Most of who have got pages of their website stumbled, knows that traffic from Stumble upon has some downsides — it results in very low CTR and comes in a tide that won’t last more than 2 days. Still and all, having your website stumbled allows you to generate very quick exposure and drive thousands of visitors to your website without any promotion before hand. So, let’s see how we can squeeze the maximum out of our SU traffic.

01. Mind Blowing Design.

Average visitor from Stumble upon spends LESS than 10 seconds on the website. They mostly just take a look go further. Unless, something catches their attention. We would assume that unless website’s title really aroused their curiosity, they won’t read but just take a look and leave. We are not trying to be nasty here, but just for the purpose of learning, lets compare these two websites (this and this). If you were to visit for only 5 seconds, which will catch you attention more? Internet is all about the visual entertainment and visual satisfaction. To an average human mind, digesting 1000 words article that is illustrated and laid out against a pleasant color composition, even the illustration is very neutral, is easier than if the article was just same 1000 words in black letters against white naked background. Conclusion: Grab the visitors by the throat with a splendid design.

02. Stumble Only Inner Pages

One of the mistakes many people do is stumbling the front page of your website. When a visitor is stumbling on such pages, he mostly moves on. Stumbling a certain page would mean directly upon arrival the visitor will be introduced to a particular topic, be it a certain game or blog post. When we land on a front page of arcade gaming site we say “oh, another gaming website” and move on. When we land on a page with certain game, we tell ourselves “ok, some people stumbled exactly this game, it must be good, let’s try it!” Conclusion: When stumbling, be specific in both tags and topics.

03. English, please!

Although there are stumblers all over the world, it is estimated that between 45% and 40% of the entire StumbleUpon traffic comes from USA and Canada.
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I posted a little entry earlier today about the war Google waged against PayPerPost bloggers. It seems as though Google just got a list of PPP bloggers and went one by one, zeroing their ranks AFTER the official update was rolled out. I can confirm this with 2 of my blogs going from PR4 to PR0, two weeks after Q3/Q4 2007 update. As a result, PPP’s marketplace suffered a kick in the butt.

PayPerPost’s CEO, Ted Murphy, quickly came up with a solution — since PR is obsolete and no longer represents accurate data for both publishers and advertisers, they are going to develop their own trademark rank, called “RealRank”, based on:

• 70% - visitors per day

• 20% - amount of ACTIVE inbound links per day (outgoing clicks)

• 10% - pageviews per day

…and, PPP’s team are about to give birth to this totally new ranking system at midnight.

What does RealRank mean for us?
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When it comes to search engine optimization, especially when you consider hiring a SEO expert to do the job for you, it’s very important to turn to a company with good reputation, which is specialized in search engine marketing and will be able to lead you to good Search Engine position with what we call “natural listings”.

One of the companies that I know of, Customer Magnetism, has been providing its clients with search engine advertising since 1997 and has a great experience in Search Engine Optimization, as well as a big portfolio of satisfied customers over the past years. Their SEO experts team has won a several awards and you can request a quote directly online or by calling them toll free (details on the website). Bottom line is, Customer Magnetism definitely lives up to their name.

Everyone, myself included, is preaching for unique content. It’s good for Adsense, it’s good for SEO and it’s good for your readers. However, not everyone can produce unique content. Hmm, okay, correction: everyone can, but definitely not on a daily basis or 4+ times a week, and if you update your blog less than that, you are going to lose all your readers. So what can you do?
Read More from "I’ll Show You How to Drive Massive Traffic to Your Blog Without Unique Content"

Like any blogger, I browse the internet daily, looking for new tips and tricks, how to increase the revenue, now to improve the Internet Marketing strategies and where to get the latest information on all the topics that webmasters and bloggers need. Most blogs are just a waste of time, but luckily, there are a few blogs on the Internet that are real assets, when it comes to handy info.

Most of you are probably already familiar with them, but for those who still did not hear about allinanchor.com, I strongly recommend to go and read their blog before you start working on your site’s success using the trial and error tactic. Don’t repeat my mistakes, learn from the pros first! The best part about their blog is that you will find an answer to ANY question you have, be it Search Engine Optimization, marketing, traffic building or even eBay. All the important events of the cyber world are also covered there, so as one of their readers, I can tell that it’s always very well-presented, accurate information, and just subscribing to their feed means I am staying up to date with all the news. Recently they posted a lot of revealing posts that I think you might have some interest in as well, here are some of the highlights I enjoyed reading the most:

Top 10 Landing Page Optimization Tactics
How Top Brands Stay on Top: Advertising
Don’t Blog on Your Blog?
‘Pinning’ a Site to 1st Position

AllinAnchor.com is not yet another blog that is showered with adverts and offers readers a few small posts about selling links. Since their launch in June 2006, they have gathered a very impressive share of knowledgeable posts under their roof.

And, before we are going to round this post, just a little extra for my readers. If you want to write for them, you can get paid! Oh, I guess I should have started with it, right..?

So, PageRank was updated yesterday morning, and Top Tutorials went from 5, to 4, to eventually PR3. Sweet. It would have made me really frustrated, but let’s look at the positive sides of it. According to Seomoz’s list, many PR6 domains ended up being PR3 yesterday, so my loss is not all that crucial after all. I still have PR5 pages that stayed intact and I still have traffic and like Aaron Wall says, “Traffic Matters, Google PR does not”.

Google “Hates” Us, What Now?

I’d say that building your business online based on Google, in one way or another, is just not wise anymore. Most likely soon, new algorithm will be introduced to us and PR will either lose it’s previous significance (no wonder since so many popular websites lost it), or will just represent a different value, that no longer plays a role for advertisers anyway. Some say it would be the era of “TrustRank” now, others, like myself, believe Google will come up with some totally new concept. Jeremy said, that when linking to others, the important part is,
Read More from "(No?) Life After PageRank Update"

This morning I opened some of my favorite blogs and looks like everyone, and I mean it — EVERYONE is talking about the merciless Google PageRank collapse, that hit most of the top bloggers and no one seen it coming… Here are some stats to start the morning with (although some of the below listed sites dropped their PR 1-2 weeks ago already)

autoblog.com PR6 –> PR4
engadget.com PR7 –> PR5
problogger.net PR6 –> PR4
copyblogger.com PR6 –> PR4
joystiq.com PR6 –> PR4
tuaw.com PR6 –> PR4
searchengineguide.com PR7 –> PR4
searchenginejournal.com PR7 –> PR4
johnchow.com PR6 –> PR4
quickonlinetips.com/ PR6 –> PR3
weblogtoolscollection.com/ PR6 –> PR4
andybeard.eu PR5 –> PR3

(Thanks Andy for the list)

You will be amazed to also discover that some of the Internet’s leading websites lost their credibility in Google’s eyes as well. Take for instance washingtonpost.com that went from PR7 to PR5 or the famous rich people’s magazine online Forbes.com that dropped as well from PR7 to PR5. Actually I can go on forever because the list of penalized domains, never mind how trusted they are, is huge.

Who giggles apart from Google?

Probably the rest of the world who’s PR was not affected, but… The amusing part is, now toptut.com is in the same PR league as johnchow.com, coppyblogger.com, weblogtollscollection.com, searchengineguide.com and problogger.net (!!), while it’s obvious that this blog is a few light years away from these big names. So what’s Google point here? To just penalize anyone who has achieved a decent or semi-decent PR? Or can’t simple mortals gain more than PR5 anymore while only the Gods at Mountain View can climb higher than that?

There is still no answer for these question as PR update was not finalized and apart from guesses, ideas, assumptions and fears, we don’t know anything.

If you feel like torturing yourself with this whole Google PR Update Tragedy a bit more, you can read also on Daniel’s, Kumiko’s, Darren’s CoppyBlogger’s blogs about the the devastating Q3-Q4 207 update.This update reminds me actually of war with Napoleon, when only after the war was over, it was possible to estimate the true losses… Hope this update won’t take as long as the war with Napoleon though!

P.S. - It does not matter if you sell PR links or not, you will probably lose your ranking anyway, because Google knows better if you sold links or not…

If you think Google does it out of purely noble intention, giving everyone an equal chance to rank high, regarding the capital you invested in buying links — you are wrong. Google does not really care weather you pay or not, however, they care WHO you pay to. Ideally, pay them, and advertise via Adwords.

Let’s see how it started the past months

First Matt Cutts writes openly in his blog, calling webmasters to report paid links. Following that, we see some ranking collapse, best and most well known example is John Chow not only not ranking for the term “make money online”, but it looks like Google kicked him out even for the term “John Chow“. Same happens to Text Link Ads, that no longer rank anywhere for “text link ads” and many other sad examples.

PageRank Apocalypse

The hysteria continues when all the top bloggers and top ranking sharks lost -1, and even -2 of their toolbar candy, and that is, with PR Q3 not even being finalized. Unofficially, Google confirms the penalty being rolled out and case by case websites and advertisers get kicked out of top ranking as well as now pay for their criminal past of buying link with live, green, vivid PR.

Google’s message to webmasters: Don’t sell PageRank, your site will lose ranking.

Google message to advertisers: Don’t buy PageRank, your site will lose ranking.

…And, the aftermath?

Naturally, advertisers are afraid to buy links via semi-banned and penalized Text Link Ads. They afraid to do it in some other networks as well for same reason. Naturally webmasters removed the “buy links here” text, they don’t offer it openly in forums anymore and as a result, link sales slowed down. Webmasters report that their  Text Link Ads revenue collapsed, with all the advertisers pulling back. But, who did win here? Of course Google. If you want to make sure you advertise and 100% comply with Google’s strict ranking policy, you can advertise via Google Adsense. This brings traffic, not links (since the script is Java-based, however, if you need to keep promoting, you will take this option.

Links sales revenue collapsed, Adsense revenue raised. Many webmasters had seen the obvious increase in Adsense revenue, and no wonder. Bottom line, it all came down to monopolizing the whole buy-and-sell-and-publish-links and search-and-rank industry.

However, if Google takes it case by case, looks like there is still plenty of work to do…