Web page design is becoming more important as each day goes by. StumbleUpon joined the thumbnail team earlier this month with thumbnails of stumblers favorite web sites displayed in their profiles.

It is becoming a trend that I feel will only spread further since many members of social networking sites feel more comfortable seeing images. StumbleUpon provides users with two options, either grid or list.

Your web page may soon become your social brand with thumbnails appearing like foot prints behind either your activities or your social friends. Until now, web pages have been designed for the benefit of visitors and search engines, you may now need to consider the thumbnail appeal of your site. Social sites like StumbleUpon are not shy about the size of your thumbnail either. In past thumbnails were very small, these days they are a reasonable size with good clarity.

If your web page is not up to scratch then perhaps it is time to do some housekeeping. Put on a pretty face for all those thumbnails that are going to continue to appear on sites like StumbleUpon. Your thumbnail is now a part of your social marketing face - capitalize on it.

StumbleUpon is one of the most popular sites when it comes to getting your page to go viral. For everyday websites, it is more popular than Digg or any of the other social sites.

One feature that StumbleUpon has that most other sites do not have is the ability to ‘buy’ traffic - yes - ‘buy’ traffic. You do not have to fight for keywords nor do you have to pay a premium for popular keywords. The traffic you buy can be targeted to your niche.

The cost - a measly five cents per click - a lot less than some of the other pay-per-click alternatives. The traffic that is delivered is targeted and those visitors, being StumbleUpon users, have the power to give your content the thumbs up (or down). You may ‘buy’ 100 visitors for a cost of $5 and find that you actually receive 150 or more - this is due to the thumbing of your content.

Is it worth the effort? Your traffic may well be targeted, however, like most StumbleUpon campaigns, the traffic is often hit and run. You will find your bounce rate hovering around the 70-90%. Conversion rates from this traffic can be quite low. However, if you are selling products with a high buy price and high margin, then you will probably be used to a low conversion rate. At five cents per visitor, you may only need one conversion per 100 to come out well in front.

Buying traffic from StumbleUpon is not for everyone. However for some website owners, the outlay may be worth the effort. One side benefit to using StumbleUpon like this is that your Alexa rating will improve sharply. The statistics page for purchased traffic is fairly basic although it does display a percentage of how many visitors liked your page. This could be handy for market research purposes particularly if you have several different landing pages that you would like to trial.

Buying a viral campaign - now that’s different - but then, that’s StumbleUpon.

You often hear that each social bookmarking site is different, and it’s best to focus your content on the social bookmarking platform that values that type of content most. Good plan. But how do the different sites value content?

SocialMediaTrader did an analysis of 500 front-page articles from February, 2008, for several different popular social bookmarking sites. The sample size isn’t huge, but results could give you a guideline of the best sites to bookmark your content.

February, 2008 # of Front-Page Stories

StumbleUpon

1. Technology 105
2. Offbeat 93
3. Arts 73
4. Politics  47
5. Lifestyle 48
6. Science 25
7. Videos 24
8. Tutorial 20
9. News 18
10. Business/Make money 17
11. Environment 15

DIGG

1. US Elections 44
2. Tech News  34
3. World News  32
4. General Sciences 30
5. Odd Stuff  28
6. Environment 27
7. Politics  27
8. Comedy 25
9. Movies  24
10. Business 22

Del.icio.us

1. Technology 51%
2. Offbeat 12%
3. Arts 9%
4. Tutorial 7%
5. Business 6%
6. Lifestyle 6%
7. Politics 3%
8. Science 2%
9. Videos 2%
10. Environment 1%

Propeller

1. Politics 68
2. News 63
3. Technology 57
4. Health 48
5. Money 37
6. Humor 25
7. Celebrities 23
8. Do No Evil 21
9. Science 20
10. Personals 14
11. Music 11

MIXX

1. Entertainment 64
2. Politics 59
3. Informative 53
4. Tech 23
5. Business 21
6. Lifestyle 20
7. Other 19
8. Education 13

These stats give you an idea of what each community is looking for, and should give you a start on finding the 1 or 2 sites that give you your best chance of submitting your own niche content that goes viral.

Keeping your social blogging simple is getting more and more complicated.

You know there are a gazillion distractions these days, making it tough for your articles to get attention and tougher to keep it. You want your writing to pay off for you, so you optimize.

• You optimize a headline that offers a great benefit and/or arouses curiousity and/or is controversial.
• You optimize the first sentence of your blog post because if the headline got them this far, now you must hook them into reading the rest of your article.
• You study StumbleUpon and Digg and the other social bookmarketing media so you can optimize your entire blog post to capture votes, not to mention hearts and minds.
• With your keyword list in hand, you optimize your post to attract your target market searchers who use the search engines.
• You go back over each sentence to find the places where you can optimize the humor or irony or alliteration or word picture or plain old intellectual impact (See? Alliteration!).
• You optimize “you”s vs “I”s, so you are writing about your reader, not about yourself.
• All these optimizations have certainly left something messed up, so you go back over the whole thing and re-optimize spelling and grammar, so the darned thing makes sense.

Pretty good plan. Have we missed anything?

Well, yes. How about … was there a point to your post? In the midst of all this optimization to attract eyeballs, did you actually give them some valuable insight or information? It’s not that unusual in social blogging to totally lose sight of the fact that a real live reader is looking for actual value. And if you trick them into reading something without value, they won’t be back.

So, definitely keep it simple. But add one more optimization to your social blogging: make it good!

StumbleUpon can be a great traffic generator - if you give the Stumblers what they want.

It’s a 2-part puzzle:
1. How can you get a LOT of “Thumbs Up”?
2. How can you turn those folks into dedicated fans of your blog?

Here’s a 10-step StumbleUpon plan that works:

1. Focus on a very clear-cut, targeted niche market. Who are they exactly? Describe them. Which StumbleUpon categories appeal to them? Write your article very specifically for those categories. Get your posts submitted to those exact categories.
2. “Lots of significant detail, clear and concise.” As you write and edit, hold that thought. The StumbleUpon reader craves examples, but they don’t want your life history.
3. Your 3 most-likely traps: too personal, too complicated, too unrelated. If a bit of information is interesting, but you can’t make a simple, strong, direct connection to your article focus, get rid of it. And don’t “wax eloquent.” Get to the point immediately.
4. Model a title with impact AND curiousity value from a “swipe file” of great viral titles. Use strong, concise subheads. Make the article easy to start and easy to continue reading.
5. Carefully craft your first paragraph as a concise statement of every important detail that’s in your article … and then be sure the rest of your article fulfills that promise.
6. StumbleUpon users have a “horse’s mouth” fetish. You can certainly use someone else’s ideas, but make everything uniquely your own, in your own voice. Include bulleted lists, advice, links, and graphics that clarify and support your point.
7. The social bookmarking crowd gets ecstatic over lists (especially resource lists), detailed step-by-step “How-To”s.
8. Think “unique insight.” StumbleUpon users compete with each other to find and share the newest, most valuable guide, discussion, approach, or evaluation - especially if it’s easy-to-use - of whatever their #1 focus is. That’s a tall order, but filling it can give you a big payoff.
9. Start your article with a clear, related, magnetic, eyeball-sucking impact image.
10. Be an active Stumbler. Every day when YOU come on sites that fulfill most or all of these criteria, take a moment to give a StumbleUpon “Thumbs up” and a clear review of what is so valuable to you. You will gain credibility and make social bookmarking friends this way, and you’ll have a head-start toward bringing your own articles to the attention of a wider, friendlier audience.

StumbleUpon and the other social networking sites can certainly be part of your branding and lead-generation strategy. But a lot of businesses get frustrated with the social media as a sales tool. And the reason is … of course, they aren’t sales tools. Instead, they are a gazillion little campfires, where people go to tell stories and to listen to stories and to have fun and learn and be part of a community.

While social media can be tortured into helping you make money, build your brand and generate leads, it’s a place where storytelling is what is expected and wanted. So why not just go with the flow?

Remember sitting around the campfire at night … somewhere … with friends, swapping stories? The memory is magical for a lot of people. Those campfires - and the stories - have been warming our hearts and minds for thousands of years. They have built lifetime emotional bonds. Even today, you can probably remember who the really good storytellers were.

The power of a good storyteller is obvious at the campfire or at StumbleUpon or anyplace else. The most effective salespeople always have great stories with impact. For instance, I tell you that $50 for a month of your vitamins is too much.

And you say, “It’s not cheap. But you know, I went to the drugstore the other day and sat near the cash register way in the back. I listened to several customers paying for their prescriptions. The least anyone paid was $85, and it went on up to over $300. Have you ever spent that kind of money on drugs after you lost your health?”

In just a few words, your vitamins now look like a bargain. You could never have “sold” me into changing my mind. But a pointed story can put my objection in a whole different light.

StumbleUpon and the other social bookmarking and social networking media give you the chance to tell your stories 24 hours a day. Campfires are everywhere. What will really pay off for you with the social networking media is to keep a diary of every great story you come up with (related to your business or product).

Be subtle. Don’t beat anyone over the head. Get good at telling those stories in print. Share them in StumbleUpon and your other chosen social networking communities. It’s way more effective than selling.

Here’s a social marketing plan to build your brand on the social bookmarking and social networking websites:

1. Be there or be square. The value of social media is in the relationships. Online relationships are just like offline relationships. If you aren’t there, you have no relationship. If you work at finding friends for 5 days, then go away for 6 weeks and come back, it’s not the same. You can’t just pick up right where you left off. That’s not how “social” works, online or offline.

You have to apply consistent, day-to-day attention, or you’ll just waste your time. And the more consistent you are, the more you remind people of your brand. Your market can potentially find you through every action you do. So be active on the social marketing websites. Every action you take opens the door for people to connect with your website or your blog or you.

2. Speaking of consistent - if you want to use the social media, it’s good to REALLY learn a handful of social bookmarking or social networking sites. Choose the same username for each. This increases your presence, gets you more notice, makes you more … social. If you want to promote your blog, maybe you focus on Technorati, StumbleUpon, and Digg. Start out by targeting 10 minutes a day on each, and do it. Keep a consistent message across all your social marketing profiles, consistent voice, style, topics you cover, avatar, etc. Doing this reinforces both your image and your brand.

3. Support the entire StumbleUpon community … or whichever sites you focus on. If you spend time on a forum, you’ll sometimes hear the guests grouse about the “drive-bys”. Those are the forum visitors who post once about whatever it is they’re promoting and then disappear for months … until they post about the next thing they’re promoting. They add no value to the group. They have no sense of community. They are looked on as scum by the “residents”. It’s tempting to just promote yourself. Millions of people use these sites. But what actually happens is, people take more notice of you when you become a useful social marketing resource. And that entices other social networkers to share your blog and speed up your popularity. If all you ever do is point to yourself, those others won’t participate as much.

4. Ride the “social” wave. If you do the first 3 items on this list, then you will have put yourself in position for #4. When your social marketing appears consistently across several social media and you demonstrate your desire to give people the best results possible when they search your niche, you will build a following.

And, of course, that’s why you joined most of these social marketing sites in the first place.

Obviously, you want to maximize the social networking value of your blog. For that to happen, your blog content needs to be fresh and enticing and insightful and most of all, targeted to your market’s most passionate desires. If you do these things, they’ll keep coming back … and they’ll tell their friends.

But how do you get them there in the first place?

You do that by creating good entry points. One blogger calls it “Hansel and Gretel Marketing” (leaving crumbs around to help others find your blog). Your goal is to ultimately have your readers create these links themselves.

Until that happens, you need to be the one dropping crumbs in all the right places:

• Create really useful and thoughtful blog posts, then request a link from the top blogs in your niche.
• Guest-write a post now and then (best: feature a market-specific use of social networking) for other high-traffic blogs.
• Learn and use some basic Search Engine Optimization for your blog.
• Set up social marketing profiles at StumbleUpon, MySpace, YouTube, etc., and link to your blog in your profile.
• One idea that can easily go viral on the social networking media is a resource list. If you know exactly what your target market wants and needs, spend time creating a special blog post where you give them a resource list. This is exactly the type of post that can get you featured on StumbleUpon or Digg or other social bookmarking sites.

You can also comment on other blogs or forums in your topic and leave your blog url. But to do this consistently takes many, many hours a week. It’s probably more time-effective to invest a few hours creating that ONE special blog post that really optimizes your social network marketing.

“Googling” is everywhere. We’ve all heard of employees getting fired - or applicants not hired - because of their Facebook or MySpace profile. And when you search for a potential employer, you might find a list of lawsuits, complaints and “IHateAcme.com” websites. Or you might find a list of company press releases. Either way, there’s a good chance what you find will influence your impression.

To monitor that “you” brand:

1. Set up Google Alerts for your name
2. Check Technorati regularly for your name in blogs
3. Check Google Video for your name in videos

How can you help make sure that your “YOU” brand shows up positively & accurately?

Don’t reveal everything to the world in your social networking profiles or on your blogs. Think what you would want to find in the social media if you were hiring “you”. Then create a professional profile to match for Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.

Register “yourname.com”, if it’s available. If not, get the .net domain or .org or one of the others. Set up a blog, if you don’t have one, with this domain name. Anyone who links will probably use your name for anchor text. Your blog can link to your Facebook profile, or YouTube video, or Flickr photos, etc. You can write up a bio for your “About me” page & link to a resume.

Link from your blog to your articles posted online, and to the positive pages created about you. Be sure to go to Digg & StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites to bookmark these pages.

Whenever you put something online, remind yourself: “This is eternal.” Because it pretty much is.

You don’t need to do all this reputation management today. But long-range, this plan will strengthen that brand of “YOU.”

Matt Ridout at SeoUnique Blog interviewed 5 “power” social marketers to see what makes them different from the rest of us, and to get an idea what the benefits are to someone who spends several hours a day at social bookmarking websites.

Some of their random thoughts:

• The sites they visit most are Mixx.com and StumbleUpon.com
• Each social bookmarking site has certain content that works better than other content. You have to hang out on the site awhile to figure it out.
• StumbleUpon.com has the most potential benefit for clients, no matter the size. It’s a great variation of personalities and interests; any niche gets good response, so long as you post good content; and you can use StumbleUpon to track what your friends think is important.
• Sphinn.com - social bookmarking for SEO, social marketing and social media. The SEO pros lurk here, so what you post better be good.
• Science & technology topics have a large following on social bookmarking sites, so the right science/tech post has high “viral” bookmarking potential
• The site most mentioned as “least liked” is Reddit.com, because it isn’t designed to be easy to use.

Overall, these power users choose a favorite social bookmarking site because it allows them to feel very “at home”. They find a site with a lot of other participants they respect, and that gives them the chance to build valuable relationships. Which, of course, is what social marketing is all about.

It’s called “social” for a reason. People go to StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking websites to share and learn and help each other and have fun … to be social.

If you use StumbleUpon only to promote a website, the “real” Stumblers will shun you. You are fairly easy to spot, because you skip the social aspect. You give your page “Thumbs Up,” and that is the end of your effort. But becoming part of the social mix is quick and simple: when you Stumble a page, write a review.

It doesn’t have to be lengthy, but it does need to be original. Don’t just copy wording from the page you are stumbling - that’s what most people do, and the SU pros mark you as a rank amateur with nothing to contribute.

Instead, find something really good on that target page - whether it’s your own page or not - some really good insight or technique, valuable to your target market. Write an original comment about that single point. A couple of sentences or a paragraph is fine, but be very definite about the point you make. When you do that, you help others make a decision, and you have become part of the StumbleUpon social bookmarking “in” group. You will attract fans, which is a very good thing for your business.

When you leave a review, you are not just telling other Stumblers about the webpage. You are telling them about YOU, making it much easier for your target market to find you and connect with you.

StumbleUpon is one of the most popular social bookmarking and social networking sites online. There’s a good reason for this. It’s hard to classify SU as social bookmarking or social networking because it incorporates elements of both so well. I particularly like SUs toolbar, which gives users a one-click approach to voting for or against a site. If you like the site you just click the thumbs up icon. Don’t like it? Click the thumbs down button.

There are some downsides to StumbleUpon though. For instance, if you are the first person to vote on a site and you don’t like it then you can’t add it to the SU community. SU won’t let you. That’s a bummer. But I’ve recently discovered another weakness of the system, although my observation at this point is merely a hypothesis.

If you bookmark an entire blog - that is, the home page - then go back later and try to thumbs up a specific blog post, SU won’t let you. Click on the thumbs up button and you’ll get a gray thumb and no response. I believe this is because you’ve already shown that you like the entire site, therefore saying that you like a particular post is redundant. At least that’s the way SU sees it. For this reason, I recommend only voting for individual blog posts.

I wonder if anyone else has had this experience with StumbleUpon and if so, what did you do about it.