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Driving mammoth traffic from sites such as StumbleUpon or Digg can become addictive. And just like any other addiction, you’ll get joyous highs… and cruel lows.

The Clinical Condition

It’s all about mathematics. Statistics, that is. When you wake up in the morning and rush—blurry-eyed and bed-headed—to the computer without even going for coffee first, you are showing signs of stats addiction.

• What will the daily visitors’ graph show me this morning?
• Did it go up?
• Did it go down?
• Damn it! It went down again

You know you’re gonna have to face it, you’re addicted to blog.

As a result, you are tempted by the dark side of the blogging force. At first glance, you may be seduced by the idea of joining obscure voting clubs. But it’s to your benefit to show a little restraint.

Voting clubs are most popular among new bloggers intently promoting their blog. For A-list bloggers counting RSS subscribers by the thousand, voting clubs are a waste of time, since their content gets promoted heavily by a steady, large readership. But for new bloggers counting RSS subscribers by the dozen, it can be difficult to get posts submitted and voted for on social media sites. Hence, the joining obscure voting clubs makes more sense.

Watchdog

Before going over to the dark side, you need to understand how social media sites work. One of the first things developers are working on when designing services such as StumbleUpon or Digg, is the backbone algorithm. This complex functionality has many responsibilities, such as :

• Detecting good content
• Finding bad content
• Monitoring submissions to increase and decrease promoted content
• Acting as a watchdog; looking for suspicious voting patterns trying to trick the system

Charlie, the watchdog, is often the most complicated portion of the algorithm. It literally has a brain (database) where it stores learned patterns. And just as a human being might, if the pattern is repeated, Charlie recognizes the action. This is called the learning process. Ok, enough with the computer science, back to SMO.

6 Things You Should Know About Voting Clubs

If you have joined or if you are about to join a voting club, there are a few things you need to know. This could prevent you from being kicked out and even banned from social media sites.

1. Do not vote for all requests
Many voting club members will be sending you vote requests using direct links to the submissions. While this saves time, it prevents you from seeing the actual posts. Before promoting a request, click the link (usually the submission’s title) to check out the content.

2. Do not vote obvious affiliate marketing offers
SU, Digg and other social media sites are no place for crappy offers. Remember why you enjoy Stumbling and reading Digg. You get the best content the web has to offer.

3. Do not vote for content you don’t find interesting
Did you know that the content you promote goes straight to your friends and followers? If you promote poor quality articles, chances are you will be losing some of your fans. This directly affects your reputation. You could, however, vote for a post that look appealing, even if you don’t have affinities with the main topic. Just use common sense.

4. Do not vote for something that’s not previously submitted… unless it is gold
Discovering good content raises your profile, finding poor material does the exact opposite. Caroline Middlebrook discussed content promotion in a recent post, and I strongly recommend you give it a shot.

5. Do not vote for something you would have voted down
I’m not a big fan of thumbs down buttons. I think I used it twice on SU, not long after I registered my account. But at that time, I was not yet familiar with the concept. Voting content down is frequently perceived as rude, so I refrain from doing it. However, if I would stumble on a Smiley Central offer, or a free ringtone download page (both being affiliate marketing), I would not hesitate to help burry the submission.

6. Be very aware that reciprocal voting is strictly forbidden
Nothing more to say, now you know.

A Legitimate Voting Club?

While it’s difficult to imagine how voting clubs could be legitimate, if you DON”T misbehave and DO apply the guidelines listed above, it makes the experience much better not only for you, but for your followers and the whole community. There is something very important to understand about social media sites: they exist to promote what’s best, please keep that in mind.

Summary

StumbleUpon, Digg and other social media sites receive tons of spam content each day. While Charlie is trained to smell them quickly, you can help him by only promoting valuable pages. Don’t try to trick the system. Produce valuable content and instead of receiving 50 Stumblers or two diggers (who’ll spend .01524 seconds on your site), you could get thousands of quality visitors from one single submission. Don’t you find the idea far more exciting?

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