StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking site that can deliver a lot of traffic. Where StumbleUpon differs to a site like Digg is that the traffic generated can last two or three days, not a short 12-36 hours. However, like Digg, traffic from StumbleUpon tends to have a very high bounce rate and an extremely low conversion or purchase rate. You can however improve your conversion rate if you follow a few points.

StumbleUpon is meant to be ‘fun’ and ‘friendly’. It’s casual surfing when you have nothing better to do and by using the SU tool bar in your browser, the sites you visit are fairly random. Likewise, the visitors to your page have landed there randomly. They don’t know what they are going to see until your page loads – and there in lies the first clue – your page needs to grab their attention. Bright colorful, friendly, easy going – little in the way of ads – a first impression that sells I want to stay and see what this site has to offer.

Distinctive branding is going to be a big asset. If your branding stands out and is memorable, they will remember it. Part of your branding is going to flow from the content they read. Your visitor is going to be wowed by they page, hit by the brand and engaged by the content. When they leave you want them to remember you by your brand and content.

If you want your StumbleUpon visitors to return, then get their name and email address and the easiest way to do that is through a free giveaway like an ebook. Offer them something in return.

StumbleUpon visitors can be hard to please. They are after a good time so give it to them.

If you use Google Reader then you will probably be aware of the controversy that occurred at the beginning of the year when friend sharing meant you were sharing a lot more than perhaps you wanted too. Google addressed that issue and now they have added a few more features.

One of the big changes is that Friend Sharing can now be done worldwide in any of the supported languages. Other changes include the ability to tag whilst sharing or noting. This is especially useful if you use lots of tags to organize your posts.

You can now also choose between alphabetical ordering or drag n’ drop ordering for your subscription list. This is handy if you have a lot of subscriptions in your reader.

Previous changes made it easier to manage who shares with you. When someone decides to share with you, you get a notification and the ability to preview and subscribe to their shared items. With the new features, you can share it worldwide in a number of languages.

I know there are some individuals who swear by Google Reader to distribute their blog content every time they post a new article. It is not really a feature that I have felt compelled to use yet.

Digg has acquired new funding and is about to launch into an expansion program that will auger well for many users outside the mainland US. These changes will be welcome and are overdue, however Digg is still not addressing one of the biggest issues that annoys most users, and that is the Digg inner club that seems to be able to control the front page.

The changes mooted by Digg include:

• personalizing the Digg experience
• adding the recommendation system to all areas of the site
• creating deeper category and topic content views
• adding new ways to discover and organize content
• making Digg more relevant to local geographical tastes
• adding foreign language Digg versions
• initiatives aimed at expanding community outreach
• more sophisticated tools and interfaces for publishers.

Digg will be expanding their workforce as well so if you’re in the Frisco area, keep your eyes peeled. As a bookmarking site, Digg has its uses. However, unless you’re in that inner circle you will struggle to gain large quantities of traffic. If Digg can find a way around the current situation, it will appeal to a lot more users.

A press release from ShareThis reports on a new study by Forrester Consulting (commissioned by ShareThis). Some of the statistics reported make for interesting reading and possible further analysis with respect to social marketing activities.

A long held belief by many website owners, particularly bloggers, is that social bookmarking is not about sharing information found, it is more about self promotion. Some of these statistics may back this up. For example:

• Email is still primary channel for sharing — 69 percent of adults cite email as the primary source of receiving information
• 64 percent of adults and 60 percent of youth still use the traditional cut and paste method to share a URL or information
• Web tools such as wikis are used by 53 percent of youth vs. 29 percent of adults, with webpage services such as ‘tags’ being shared by 31 percent of youth vs. only 16 percent of adults
• In general, men are more likely to share something to appear cool or to look like an expert
• Women are more likely to share directly, especially via cell phone texting
• Women are more likely to share products or ideas they like via easy or direct sharing methods

Visitors to your website or blog are more likely to share using the ‘email to a friend’ rather than the social bookmarking sites. It would be interesting to see what would happen if you could have a built in SMS to a friend’s option as well.

Social marketing is more likely to be effective if it targets women. For men, social marketing needs to target the ‘cool’ aspects of their lives.

While statistics can be manipulated to support any argument, it seems from this data that serious sharing is done using traditional means rather than the social media marketing outlets currently available.

Social bookmarking now has a new player, at least for the general public it is a new player. Yahoo! Buzz has been closed to all but a select few; now it is open to all. I have read reports that it is limited to the US, however nothing in their TOS or pages seem to indicate this.

What is Buzz. Really it is just another bookmarking site, similar to Digg, Sphinn and many others. You can get a widget to put on your site that has vote buttons and vote counts. It is still fairly rudimentary in comparison to the others. You have to manually enter the page’s URL every time you include the widget.

Where Buzz is a little different is in the traffic that may generate from popular articles. According to Yahoo!, top stories ‘may’ be featured on the Yahoo.com home page. Whilst Google may be the number one search engine, Yahoo.com still ranks as the number one site for traffic. Having your story featured there could potentially lead to millions of viewers – I hope your site is prepared for it when it happens.

You will need to have a Yahoo! account to use Buzz, however, in this day and age nearly everyone has one, even if it’s been sitting the corner gathering dust for a few years. Will Buzz help with your social bookmarking? Time will tell. It will depend on what sort of user interaction there is and whether or not is gets abused like many of the other sites. The rewards for artificially inflating a Buzz rank could be huge.

It will be interesting to see if individuals set themselves up as Buzz voters (setting up several hundred artificial accounts) as they do with StumbleUpon and then offer to vote up your content, for a price! Yahoo! Buzz is certainly worth checking out.