Elaine

One of my SEO friends recommended that I try a social website called stumbleupon to improve my generic rankings in search engines. Of course I was skeptical at first, but I tried it anyway. Stumbleupon shows you random websites that are based on your interests. I thought to myself, oh great, now I have to sit and look at a bunch of poor quality websites. But after I set my preferences, I expected the poorest and most irrelevant sites imaginable. To my surprise, I was able to stumble upon some very interesting websites and I found myself bookmarking about 5% of them. I rarely bookmark a site unless it has someone incredibly useful to offer. The reason that the websites were more relevant and better than what you would normally get from a standard query on a search engine is because over 2 million stumbleupon members can vote whether your site was useful or not and they can leave positive or negative comments about them.

This exercise started to make me think about my own sites. Do my websites offer something useful to visitors within 2-5 seconds? Do my websites make me to appear to be an authority on the subject? Are my websites easy to understand and navigate through? Do my website offer clear benefits to visitors?

I tried posting several of my websites up on their advertising section just to see how stumbleupon users would react to them. One of my websites received a lot of praise because I offered a useful free video on the top right of the home page that was relevant to my URL name and the landing page content. That particular video cost me $8k to produce and I was once tempted to set it up as a pay-per-view on google video but then I decided it would be best to offer it free to draw new and repeat visitors to my site.

I also tried entering one of my clients websites that has a recognized brand name. Within minutes it received 3 very positive reviews. In fact, two of the reviewers happened to be former employees of the company.

It was great to get the instant feedback for my websites and the exercise opened my eyes to some things I can do to further improve the way my websites project themselves to the public. Now I almost think of my websites as contestants on American Idol that might be voted off for poor content or delivery.

How can your websites avoid a thumbs down? I suggest asking as many of your friends to criticize your websites until the text, images or media on your sites themselves radiate The Law of Attraction. In other words, try to determine the positive ways your website should project itself to reach the targeted customers you are trying to attract.

You may also consider reading a book by Al Ries & Jack Trout called The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. Try to align your positive messages about your products and services with these immutable laws of marketing. Start using the new demographic tools that some search engines such as stumbleupon are use to target customer interests and preferences. This information should help put you on the right track for increased traffic and higher conversion rates.

Christian Wilson - Born in North Hollywood and raised in Mexico, Brazil, New York, Idaho, Utah and the beautiful islands of Tahiti and Hawaii. Graduated from BYU Idaho and BYU Hawaii where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Adminstration. Christian spent the last 25 years in business, computers and marketing - primarily as a computer programmer, retail manager, nutritional supplement manufacturing consultant and last 8 years as a SEO/SEM consultant.