Now seems to be a good time to try to drive more StumbleUpon traffic to your website. It’s been announced on the StumbleUpon blog that the old 200-friend limit will be lifted. Moreover, stumblers will be able to subscribe to someone’s stumbles without becoming a friend.

Why should you care about StumbleUpon’s friends limit?

At StumbleUpon, whenever you stumble and review a page/image/video, the link and your comment are displayed on your friends’ homepages. Therefore, having a large amount of StumbleUpon friends can help you spread the word about your own sites and/or sites that belong to your partners or friends. This is why you want to be added as a friend by as many stumblers as possible. However, StumbleUpon used to have a 200-friend limit for all accounts. Such limit obviously harmed StumbleUpon’s networking potential.

Now that the limit is about to end and stumblers will be able to subscribe to as many people as they want, you can add everyone and everyone can reciprocate. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone should subscribe to you, nor that you should reciprocate all subscriptions. Read the rest of this entry »

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Did you notice that Google and Digg have been sharing several headlines lately? Take a look at blogs, news sites and forums on our industry and you’ll find several references either to Digg’s acquisition by Google or to Google’s experiments with a Digg-like SERP interface.

Despite the fact that Google gave up on the Digg deal (for good or only temporarily?), the googlesphere is still excited about this topic. But…

Does Google need Digg?

Is Digg an essential tool for Google’s Internet dominance arsenal? It doesn’t seem to be the case.

* Google is already used by the vast majority of websurfers. Digg, despite its popularity, still looks like a small club dominated by a few privileged members.

* Digg lacks diversity; most links on it are of a geek-oriented nature. Google, on the other hand, can lead users to any type of site they want to see. This efficiency is the reason why it rules the search engine market.

Do Google users need Digg-like features?

How would those impact our search experience? Would such features give us the power to find more (good) sites in less time?

* Perhaps Google intends to use our own votes as a basis to bring us more customised results over time. However, isn’t it what our search history is for? At least, this is what’s been implied by a post at Google’s Official Blog.

* If you think a social voting system could effectively reduce manipulation of search results by suspicious webmasters… forget it. All social media sites are manipulated in some way (bury brigade anyone?). Why would a “social Google” be different?

Let’s see how the whole Google-Digg (or “Giggle,” as suggested by some good-humoured guys out there) case will evolve — if at all. Whenever I find any substantial news on this thought-provoking subject, I’ll write more about it.

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The web is moving quickly in various directions all at once. Opportunities come and go in a snap. If you plan to make money online, you have to be able to keep up. It can be quite intimidating trying to follow every emerging trend, not to mention time-consuming. There are millions of blogs, forums, twitter feeds and the list goes on and on. However, using an RSS aggregator like the Google Reader and a few techniques, monitoring conversations in the web can be fast and easy. Read the rest of this entry »

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The truth is, many Internet marketers sometimes have the tendency to be over-eager, earning the industry a less than stellar reputation. More than a few have tried to change this perception over the years with honest-to-goodness value propositions, and for that I applaud them. However, there are those who still insist on turning a profit on deceptive, irritating methods like spamming. Where traffic is, so spam goes, and right now the prime targets are social networks. Read the rest of this entry »

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