I DO!

Somewhere after 2AM this morning, I officially surpassed 1,000 likes on my StumbleUpon!

Now, I’m definitely hooked.  I have a naturally competitive nature and am a sucker for  “top” anything titles!

I’ve learned a lot about StumbleUpon and what it can do!  I posted a list of some of my favorite posts on SU.   I also saw a huge surge in traffic to my blogs thanks to SU.

I am so pleased with the traffic benefits I’ve seen from SU, but more importantly I have stumbled upon some amazing blogs and run across some great people.So here is my mission…I want to hit the top stumblers page by October 31st.  Why Halloween?  I have no idea, just seemed like a decent amount of time.  Is it possible?  I have no idea.  But I know it’s impossible without a little help.

By the way, I’m not deluded…I am aware that the title is fleeting and most likely meaningless in the long term, but my ego never likes to let a challenge go untried!

What can you do?

• Add me as a StumbleUpon friend (dwweb)
• Review my SU profile by visiting my profile and clicking “Review her blog”
• Once you’re my friend, send me stumbles!  I’m always up for checking out new stuff that people send my way and assuming it keeps in line with any of my interests and I like it…I will “Like It” and review it.
• Excuse any nonsensical or less than stellar posts made to my blogs during this Stumblethon as sleep will definitely be minimal

What’s in it for you?

• A better StumbleUpon profile…Anyone who reviews my profile will in turn receive a profile review from me!
• Get your pages in front of an up and coming stumbler who is gaining more and more Stumble power…as I said, I welcome any of my friends or fans sending me sites to check out and stumble.  If you are my friend, you can use the “Send to” feature…if you’re not my friend, feel free to message me pages you’d like me to check out or leave them in comments on this post.  I am not guaranteeing stumbles…I not going to Stumble anything that I think is not Stumble worthy…I’m not looking to become Stumble’s “Top Spammer”  But I think I am very fair and generous in my stumbles and reviews
• That happy, warm and fuzzy feeling of knowing that you helped someone!

Not a Stumbler?  Go sign up today…the benefits are amazing!

So come on everyone, let’s do this!  Help me, help you, by helping me!

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Traffic Rank for Dwwebsolutions.com:

Alexa traffic rank based on a combined measure of page views and users (reach)

Yesterday	1 wk. Avg.	3 mos. Avg.	3 mos. Change
N/A*	153,455	991,631	6,940,2544

Those numbers are kind of unbelievable to me as this is truly the fruits of about 7 or 8 days of dedicated blogging!  Note the traffic numbers for September which are substantially larger than the previous four months and we’re only at Sept. 8th! 

I have had this blog going for over a year. Unfortunately, I had kind of let is slide over the first 6 months or so of this year. At the end of August, I decided to rededicate myself to blogging in general.

I have never had a lot of traffic coming into this site. Which was overall not that unexpected or problematic, as a very specific service business who was not focusing much on the traffic aspect, I was pretty happy when I could land 50 new visitors a week. I never even bothered to check the Alexa rank or many other stats programs for it because as I said, that really wasn’t my focus.

But as I’ve been significantly increasing my efficiency in actually designing my client’s websites, I’ve had a lot more time on my hands for other marketing methods. I’ve always enjoyed writing, and I’ve seen what blogging has done to help my client’s sites in terms of the search engines too.

What Did I Do?

• Write!  I consistently wrote at least one post a day, sometimes two.  By far the most popular post was 60+ Resources for New Bloggers   And let me tell you, that took some time to find all the resources, but it took exactly zero creativity…I’m not necessarily proud of that, but that seems to be the way blogging works.  And even if no one else had looked at that post, I learned a lot gathering the information and continue to reference it on an almost daily basis.
• Don’t Be Scared, Get Out There  Everybody talks about it, but I really believe it now…the key to blogging is to connect with other bloggers.  Not only does it help in the cold world of getting incoming links (yes, it’s questionable based on whether people do-follow or no-follows).  But more importantly, the blogosphere is full of amazingly talented and helpful people…not to mention, really fun people too!  So get out there and read as much as you can and interact!  See below for those who have helped me in my one week transformation.
• Social Networking, Social Networking, Social Networking  Again, this is nothing new.  But I have to put my two cents in that this is a huge, huge factor in what’s been happening around here.  I feel compelled to say it mainly because I read a lot about StumbleUpon, Digg, MyBlogLog, Technorati and all the others before and thought that’s nice, but it would never apply or work for me.  WRONG!  StumbleUpon specifically has been amazing for me.  I know different sites have different results with the different social sites.  But in my case, SU has become a really great marketing tool, fun addiction and great place to connect with some really wonderful bloggers!  I’m such a huge fan that I actually wrote a post earlier this week just pointing to a few great posts about SU from the week.   Definitely check out the articles mentioned in that post for all the information you could possibly want about StumbleUpon.  Or you can always add me as an SU friend and I’d be happy to help anyway I can!

So you can see, I really didn’t do any earth shattering…just implemented what all of the best have been recommending forever.  But what amazes me is that you don’t have to be a professional blogger or blogging expert to be able to get the results from any of these techniques.  All you have to be is determined and sleep deprived!

Only time will tell whether this new endeavor will have any real ROI in terms of my website design business, but I’ve already had several referrals from it…so my prediction would be definitely!

As I mentioned above, I have discovered a lot of great blogs and bloggers and online friends in general in the last two weeks or so.  Here are a few…check out their stuff and subscribe to their feeds.  They’re brilliant and even better eager to help!

• Jayne at About Blogging
• Sara at the Blog Experiment
  
• Sus at AdScoops
• Blog About Your Blog
• Chris G On New Media
• Internet Marketing Online with Shaun Low

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After spending a good part of the day stumbling myself, I’ve come to the conclusion that today must in fact be the official (or possibly unofficial) blog about StumbleUpon Day!

It makes sense to me that those of us in the US might be stumbling a bit the day after a long holiday weekend, but the trend seems to be international.

But I digress…I don’t claim to be an expert on my newest addiction (seriously, over 5 hours today), but I will testify to the power of the Stumble as my traffic has definitely been skyrocketing these last few days. I thought for the benefit of anyone who stumbles by my blog I would just share with you a collection of the great posts I stumbled into today that gave me a much better understanding of how the whole thing works…

• A Definitive StumbleUpon Guide- Driving Traffic To Websites from Shaun Low
• Building a StumbleUpon Power Profile from Cristian Raiber
• The Importance of Building your Stumbleupon Network from Blog About Your Blog
• Analysis: StumbleUpon’s Top 50 Stumblers  and Interview with a Top StumbleUpon User from ViperChill
• The Secret Features of Stumble Upon from NowSourcing

Note: not all of these were posted today…but they are all from within the last week!

Anyway, sorry for the lack of original thought, but I want to make sure everyone possible is hooked up with my latest habit.  To be sure, I will be advising all of my clients to start Stumbling right away too.   Now if I could only master Blackberry-stumbling…that would be Stumbleriffic!

 Want to Stumble together?  Be my Stumble friend!

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I’ve recently had a number of clients asking about adding a blog to their site. They have so many questions, many of the same that I’ve had over the past year and a half. So I decided to compile a list of all the resources that I have found immensely helpful…at least those that I can remember and/or have bookmarked with one bookmarking tool or another!

I’m sure I won’t get them all on here…so no offense to anyone. And I will be updating this post with whatever new, awesome things I find as time goes by…feel free to add your sites or things you’ve found helpful in comments

The Basics of Blogging - Intro to Blogging

• Blogging Basics 101- “where there are no stupid questions” a very newbie friendly blog with great tips and information.
• Blogging Help- nother great place to get easy for everyone to understand blogging tips and also a very non-intimidating place to spend some time!
• Blogging Tips- again a wonderful resource for information about all things blogging without a lot of mumbo jumbo that you have to be at least an intermediate blogger to understand!
• Blogging 101- an intro to reading and writing a blog
• About Web Logs- I’m always a sucker for about.com for pretty much everything…their blogging section can be pretty helpful.
• Wordpress Codex Intro to Blogging
• Blogger Forum- helpful community for all blogger levels!
• Performancing- this one could really go in almost all of the categories of my list here…plus, it’s the home of several of my favorite free wordpress themes.
• Daily Blog Tips- exactly what it says with great stuff for new and seasoned bloggers.

Read the rest of this entry »

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I know Web 2.0 is getting to be an old and definitely overused term, but I think it’s the best fit for my thoughts today! Since I began blogging in the last year and trudged along my crash course in social networking, it’s occurred to me that this brave new world of blogs and social networks is a lot like high school…

Blogging is putting your thoughts and feelings out there for everyone to see and yes, possibly ridicule. The exact thing many of us spent ridiculous amounts of time and effort avoiding back in our school days.

Reading other people’s blogs can tend to feel like eavesdropping on the cool kids and hoping they don’t notice you’re listening. And actually putting yourself out there enough to leave your comments or thoughts is as terrifying as the thought of showing up for homeroom the day after a complete hair color disaster.

And then of course, there are the social networking sites…my favorites at the moment are Digg, Technorati and StumbleUpon …that are pretty much akin to running for prom king and queen or student council president.

Right here, right now, I will cop to watching my posts and articles ratings and rankings on just about every site out there, just hoping that someone likes me enough to let me into their online clique!

It’s amazing to me that after thinking that thank God, those queasy moments of waiting to see if people liked me, thought I was smart or cool were long gone 10 years ago…I find myself back in the game all over again! Or maybe it’s just because I recently attended my 10th reunion, so those good old high school insecurities or at the forefront!

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Just when I was starting to get a handle on my StumbleUpon addiction, I learned today that the folks over there have just launched StumbleVideo. Along the same concept as the original, you pick a category or “channel” and then stumble through clips in that category from YouTube, Myspace and Google Video. And just like it’s predecessor, you are given the opportunity to give each a clip a thumbs up or thumbs down. Over time, the system will learn from your rankings and send you video clips that based on your previous votes it thinks you will enjoy.

Who knows, this might just bring an influx of videos to the DW Web Solutions blog!

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Just wanted to take a minute to give thanks for one of my favorite resources in the blogging world.  I don’t know if all bloggers regularly run into a lack of inspiration, but I sure do!

From the first week I started blogging, I figured out that one of the best ways to overcome creative blocks was to read other blogs. You can really learn a lot, get ideas and even better use trackbacks to respond to other people’s brilliant or not so brilliant posts and end up with some great posts on your own blog.

So I was constantly finding new ways to search for inspiring blogs and would run into dead ends.  I then started looking at all the social bookmarking sites and figuring out how to best utilize them.

Enter StumbleUpon.

I’ve found this nifty little tool extremely helpful.  It’s a bit like using Google’s I feel lucky option.  It has a great Firefox (and probably IE, I’m not sure) toolbar addon.  And whenever I have a few minutes, I just start stumbling around!

This recommendation does, however, come with a warning.  If you’ve ever become addicted to virtual solitaire or Myspace, be careful!  You can find yourself stumbling around for hours without realizing it!

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