Internet Business Blog

So last night before heading out to the Minnesota Wild playoff game versus the always tough Colorado Avalanche I found out that my Stumble Upon account had been frozen and “under review”. Surely enough, I logged in to my account this morning and found a nice little email in my inbox.

The email read as follows:

Regrettably, your account privileges have been suspended due to a breach of our TOS. I respectfully draw your attention to our Terms, particularly with respect to the clauses which forbid the use of personal accounts for the promotion of a business, product or service, and also with regard to the sending of ’spam’ messages to other members.

Our terms can be found here: http://www.stumbleupon.com/terms.html

Under the circumstances, the restriction is unlikely to be lifted.

Regards

Barry Conway (SU Community Support Manager)

Here is my public reply to StumbleUpon:

Dear SU,
You fucking suck. You’re going to ban me over one QUALITY business link from nearly four months ago when competitors pull the same exact shit on a daily basis? Never mind the hundreds of interesting links that I have discovered for you, or the thousands of thumbs up (and down) that I have given – and certainly never mind my community participation with seventy friends and a PR4 profile page. Sounds like a GREAT idea.

I think it’s fair to say that at least half of your stumble volume consists of proxy sites, myspace layout sites, worthless blogs, and scrapers. Come to think of it, that sounds like a neighborhood that I don’t want to be a part of anyway.

P.S. Stumble my nuts, bitch.

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Social bookmarking has taken the internet by storm over the past couple of years. It now even has its own category on many established webmaster forums, and certainly has its own special spot within my list of proven internet marketing techniques.

Per Wikipedia:

On a social bookmarking system or network, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists can be accessible to the public by users of a specific network or website. Other users with similar interests can view the links by topic, category, tags, or even randomly.

Other than web page bookmarks, services specialized to a specific subject or format - feeds, books, videos, shopping items, map locations, wineries, etc. - can be found.

There are many reasons why you should use social networking to your benefit, but let’s take a look at three specific advantages for the sake of this post.

Reason 1

Reach people, fast. Social Bookmarking is the way to reach a large audience quickly, without having a large audience-base yourself. Though this traffic is often temporary, that is not always the case because I do see traffic from posts of mine which were first social bookmarked about months ago. I also like this method because many visitors’ will either a) become active readers through either bookmarking the site themselves or b) subscribe to my Feedburner RSS (Really Simple Syndication).

Reason 2

The Snowball effect. Often times when a great post is submitted to a social bookmarking site it will be bumped higher and higher and may even eventually hit their front page. When a post of mine is Dugg or Stumbled traffic can often skyrocket. It’s not uncommon to see a website temporarily exceed its bandwidth limits thanks to social bookmarking and in my opinion that is an excellent problem to have.

Reason 3

It’s Cost effective. It doesn’t get any more cost effective than free and social bookmarking is just that, Free. It only takes a few minutes of your time but I highly recommend that if you do bookmark your own sites to take the time to bookmark others as well. Not only will this make you look better in the long run but it will support the cause, and you will undoubtedly learn something new each time.

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I feel that it’s important to note that social networking isn’t just for blogs anymore. You can bookmark many press releases (think PRWeb), news, retail product sales, and classified advertisements if they are deemed bookmark worthy. If you’re not sure where to start, visit Digg or StumbleUpon and start bookmarking!

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