Baby steps. Bit by bit I am gaining a foothold in this whole social media realm. I am sorry, but I am 35 years old, but understanding all of the nuances of social media and how to use it for your benefit is still tough. I have got just a few more tweaks to my blog and it will be ready. My developer fixed most of the formatting issues, now he is going to put the final RSS feed buttons / bookmarking buttons into the sidebar and then I am all set!
I continue to stumble and review sites and people I find interesting. I have already met some interesting people. There is another guy who owns a vacation rental site in California, he’s given me a few great tips. Today he told me about the tagging feature of StumbleUpon.
I knew about tags as a means of providing additional information about the post. But I didn’t know that SU actually had individual pages dedicated to each tag, those pages in many instances have decent pagerank, so getting your post or site listed higher up on those pages can generate a nice backlink. That makes sense.
He gave me this example (and I quote):
http://www.stumbleupon.com/tag/holiday/
See how that particular tag has a certain amount of reviews. For you to get on that page you generally need to have more reviews then the other people to get on. A great benefit is if you look at the pagerank of that page, I now just got another pr4 link. Most keywords you only need to get 3-4 reviews of a certain keyword to show, but some keywords are a lil more competitive like:
http://www.stumbleupon.com/tag/travel/
The top post has 468 review, the bottom has 12 reviews using the tagged keyword. So you’ll most likely need at least 12. It’s not an exact rule, but follows it most of the time. sometimes it only takes one review if the stumbler has a lot of ranking power.
(end of quote)
So that’s pretty cool. Of course, the backlink is nice, but what I found even more interesting is that it’s an easy way to find other stumblers and sites that are of high quality and match my interests. I contacted this guy on SU because a) he lives in the great state of North Carolina; b) he is a writer and also knows SEO and Social Media; c) I am looking for a writer to help me with this blog and to help me write about some of the more important regional areas on this site; and 4) he seems like an expert Stumbler, maybe he can give me some tips on how to be successful.
So, I think I am starting to grasp the essence of social media. If you are social, others will be social in return. If you contribute high quality stumbles and reviews, that help others, and if you write and produce good quality content, they in return will help you. I have no idea if I will ever hear from Matt, but regardless, his blog and his stumbles are taking me to new places that are enriching my Internet experience!
It’s cool. I’m liking it and looking forward to meeting more new people, hopefully soon I an help others get the hang of social media!!