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I like Stumbleupon a lot and have been using it effectively for over 6 months now. It is a social site that is both easy to use and easy to get volumes of traffic from. Even with just posting, with no "send to" or what is called "forced stumbling", I usually expect 200 visits or more per post. I have liked it so much, I wrote a series on how to use Stumbleupon effectively. The links to the series follows: Introduction Fresh Content Tagging Your Posts Making and Keeping Friends Becoming a Top Stumbler But something is missing. I have been running an experiment with Stumbleupon recently and have previously posted on Stumbleupon - Advanced Tactics. Friends are always the key to getting traffic from a social site if that is your goal. Your goal may be getting attention and being called an "attention whore". And maybe you are using a social site just to socialize and share. This post topped out at 616 unique page views on 11/28/07 and then dropped down to nothing. The CTR was zero, of course I do not run any ads on my blog at the moment, but when I was I noticed that the CTR from Stumbleupon traffic was zero. In the process of driving traffic way up and then it dropping down to a trickle, what is left besides the memory of the adrenaline rush and the possible new fan? I have found this missing something in Mixx.com and have found that the basics covered in my series about Stumbleupon apply to Mixx quite effectively. Mixx advantage #1 - Email. Stumbleupon uses it's own email form. Emails can sit there for days, weeks, even months before getting answered if the Stumbler remains innactive. I have had this happen frequently. Mixx uses good old fashioned email to notify Mixxers of shared links, comments, comments to your comments, and when someone makes you their friend. Mixx gives you the choices necessary to block incoming emails if you should so choose. The from address is mixx@mixx.com so there is no chance of spamming your friends. The email notification is your chance to reciprocate friendship. Otherwise you can sift through your fan list in Mixx to determine which ones you have not reciprocated with. Mixx advantage #2 - Broadcasts. Stumbleupon calls this the "forced Stumble" where you send it to your list of friends. Stumbleupon only allows you to send a link to one and only one of your friends at a time. You have to re-paste any message you want to send with every request. If you have a list of 200 friends, this can be quite time consuming. At my best, this has taken me up to an hour to complete. Mixx, on the other hand, takes about one minute to check the check boxes in your friends list . You only have to enter a message once. Put in the capcha letters for security then hit the submit button, and off it goes! Mixx advantage #3 - No limit on the number of friends you can have. Not yet at least. Digg limits you on how many you can add in one day. Stumbleupon maxes you out at 200. So far, Mixx has no limits whatsoever. Mixx advantage #4 - Popularity. Do you know why the top Stumblers and top Diggers are where they are today? It is partly because they started at the beginning. Mixx is now about two months old and has just been getting a lot of attention the last couple of weeks. Start Mixxing now and in a year you could have a great number of posts in Mixx. I made it to the Top Mixxer page, called The Mixx Lounge in about 3 days of posting frequently and applying the social basics, especially finding and keeping friends. It is not hard in Mixx at this point. Mixx advantage #5 - No posting limits. Stumbleupon has built in Spam limits which prevent you from submitting from the same url over and over again. I find that I have to fill up a blog page with posts from urls other than my own and only submit 1 or 2 from my own to avoid this filter. Of course, if you want to be a popular poster in Mixx, you should learn how to post from some of your favorite blogs and news sites. I do not think that Mixx will leave things this way for long. Digg and Propeller ban urls for this reason frequently. Don't be selfish! Mixx advantage #6 - Real back links. Stumbleupon uses the nofollow in it's outbound links in wholesale fashion. Mixx has no "nofollow" in their outbound html links. At least not yet. Once Mixx gets above a pr4, this should mean more Google backlinks to the post urls that you submit, including your own urls. Mixx advantage #7 - An afterlife. By an afterlife, I mean those posts that have been relegated to the “Report This” link. The posts are not deleted. They are posted under the mix user exMixxer userID for other Mixxers to enjoy. Mixx advantage #8 - Favorites. Both Stumbleupon and Mixx have the means to add to favorites within their own site, Stumbleupon with the thumbs up button and Mixx with the star that appears to the right of the posts title. The advantage Mixx has is that the top ten posts that have been marked favorite show up in the Mixx Lounge creating yet another chance at more traffic to the post. Overall, Mixx is a different kind of social media site. It's design is borrowed from some of the best characteristics of all the popular social sites including Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, del.icio.us, and more. The biggest difference is that it is very much easier to "rinse and repeat" the process on a daily basis and keep the traffic coming without having to communicate to your network that you have a new post. Of course, if you want a traffic boost, you should communicate to your network. Long term traffic should come from the search engines as a result of the default "dofollow" back linking. This traffic should be quality targeted traffic based on the keywords in the post and tags used in Mixx. Come, visit me at Mixx.com and see for yourself. Add me as your friend while you are at it.
Bart The Bear Says - Leave me some comments please... 
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6 Comments:
nice post! i'm new to social bookmarking and the sorts, so all this info is good for me. lots of carbs! i must agree that mixx seems the easiest to use of the systems. i don't dig digg all that much. but once again, social sites without friends are pretty useless...
1:56 PM
I don't necessarily agree with your idea that Mixx is better than StumbleUpon.
I see them both new but with a great potential. They both grow fast and I'm sure they'll become the most popular social bookmarking websites on the Internet.
And this will probably happen very soon. :)
3:26 PM
My best response to Monica is contained in the comments I made over in Sphinn
3:43 PM
Hey Leonard, what I like about Mixx is that it's new. That's the key to SB sites, you've got to get in on the ground floor so you can reap the benefits.
11:33 PM
For those of you interested in making this a competition of sorts, the results are contained in my latest comment at http://www.mixx.com/stories/23756/why-mixx-is-better-than-stumbleupon
1:55 PM
http://www.subbmitt.com is better.
11:46 AM
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