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I was simply amazed with all the traffic I got from StumbleUpon yesterday with my post, 5 Helpful Sites You Should Be Aware Of. And I’m still receiving so many hits from that article!

I got on and I went to my Live plugin and saw all the views that were coming referred by StumbleUpon, and it was for an article I didn’t stumble. Well, someone else had stumbled it, and 40 other people had rated it a thumbs up!

Then later on I noticed hits coming from Popurls. My article had been featured under the StumbleUpon section, which just amazed me (I still consider myself quite the amateur blogger). I just started using StumbleUpon again after I’d given up on it a long time ago, but now I see how much it can help getting traffic. I’ve gotten more hits today than I’ve ever gotten before. I’ve also had more people online at one time than ever before - 139!!!

After I discovered how well that article was doing with StumbleUpon, I added a Google Adsense block to it, which surely benefit me some more.

What is the point of this post, you ask? Well, basically I’m telling you that when your right articles meet StumbleUpon, something magical happens. Hehe. If you have a blog and you don’t have StumbleUpon, you’re missing out on some valuable traffic - and even some valuable entertainment. Whenever I get bored, I can spend hours stumbling and rating interesting websites!

The thing is, I never would have seen that that article would have had StumbleUpon potential. It just listed five helpful site tools! But because that post was stumbled, so many new records have been broken on this blog in just one or two days. Like I said, if you haven’t already, you really need to join StumbleUpon, or else you’re missing out on great opportunities for traffic. Even if not every post is a StumbleUpon hit, each post will still get you some traffic.

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In every job, in everything you do, there will always be someone who is rude. That is the same for blogging. I’ve recently had an unpleasant experience with a person - I will not name any names. But when you come across a situation like this, you need to try your best to handle it properly. I hope I handled it properly.

Pretty much I discovered someone who had copied one of my articles and pasted it on their blog. This person wasn’t completely wrong though - at the end of their post, they had written “Original post by Tay” with a link to me. However, my problem was that they had reposted my whole article in its entirety. It’s not like they had stolen it completely.

I posted a comment on their post (my comment never would have gotten posted, because it had to be approved first). I said something along the lines of, “I know you linked to me and gave me credit at the very end of the post, but I would appreciate if you did not have the article up in its entirety.” This does, after all, create double content for the search engines which is a bad thing. I also said that in some ways it appears as if the owner of the blog wrote the article, when really I did. I asked nicely if they could remove it or change it to only show a portion of the article, with a link back to my post so the readers could continue here.

A few hours later I received a comment (which I did not accept to show on this blog). The person told me something like this: “If you had read the whole thing and got to the end, you would have seen I had linked to you. I did not say I wrote the article!! You’re an asshole and I unsubscribed from you on my RSS feed.” Along with a couple other things.

I told them that I did not say they had taken credit, but that was how it was perceived in some ways. I also had clearly stated to them that I had KNOWN they linked to me. I appreciated that they did. However, all I asked was the article not be posted in its entirety, and that only a segment be shown instead. This would have solved all problems, and if the person had said okay, everything would have been fine and dandy. I mean, what was so hard with just agreeing? Posting a portion and linking to the rest would not have hurt a thing. But instead this person had to call me an asshole and threaten me with unsubscribing (which was a pointless threat, really).

They did remove the post. But they did not have to handle this so immaturely. They made a big deal out of nothing, and had to resort to calling me names, over absolutely nothing. I really do feel flattered that they liked my article enough to put it up on their own blog. All I asked was one little thing - that it not be posted in its entirety. And I asked nicely too. Instead I received a comment with a fake email attached to it which included the words “fat chance”, was called a mean name, and treated pretty unfairly. It was my content that I had written, so what was so wrong here?

This is NOT an attack on the person. This is actually my first experience like this, and I am just saying I knew I would have to handle something like this eventually, and I was hoping I did it right. I am trying to understand why they felt like they had to be so defensive, and if I handled the matter properly. Should I have let it slip and not asked if the article not be posted in its full entirety? Should I have been fine with the link back to my blog? Or did I do the right thing, and did they just get a little upset over nothing? When I first commented this person I asked nicely, called no names. What I said was received completely wrong on the other end. But did I deal with it correctly? Was having the article put up in its entirety a big deal or not?

Once again, I’d like to say this is not an attack. I’m not naming names. And I really DO appreciate and feel very flattered when people like my content enough to put it on their blogs. All I ask for is a link back to me (which this person DID provide), and that the post not be just copied and pasted in its entirety from my blog. I please ask that just a portion be shown with a link to my original post saying, “click here to read more”. Maybe also at the beginning of the post saying that I wrote the article, so it is not mistaken? That is not asking too much, is it?

If I’m being way too uptight about this, let me know what you think please. And I want to know if I should have said anything about the article being put up in its entirety or not. Did that matter? Also, my readers, have you ever had to deal with someone being rude and much too defensive other nothing in your blogging experiences? Thank you for reading.

UPDATE: I am rather confused. He links to all kinds of Ebay related things and also lists his RSS as one that actually isn’t his. I’m trying to figure out what he’s trying to do.

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I’m very happy to announce I’ve broken Technorati’s top 10K. At the time of writing my authority is 378, my rank is 9,780. There are 562 links to Super Blogging. But while it is great, it is a bittersweet victory.

Why? I did not earn this myself, from hard work and determination. Most of my links are from viral linking trains (ViraLink and ViralTags). While many are genuine links to my blog and my posts, a lot are not. While I love being under 10,000 in my ranking, sometimes I just wish I could see how long it would have taken me to achieve that on my own.

Another downside, besides it not being completely honest, is punishment from Google. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of bloggers participated in the viral trains, ViralTags especially. Google cannot punish them all (can they?) but it still leaves me worried. If your links are not genuine it can end up damaging you in the long run, something I didn’t think of before.

But I hope everything turns out okay for this blog, even if I did use the “cheating” way of getting links. Before I talked about how I didn’t consider it cheating. I still don’t think it’s plain old cheating, but it’s not a hundred percent honest either, because I would not have gotten all those links otherwise.

In the future I probably will not join in on link trains anymore. Not only can it get me in trouble and allow me to get away with not working as hard, but posting the trains does not provide good content for my readers and might even drive them away.

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If you’ve been reading lately you might know that I’ve written an article on MyBlogLog before, found here. It’s about using MBL effectively, and talks about visiting sites with the recent reader widget installed, having a very noticeable icon, and joining communities. Now I’d like to talk more about joining communities.

I have been joining 15 communities a day (or I try), and this creates so much exposure for me. When you join a community on MyBlogLog, it lists you as a member of that community as your icon and it links to your profile. If people see your icon in the community and click on it, they’ll be taken to your profile, and all they have to do then is click through to your site! I’m very happy to announce that MyBlogLog is now in my top referrers for traffic. Many of the people who visit this blog get here from seeing me on MBL!!

If you want that kind of traffic and exposure, you’ve got to join 15 communities a day (I would join more but 15 is the limit). The more you join, the more you’ll be seen. Especially join the communities that are relevant to your niche, but don’t stop there! I join them all.

If you find it hard to join 15 communities a day, then you can make it a little easier on yourself and let MyBlogLog do all the work for you. By changing one setting, they will automatically join you to all the communities of the sites you show interest in. Here’s how you do it. Go to ‘edit profile’, then scroll all the way down. You will see under preferences something that says ‘join a community after’… Select ‘10 page views’. Then after you have viewed any blog 10 times, you will automatically be joined to their community. Fantastic, isn’t it?!

Joining MyBlogLog communities is most effective for getting traffic and exposure, but you can also add people as friends and be shown on their profile as well. You can even use the mass message option for everyone in YOUR community, but a lot of people frown on that and think it’s like spam, so I wouldn’t recommend doing that, but it’s your choice.

The most important thing is just having an interesting, bright icon people will click on. Look at your current icon and ask yourself if it will stand out among the others. If it’s not the most eye-catching, it won’t be the most effective either. Good luck, and please consider visiting and joining the Super Blogging community.

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There are so many sites out there that are helpful tools, and I have plenty of them in my bookmarks! However, today I will introduce you to five of the websites I have favorited for quick access, and I hope at least a couple of them will be useful to you.

1.) JotForm - This site is a tool for an easy form builder. You can make contact forms, satisfaction surveys, job applications, time sheets, and party RSVP’s, just to name a few. You can also use the blank form and mold it into anything you want, and have it include dropdown menus, checkboxes, file uploaders, buttons, text, and more. In your creation you can add a captcha, a password box, birthdate picker, and dozens more. Using JotForm, you can create almost any kind of form or survey imaginable. It’s a pretty handy tool, especially if you need to make something for your website.

2.) Alphabetize - I found this one over at MAMD. You can paste any list into it and it will arrange every item to alphabetical order. It can also make everything lowercase, capitalize the first words in your list, remove duplicates, reverse the whole list, randomize, add any word or symbol of your choice to the start or end of each word, or a mixture of all those things at once. Also a very powerful tool this site provides, it can strip the HTML from whatever you paste into it! Check it out and see for yourself.

3.) Keyword Suggestion Tool - This is a free tool that lets you enter any keyword, and it will give you up to 100 related keywords and an estimate of their DAILY search volume. This can be extremely helpful to bloggers, especially if you want to get ranked for your keywords and include important keywords in your posts.

4.) Hundreds of Free Icons - At this site you will find so many icons you can use that are from the Crystal Clear icon set. Icons for actions, applications, devices, file systems, KDM, and MIME-types are all here. You can use the small version of the icon, or click on it and get the larger version. I don’t know how often you’ll be needing any of these but when you do this can be very helpful.

5.) Cliché Finder - If you like to make your content interesting, then you might want to consider adding some clichés to spice it up a bit. You can search for any word that may appear in your cliché, or you can select to view ten random clichés. For example, when I clicked to see some random clichés, the first one it gave me was “faster than a jackrabbit”. This might not be something you use that often, but if you ever want to say something and make it a little more exciting, this could come in handy.

There you have it! Five handy-dandy websites you can use. I will try to share helpful sites in list posts like this from time to time. I hope any of these might be useful to you in some way.

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