloading these files, then yes, you’ll need a lot of bandwidth. Otherwise, why spend more money on your hosting plan than necessary? Go with a lower-bandwidth plan until you need to upgrade.

There’s a few simple things you can do to lower your bandwidth usage. If you have video files, host them on Youtube and link to them from your site. Large image galleries can go on sites like Photobucket or Picasa. Use free file storage services like Sendspace or Rapidshare to host and distribute huge files.

How big is it going to get?

How much storage space will you really need for your site? You’re the only one who knows the answer to that question. If you’re going to keep a lot of large files on your server like video, audio, or high resolution pictures, then you’re going to need a lot of room. If you don’t have that much stuff to put on your site, why pay the extra money? Most hosting providers will let you upgrade if you need more space.

You’re better off starting small and then buying more storage space as you need it, rather than paying extra every month for storage you’ll never use.

Location, location, location

Yes, it matters where your server is located a little but not much. Really you just need to focus on the region, so if you are going after North America buy hosting service in the USA, if your visitors are in Europe buy hosting with someone who has servers there.

Why SSL matters

SSL. Secure Sockets Layer. I’m not going to bore you with all the details of what a socket or a layer is. There’s one important word in that phrase, and that’s “secure.” SSL keeps data safe as it goes back and forth between your web site and your users. That may not be so important if you’re swapping recipes with your friends from the Ladies’ Rotary or sending funny pictures of your cat, but you’d better believe that if you’re selling anything via your site and financial information is being exchanged between you and your customers, it has to be secure. That’s of dire importance to you and your users. The absolute last thing you want is someone out there getting hold of your customers’ credit card or other personal information.

If you’re handling any kind of e-commerce with your website, make sure your host can offer SSL. Check to make sure there aren’t any surprise fees associate with using SSL, either.

So how do I know if a host is any good?

The fact of the matter is that most web hosting companies offer fairly similar services within a fairly similar price range. What sets one hosting company apart from the rest? For me, it comes down to two things: service and reliability.

Dealing with all the details of keeping a site up and running can make your head spin, and you’re bound to come across a problem you need help with. Make sure your hosting provider will be there 24/7 to assist you via phone, live chat, or email. If you prefer talking with someone via phone or instant messaging, make sure your hosting provider offers that kind of customer support. On a practical level, can you get help from customer service reps you understand? Good English skills and friendly service count for a lot.

Your provider should also offer an up-time guarantee and not surprise you with random and extended outages. Don’t put up with a provider who can’t keep their servers online. Expect to be notified ahead of time if your site will be unavailable.

Take my word for it – there are hosting providers out there who are ready to take your money and give you terrible service for as long as they can before you get fed up with it and leave, or else they finally get around to taking care of you. There’s no point in wasting your time with them.

Things to consider as a reseller

If you’re looking for a reseller hosting plan, your needs are a little different. Obviously, you still want great service and low prices. You should also think about what kind of control panel your customers will see. Cpanel and Plesk are well-known control panels that have great track records. Is there a limit on the number of domains you can have? Bandwidth? Disk space? Email accounts? Keep your eyes open for hidden fees, too, for things like service upgrades, dedicated IPs, SSL costs, and early cancellation. It’s a huge pain to have to switch hosting companies when you’re a reseller, so the more you know before you choose a provider, the better off you’ll be.

Linux vs Windows Servers

The only reason you would go with Windows is if you have to host a ASP.Net site. If you have a choice go with Linux as it is a lot more dependable and easier to manage.

Really, what should I be looking for?

At the end of the day, I’m convinced that the best way to pick a host is to look at a combination of reliability, service, and price. Most hosting companies offer somewhat similar hosting plans. The question is, who’s going to give you the best service when you need to talk to someone about a problem with your site?

There are lots of online reviews of hosting companies out there, so take some time to do the research. Be aware that people are more likely to complain about bad service instead of rave about great service, so if there isn’t a lot of information available about a particular host, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re terrible.

Pick someone you’re comfortable with. If they seem sleazy, look elsewhere. Don’t be afraid to ask questions before you sign up – it will help you get a sense of what their service will be like.

Ben Welch-bolen
CEO and Co-Owner of Site5 web hosting

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Being unique

All beings are unique by default. Seems pretty easy right? All you have to do is be born, and you’re unique – right there – instantly – on the stop –  for the rest of your life. Although some people try extra to separate themselves from others by getting a unique hairstyle or clothes combination and even if they fail at that, they are still unique.

So how do you do it on the Internet? How do you get a new hairstyle on your My Space page, your blog or your corporate website? Do you just learn how to be a professional web designer or is there something more to it? With all of the multilingual and multicultural differences, how do you communicate your message across the wire and staying unique and original in the process?

In my personal opinion, people lack the time and money to experiment – so they just go with whatever the know works. Why would I think of (and experiment with) a new blog layout when I know that a content column and a sidebar column works perfectly fine?

Tell me, how do YOU stay unique? Do you even try? What is more important to you, visual or intellectual uniqueness?

A while ago I come across a great posts from a blog-friend of mine called Bilal Rammuy (Rob) who wrote about “How To Stand Out As A Blogger” on his RobsWebTips blog, which you can check out on the link.

Are bloggers just recycling each others material?

When was the last time you read something you have never read before, anywhere else? It rarely to me but maybe I am not looking in the right places. Some people I know really have strong opinions and they express them frequently on their blogs. Those kinds of posts get a lot of attention, it seems. Being unique is something that could separate the success from the failure.

Is there a point where you could be trying to much? You want to be unique sooo bad that you are writing strange stuff, that people can not understand. You are writing curse words in your posts, making fun of people with jokes that often have questionable moral standards?

What I found particularly interesting is how people tend to read a blog post (or any text) somewhere in a foreign language, translate it to their own language and then post the exact article with some minor changes or just re-format the article where they would just write a summary about it. I imagine this is hard to figure out when trying to protect yourself against copy-writing, you would have to know the language. But this method is somewhat like a perfect crime, isn’t it?

Conclusion

I have asked a lot of questions in this blog posts hoping to get a lot of feedback and discussion from all my readers. Ping-back reply posts are welcome as well. Hope you have a nice Easter planed for yourself and your family. Have a nice (extended) weekend and don’t forget to share this post, if you like it!

Related posts:

1. Blogging On Autopilot During The Holidays

What is the Bubble?

ProjectBubble is a web application that allows you to manage your freelancing projects. Those things include adding clients, projects, tasks, modifying progress, recording the time you spent working on a certain project, shearing your project with other members of your team, designing and sending invoices and getting paid via PayPal. Everything you need as a freelancer packed in a nicely designed user interface with more features coming every once in a while.

Project Bubble is an easy-to-use, simple and free project management tool that is ideal for small businesses and freelancers.

ProjectBubble website

Here is a short preview video from the ProjectBubble wiki page:

The mastermind behind the Bubble

I would like to thank Mr. Stu Green – the founder and lead developer of ProjectBubble for his very generous act of making this software free for all users. Donations are excepted but it is totally up to the users. If you like try, like and decide to use ProjectBubble, please consider donating even the smallest amount to help in future development (faster servers, security certificates, etc).

Adding a new language

If you happen to know any language that is not already integrated in the Bubble, feel free to contribute to the translation by going to the PB Wiki and writing the translations in the language section. I’m already writing the Croatian translation and I’m really going to be excited to be able to send invoices to companies in my country, in my language.

Suggesting and voting for new features

When you register on ProjectBubble, you are going to be able to spend some voting points and write up some suggestions. Tell the ProjectBubble team what kind of features would you like to see in the future and see other users support your ideas with their votes. This is an absolutely great way of improving a product and I am really looking forward to seeing some of the suggested features implemented.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading another post from the Knowledge Reactor’s Blog! I hope you have found it useful and that you have fun using ProjectBubble. Share this post with your friends and spread the word!

In my next post I am going to be giving away a few 125×125 ad slots for free so stay tuned for the contest and a month of free advertisement on the KR blog! Catch you later!

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Apparently it is very popular to setup an automated scrip so that when a certain account is followed that account will automatically distribute a DM with their affiliate link or something like that to everyone who follows them. It usually looks like this: “Hey thanks for following! If you want to earn money online click here LINK.com”. Some DMs are more imaginative than others but all of them annoy about the same.

Twitter viruses?

Next to the automated scripts setup by users themselves, we also have the standard Twitter-virus-auto-DM-sending-infections that will infect your account and automatically distribute DMs to your followers. These work similar to those viruses that you can get via e-mail and which automatically send themselves to all your address book contacts. You need to watch out for those because they will KILL your account and everyone will hate you. Especially if you have a corporate account, imagine how bad that is for the companies image.

Follow programs vs. manual following

Somewhere at the end of last year I started using a Twitter following service (going to write about it soon) where you follow others and earn points. You can then use those points to award users that want to follow you and so on. I’ve been using that on the @TheKReactor account for the Knowledge Reactor website and ever since I have been getting a few DM messages from every person I follow.

The messages are really annoying and extremely useless. Got about 450 of them in a month and I never wanted to waste my time deleting them. Generally I was  afraid for my account that it would be flagged as spam for having so many undeleted messages. That motivated me to find a quick delete solution.

I have never and I mean NEVER had a useless or spammy DM sent to me while following people manually. When I see someone tweeting about something interesting, I click follow and see what that person is about for the next few days (See how I got 300+ Twitter followers without mass following others). I guess this is another reason to ignore all those auto-follow programs – I have yet to find a good one. They all seem like questionable Twitter marketing tactics to me.

Mass deleting Twitter DMs with a single click

I found a great tool which does the job perfectly although I can not guarantee that it won’t pick up your personal Twitter data Just to be sure, I changed my Twitter log-in password before using it and then changed it back after.

You go to this link: http://dcortesi.com/tools/dm-deleter/ and you can read about it. To make it work you need to find the link “Bookmarklet: DM Whacker” where the word DM Whacker should be a link. You will want to drag and drop that link to your bookmarks bar.

After you do that, you log into Twitter, go to your DM inbox and click the bookmarked DM Whacker link which contains a snippet of Javascript code that will generate a few options on your Twitter page that look like this:

Now you can edit in a few options and click the “Delete!” button. After that you will have to wait depending on how many DMs you have. I had 450 and waited less than a minute for the scrip to do it’s magic. After that, not a single DM in sight.

Conclusion

I hope my post has helped you get rid of your inbox spam. Watch out for viruses and automatic DM scripts because they can discredit your Twitter account over night. Let me know in the comments your experience with DM spammer and how you deal with them. Do any of you use any “Get Followers Fast” services?

Related posts:

1. Hashtag Heaven – Getting Started On Twitter
2. How I Got 300 Twitter Followers Without Mass Following Others

But now that Google Chrome has it’s own little extension directory, it has become even a bigger competition and the beauty of it – it’s still in beta! In this forum post, I am going to show and suggest to you 5 Google Chrome plugins that made my life easier.

1. Firebug Lite

This is one of the most popular plug-ins for web designers using Firefox. It is not available for Chrome as well, although it is a prototype version but still works very well. Firebug allows you to explore both the HTML and the CSS source code of any website. Very useful if you are debugging your own website or just want to learn how someone else programmed his.

Extension link

2. Chrome SEO

An absolutely fantastic plug-in! Everything you need SEO-wise, it has it. You get a little Chrome SEO icon and when you press it, it gives you all the SEO information for the website you are currently on. No more using third party Google Page Rank checkers and going to the Alexa website to check the rating or to see how many backlinks a certain website or blog has. This one is a must have!

Extension link

3. Resolution Test

If you are a web designer or developer you will look at this plug-in like it is pure gold. Making your website or blog look good on all or most resolutions always presented a great problem for me. There are websites that can screenshot your own website in different resolutions but that was a slow process and this plugin is just fantastic.

Extension link

4. Measureit!

A very simple Chrome plug-in that creates a measuring tool for you to use in order to determine the dimensions of certain images, placeholders, cells, blank spaces or any other elements on a web site. It is very useful for designers, when you are trying to squeeze something into that last pixel, especially on WordPress blogs in the sidebar.

Extension link

5. AdBlock

One of the most popular all-around Chrome plug-ins. It made Firefox work faster and it makes Chrome run at lightning speeds. It will get rid of all the advertisement on websites and allow you to surf in peace, giving you faster page load speeds.

Extension link

6. Bit.ly plug-in

The most useful plug-in that I currently have installed. This one allows you to instantly shorten and share an address of a website to Twitter or to Facebook. Just click on the little bit.ly icon in the Chrome toolbar and it will do the job. Another fantastic feature of this plug-in is that when you are on Twitter.com you will get very little pop-up windows every time you hover your mouse cursor over a bit.ly (or most other shortened URLs) and you will be able to see how many clicks that link has, it’s full address where it takes you and a sentence or two of meta description. It also works like that when you hover over a persons @ name in the tweets – shows you a few sentences of description.

Extension link

7. Google Mail Checker

This plug-in displays a small icon Gmail envelope icon located right from the address bar (where all plug-in icons are implemented). Every time you get new e-mail, a number will appear next to the icon telling you how many unread e-mails you have. You could certainly live without this one but it’s very handy to have, especially for someone (like myself) that checks their e-mail every few minutes.

Extension link

8. Countdown & RemindMe

Not so popular but very useful little plug-in with a friendly interface. Countdown will let you set a countdown timer that will play a custom sound when it reaches zero. Very useful for people that spend a lot of time in Chrome and have a lot of work on their plate. I love this one!

The RemindMe plug-in is your simple note+alarm clock that is also useful if you have stuff to do, blogs to read, e-mails to send, RSS feeds to read.

Countdown extension link
RemindMe extension link

9. RSS Subscription Extension (by Google)

Official Google RSS subscription plug-in for which you will probably think: “Why isn’t this in Chrome by default?”. Well, maybe it will be in the future but for now it’s good to have it installed. It will show a little RSS icon next to the website addresses that have RSS and you will be able to subscribe to the feed by just clicking that single button.

Extension link

Conclusion

As far as I know, Chrome doesn’t notify you when there is an update available so be sure to update your browser. I had no idea I was a few versions behind and those versions didn’t have extension capabilities. Thanks for reading and don’t forget to share. The question of the week is: “What are your favorite Chrome plugins?”

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The UPs and DOWNs

It sure is great when you can look back at your traffic statistics and see your progress. There are many times when the thought of giving up has crossed my mind. You get home, you are tired and cranky – especially if you have a full time job or a college that you are required to attend. Of all the problems you had the entire day, you now have to write something good on your blog. Sometimes it can be a real mind-twister. The more you try, the slower you move.

No matter how many times I wanted to give up, I have always imagined how much work I would throw away. How much time I would have spent for nothing. How many friends I would lose if I just shut it all down and started doing something else.

Support, advice and requests

During January I have been getting tones of e-mails from readers and it has made me really happy and motivated. I don’t mind the support but what really gets me excided are the requests. Requests like “Hey Gordon, can you write a post about website vs. blogs? I like your blog and I’d like to know what you think about it.” really put a smile to my face.

I have composed a list of future subjects I will write about here, according to the requests I got in all the e-mails. So if you sent an e-mail, subscribe to the RSS feed or newsletter because your question might be answered next!

Knowledge Reactor updates

I know that the site has been accumulating a bit of dust and spider webbing for the past month or two but that will chance soon. After giving it some thought I decided to rather release a bunch of material at the same time then a bit every few days. Some backstage elements on the website still need to be ironed out such as social bookmarking icons and other community-friendly plug-ins. Being the perfectionist that I am, everything needs to be triple checked

Another thing that keeps getting in my way is college exams – I have a bunch of them this month and they are going to require quite a bit of my time. Anyone who said that making any kind of income online is a piece of cake probably never tried it himself. No matter what you do, either affiliate marketing or writing a content site and putting up advertisement, you need to invest a lot of time, hard work and love into it. This is why I think that starting your own online business/blog/website while still working a full time job is the most difficult.

Conclusion

That’s all for now guys. I hope this blog has acquired some nice readership and that it will continue to keep their interest. Keep the e-mails coming and let me know how I can help you by writing something on my blog.

P.S. I am going to be giving away free advertising space both on the Knowledge Reactor website and on this blog so stay tuned and win some free ad space!

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Spending additional time

If you are anything like me, you probably spend a few hours writing a blog post then another 30 minutes to up to an hour of submitting your new blog posts at various locations. The thing is, I don’t even use a lot of them and it takes up so much time. It would take up a lot more time if I decided to engage with the community a bit more, which I do as much as my free time permits.

Separating the good from the bad

Apparently it is easy to setup a social bookmarking website today. There are pre-made CMS systems and themese that can make it look very professional. Anyone can do it – but do you have what it takes to make it worth something on the Internet? Some people would say that there is no bad social bookmarking website, there is just exposure. Even if a social bookmarking website has 5 or 10 members, it’s some kind of exposure. So what is left to discuss?

The best way to determine if a social networking website is worth your time are the different categories in which you can submit an article. I find this hard to do on Digg – can never decide which category I want my submission in because they are so poorly segmented in my opinion. They definitely need mode categories.

Why are categories that important? Well they are – what good is your submission and millions of members if they can not find it. Picking the right category can mean the difference between your submitted article going viral or getting a few votes here and there. Don’t forget that next time you submit something to a social bookmarking website.

What’s so special about this one?

I’ve tried Digg and Reddit and they haven’t had a lot of good results for me. It is hard to get noticed on websites like that because there is so much good content moving around. My suggestion to you is to use less popular social bookmarking websites that are concentrated on your specific niche than on a bunch of topics. You have a better chance to get exposure and make new niche-buddies.

This is why I like Blogging Den. It’s small, simple and it’s like Digg but for bloggers! Another thing I like about it that is has all the right topics that I like to write about: Blogging, Making Money, Marketing, SEO, Design, Development, Content Management and even an Off beat section. Each topic is also segmented into more specific related themes.

Give it a shot

Why don’t you give it a shot and tell me how you like it in the comments? I hope you find it useful and thanks for reading!

You can give me your support on BloggerDen if you’d like. These are my articles that are currently submitted: http://www.bloggerden.com/user/history/McKnight

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Not just backing up

Other than backing up, I wanted a better way of transferring material from my College laboratory work to my dorm computer – without having to rely on my USB stick (those things will give up on you when you least expect them) or spending time e-mail it to myself on Gmail.

Another method I once used is uploading stuff to my server via FTP but that was the problem. I couldn’t upload anything to it from another location without having FTP access to the server.

Every way seemed so time-consuming especially if I had to only transfer a single PDF file. I needed a way to synchronize my files without the fear of them getting damaged.

I found about “Dropbox”

What is it? Well, Dropbox is an online service that is used for backing up your data but also with a special twist to it. You get 2 GB of space on their server (that’s the “free” version, you can pay for 50 GB and 100 GB monthly) and have to install a small application that manages your local Dropbox folder called “My Dropbox” which you can place wherever you like.

The beauty of Dropbox is that you link all your computers (and even your iPhone or some other smart phone) to your account and each of the devices gets a “My Dropbox” folder. Once you put something in one of the Dropbox folders on any of your devices (which you have previous linked to your online account) it automatically gets uploaded to the server and synced with all of your other Dropbox folders across your devices.

What’s so special about Dropbox?

One of the most attractive features that I’ve noticed is the automatic

Dropbox Web Interface

synchronization of data in all of your Dropbox folders. That means I can be anywhere with Internet access, log into Dropbox.com and upload my files to their servers and by the time I get home, I will have all that data already on my computer along with the same folder layout that is online.

This will work perfectly once I get a laptop that I have been planing for a while now. I will have everything I need in that one folder without having to manually transfer important data back and forward.

They have this link called “Votebox” at the bottom of the website where users submit suggestions and vote on them. Then the development team implements them one by one starting from the ones with the most votes. There are some amazing features coming soon. One of my favourite is “Remote destroy/purge option if laptop is stolen” which is just brilliant, especially if you use it on a cellphone which is more likely to get stolen.

Sharing a folder

You can share a folder with one or more people on Dropbox. Everything you upload to that shared folder is instantly transferred to all local Dropbox folders. This is a powerful tool for collaboration and I think it has pretty good business use. The only problem is that all people that share the folder lose space when a single member uploads something but I have hear that they voted to remove that soon.

Automatic photo-galleries in the “Photos” folder

By default, when you install your Dropbox folder on your PC, you get 2 folders: Shared and Photos. Everything that is in the Shared folder can be visible to anyone you link it to and the Photos folder changes every sub-folder into an image gallery with thumbnails and a lightbox effect that looks very similar to the photo-gallery layout in Facebook.

RSS feed for “Recent activities”

There is a tab that lists recent activities of your Dropbox folder and any shared folders you might be a member off. The amazing thing about that is that you have an RSS feed for it so you can monitor the activity from your phone or any RSS reader.

Easy un-delete feature

After deleting any file from your Dropbox, both local or from the web interface – it is never really deleted at first. You can always use the “Show deleted files” button and see what you have deleted – restore it if you need to. They keep a backup of the files but I’m not sure for how long, haven’t researched that part yet but I know that the feature is there.

Referring friends

When you refer someone to Dropbox, you get an extra 250MB of space added to your account. It only works for up to 3 GB but I think it’s more then enough at least for backing up blogging and source files.

What about for bloggers?

Now here comes the part where I explain why this service is great for bloggers. There are so many bloggers that use notebooks, netbooks and especially iPhones. There are tones of iPhone applications for bloggers, from Twitter to WordPress publishing plug-ins.

If you are like me and like to good old Notepad notes for blogging ideas and other stuff related to your blog – you will want to have it in a folder where it would exist on all your machines.

How do YOU backup your files?

I’m interested in how you backup your files, from your computer, laptop or mac. Tell me in the comments and offer your suggestion! Thanks for reading, I hope you like Dropbox because I sure do.

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Those are the kind of things that destroy social networks and communities in general. Alright, maybe the word “destroy” is a bit too harsh, but it makes me mad when I think of it. Today I am going to talk about traffic spikes and how to get them. I will try and teach you some of my methods and I hope you will benefit from my words.

My first traffic spike, ever!

It happened 5 days before Christmas 2009. and I was very excited about it. I woke up one morning and noticed the bandwidth usage on my server has gone from the average 10-50 MB per day to a few GB. First I thought I’ve been hit with some kind of virus, like the Black Plague or something. After checking my AwStats and Google Analyitics (like 5-6 times) I realized that I’ve been spiked! Thankfully, the server didn’t overload, lag out or anything like that.

It is important that I stress the satisfaction of this because you can draw motivation from my excitement. I know I did the same thing when I read about people freaking out about their traffic spikes on YouTube videos or single posts – posts that hit the front page of Digg or Reddit.

The “bad” news

I guess you can call it bad news because the traffic spike didn’t exactly happen on this blog but on another blog that I am admin of. Some of you might already know it as a Knowledge Reactor project, it’s called Cosmo’s Reviews and it is all about fresh news and new computer game reviews from the industry. Cosmo is the mastermind behind the content but things like blog infrastructure, marketing and promotions are my responsibility.

Which social network website was responsible?

It was StumbleUpon! There are a lot of people that think SU is useless because it is just so random. What I think is that there is a lot greater chance that someone will randomly stumble and thumb-up your article on SU than vote it up on Reddit or Digg unless directly linked. StumbleUpon is a great service you should definitely be using, especially if you are a newie blogger. With StumbleUpon, you would want to use their URL shortener called Su.pr which will display a SU bar on tool top of your article, making it easy to vote it up.

Important note: There is a rule on StumbleUpon where a user is not supposed to submit his own articles, only articles of others. I’m not sure how often they check that and ban people because of it but play it safe – find a StumbleBuddy!

What did I do?

Cosmo wrote the article and I submitted it to StumbleUpon. The interesting thing is, the article was submitted over a month before it spiked and received very little popularity until then. There is absolutely nothing special I did, just clicked the submit button and the content did the rest.

Contrary to what some people think, spamming social networks with your own content submissions is not the way to go. What is more important is, friendships, connections and communities. When you connect with people, they will help you out and Tweet your new blog post, submit your article to Reddit or Digg, submit it to StumbleUpon. When you have friends who care, you are free to spend less time on marketing and more time on writing amazing content!

Time for some tables and graphs

Another thing that might motivate you to write good content and do it the right way, like I’d like to believe I am doing is showing you some raw success stats – so here we go:

Google Analytics stats for Cosmo's Reviews from 13th Dec to 30 Dec

On this image you can see that before the spike, the average visitors per day was around 10 since the blog was only about a 2 months old and a new article hasn’t been posted for a week. On the 19th it started to spike up to 1,280 visitors and then up to 2,960 visitors on the 20th. After that huge peak it started to descend although what I found very interesting is that the number didn’t go back to an average of 10 but kept steady at 100 to 150 visits per day. Sometimes it even went up to 250, mostly when a new post was published.

Before I thought that spikes where pretty much useless because a lot of people that come to your site on a spike-day just “bounce” off it – don’t spend more than 10 seconds on your blog or website. I’ve always learned that a less related traffic is always better than more random traffic. Be as it may, some of the people stayed interested and started returning to the blog which was great.

Let’s see the traffic sources table next:

Google Analytics traffic sources table for Cosmo's Reviews

An absolutely huuuuge amount of visits from StumbleUpon – this screenshot was taken today. From looking at this table, I can safetly say that the spike was not just a spike but turned into a constant funnel of new traffic. The traffic spike from SU was only about 4,000 visits and it was 20 days ago. So I got more traffic from StumbleUpon for the next 20 after the spike than for the last 2 months of the blogs existence. I consider that as huge and I am happy about it even if I’m just the handy-man behind the scenes

The post that went viral on StumbleUpon currently has about 7,500 views from SU alone and it’s rising every day, still bringing in readers.

StumbleUpon Twitter hashtags

Next to the obvious #SU and #StumbleUpon Twitter has tags, there is also one I’d like to mention, promote and encourage my readers and their friends to use. The tag is called #USIS which stands for “You Stumble I Stumble”.

What does that hashtag actually mean? Well, when you tweet your new blog post title and link alongside this tag, other people using and monitoring it will see your tweet even if they are not following you. After they see it, they will click on your link (maybe) and submit your article to StumbleUpon. It is basically a small twitter hash-community of people who Stumble each others content since self-Stumbling can get you “banned”.

I am not the one that original thought it up, I’ve read it on a blog but I forgot which one (turns out it was http://www.sitesketch101.com/ ) - seems like a great idea and I’ve been using for about 2 months now. It has gone a bit inactive recently and that’s why I’m pointing you to it.

If you are still new to Twitter hashtags and don’t see the point in using them, or just don’t know how – check out my older post about Twitter hashtags!

Conclusion

Every topic that you write on your blog and which gets submitted to StumbleUpon has a good chance to go viral so be patient, write quality, don’t spam and you’ll strike your home run. I hope this article has helped point people to the right direction when it comes to promoting yourself on social networks. If you where doing the exact same thing as me for a longer period and you’ve not gotten any results so far, I hope this article has motivated you to work harder and be patient.

Hope you all have a nice week and don’t forget to share this post with your friends (and khm Stumble it khm ). Also, feel free to be my friend (aka subscriber) on StumbleUpon HERE.

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During all of my research I came to realize that the most successful headlines are the ones that:

1. promise a major benefit

Everyone is always looking for benefits. Whether they are material or intellectual, people want to better themselves and their existence. Writing a title that will let your readers know what kind of benefits they have if the read the article that is under it will give you good click results.

2. offer a solution to a problem

The Internet is like a all-in-one troubleshooting service where you can find solutions to almost every problem. People enjoy being independent, solving their own problems and not needing to pay anyone to do it for them. Some are just lazy and prefer to pay but a simple solution to a big problem is what people value the most.

Headlines that offer that solution are very interesting to a frustrated user that has spent hours trying to solve his problem. A lot of people would agree that problem solving websites tend to get the most traffic in the least period of time especially if they are free.

3. ask a question

Asking a simple question or your readers opinion can go a long way into building good a community around your blog or website. By allowing your blog to be a two-way communication conduit between yourself and individual users will help you build a stable following – even if they don’t subscribe to your mailing list or your RSS feed.

The kind of article titles will make your readers feel important and some might even take the next step by contributing with a guest post. A lot of good can come from discussions in comments and a lot of people draw inspiration from them.

4. quote a testimonial

There is nothing better to offer potential customer (or reader) than a quote from a previous satisfied customer. Although nobody can guarantee you that the testimonials that you read on thousands of sales sites are true, they still carry a lot of weight in the business world.

Be careful not to add any additional hype to your testimonial because although it can be a gold mine, untruthful and hard-to-believe testimonials can hurt your business and more importantly – your credibility.

5. call out a targeted crowd or profession

Starting a headline with a profession on which your customers or readers are based on will grab their attention because they will feel called out.

Headlines such a:

“Bloggers! Learn From Other People’s Copywriting Mistakes!”

“Freelancers! Check Out Our New Project Management System!”

“Single working moms! How To Find The Right Babysitter?”

let your readers know which user group you are basing your article on.

I like this one especially because it looks to me like it might improve the “Average Time Spent On Site”. It will clearly state that this article is mainly for bloggers (and anyone else who is interested of course) and if people are not interested in blogging, will not click.

6. announce some news

People using the Internet for a specific profession like blogging for example like to stay well informed. A lot of people have written popular posts based on some piece of news they have came across faster than other people and wrote about it.

A recent example would be the release of WordPress 2.9 “Carmen”. You saw hundreds of blogs writing about it, the news, features and fixes. But the ones that profited most are the ones that where first to publish their posts. This works in very much the same way in most professions that deal with any kind of information.

The great thing about writing a fresh piece of news is that most readers won’t bother to write about the news themselves but will rather just re-tweet your own post spread the news. This will help you get a lot of exposure, maybe even more than with a regular non-news post.

Conclusion

A combination of a few of these techniques will spark the flare of interest in your readers. Make sure you stay as original as you can and don’t make EVERY post a spotlight grabber as it will look cheap and kinda hyperactive.

I hope this article helps you attract many more clicks in your future copywriting endeavours. As always, I would love to read about your results in the comments. If anyone has any other good advice, feel free to share!

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