After some recommendations from friends, I signed up to Pay Per Post. Quite a few people have said their SERPs have been penalised because of it, but I shall soon find out.

From first glance it seems to be quite interesting. You get paid quite a lot for just making blog posts for advertisers. For example, a welcome post gives you $20! You get more and better opportunities if you have better traffic, higher PageRank, you write better etc…

Obviously I’m going to be making some of the posts here on Site SEO. I shall try to keep it down to a minimum so it doesn’t totally ruin the blog, but you may see a few posts here and there.

Hopefully Pay Per Post will be a success for me, and hopefully you’ll discover it if you haven’t already.

Incase you don’t know the link, you can find it at payperpost

If you don’t know already, Stumbleupon and are both popular Social Bookmarking websites that are commonly used by webmasters in an attempt to increase website traffic.

Both of them have their positives and negatives, and they’re going to be discussed so you know which of them is the best.

StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking website where if people like your website/webpage, they can “Stumble” your website and maybe even add a review about it. This will increase the popularity of your website/webpage on StumbleUpon because it will appear higher on the Search, and hopefully get you more traffic.

Positives

• Is known to send constant traffic to websites
• Can easily be manipulated by asking people to Stumble
• Popular, so a lot more people will see your website

Negatives

• Doesn’t really send a big amount of traffic all at once
• Users don’t generally click ads or anything
• If you can’t get people to stumble it in the first place, then you won’t get anything from it

Digg
Digg is a social bookmarking website, like StumbleUpon, but its arranged completely differently. With Digg, if people like your webpage or article, they can “Digg” it and then will be added to a total of Diggs you have. Basically, its like a voting system, the more diggs you get, the higher you’ll get in the categories.

Positives

• If on the frontpage, can send massive traffic at once
• Very popular, great for traffic
• In some ways easy to manipulate, but they catch out spam submissions and spam diggs

Negatives

• Doesn’t send constant traffic, normally starts high and then slows down a lot
• Very difficult to get on the frontpage unless it is a really good article
• Digg are on the lookout for people exchanging diggs

Conclusion
In my opinion, the best out of the two is Digg. This is because if you create quality articles that people want to read, and you know how to get a few diggs to start with, it can send a massive amount of traffic (Especially if on the frontpage). If you get onto the frontpage, you could expect around 50,000 visitors on your website within a couple of days! StumbleUpon is good, but it just doesn’t have the same effect.

If you own a new (or dead) forum, then you probably will want it to be more active. This guide should explain to you how you can go about doing this. Afterall, who wants a dead community?

First of all, if you have only a few members, try to get a few friends to register and make some posts. It should automatically make your forum look like its more active and it will get a few more posts in and free up those empty categories.

Secondly, submit your forum to social bookmarking websites, such as StumbleUpon and Digg. If you can also get a few friends to give you diggs or stumbles, then it may just give you more traffic. If you pay for people to digg your article, you may find it goes to the frontpage if you’re lucky, and that sends out massive traffic.

Thirdly, you could do SEO to get your site ranking higher on Google. That means doing all the ordinary stuff - More backlinks, META Tags, webpage optimization etc… If you do all of this correctly, your rankings should be higher, and it may get you the organic traffic that your website needs.

Fourthly, you could simply spend a bit of money advertising on other websites with banners or text links. If you’re doing this, make sure that the website is at least remotely related to your website and that it has a lot of traffic going to it. If not, it would be quite a waste of money!

Fifthly, you could also spend some money on pay per play advertising such as Google Adwords, Yahoo or Bidvertiser. The more popular, the better. Hopefully your campaigne will be successful for you to get more traffic and more importantly, members and posts.

Finally, you could do the basic stuff such as putting the link to the forum in your signature on other forums, such as webmaster forums, or you could simply seek other forums and blogs are that related to your niche and then make more posts and hope that other members visit your website.

Thank you for reading it. All feedback is appreciated.