There are obviously two factors that play a role here. The amount of traffic that can come from Twitter depends largely on the Twitter users who post links pointing to a website on Twitter. The more users and the higher their follower count the better. It certainly depends on the content as well but the content is usually of interest if it is posted by a user.

Some webmasters like to monitor the dynamic process more thoroughly. The default Twitter search engine is no real help when it comes to discovering links pointing to a specific url or website on Twitter. BackTweets is a third party search engine that offers more reliable results. A search for ghacks.net would reveal nine results at the Twitter search engine and more than 4000 results at the BackTweets engine.

Results display the Twitter user who made the post, the post contents and the time it was posted. A click on the user icon or name will open the Twitter user page. A good way of finding new users to follow (and to thank them for posting links). An advanced search form is available as well which can be used to search in a specific date range or by Twitter user.

Backtweets is an interesting service for webmasters who want to analyse and increase the traffic that Twitter is sending to their websites.

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Amberjack is a virtual tour software that can be used to create website tours without programming knowledge. It basically offers a site wizard that can be used to create a tour based on urls pasted by the user. The urls should be on the same domain as the technique behind the virtual tour requires a bit of code to be integrated into the source code of the website. That might sound complicated but it is not at all.

The virtual tour wizard on the developer’s website provides access to a few skins (with the option to create unique ones which does require CSS skills) and several parameters that define certain aspects of the tour. The text that is displayed during the tour can be edited right in the source code after the virtual tour has been created. Website visitors can stop the tour at any time to explore the currently active page. The tour creator has the option to close the tour controls at this time or open the active url in a new tab so that the tour itself stays open.

Webmasters can use the virtual tour software Amberjack to create tours of their websites easily. It only takes a few minutes to create a tour and integrate it in an existing website.

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Webmasters need a local html file so that it can be loaded into the software program. The easiest way to achieve this is to go to the website that should be validated, view the source code of it and save it as html on the computer system.

This html file can then be loaded and analyzed in the software. The html code will then be validated by the software. It will immediately jump to the first error in the code and link it to the errors and comments in the footer area. This makes it very easy to understand (in most cases) why something is not right with the code. It is possible to edit the html code right in the HTML Validator to correct the errors that have been discovered. It is still necessary to correct the error on the web as well obviously if the html code has been downloaded from the web.

The program comes with a few additional functions that help in certain cases. It is for example possible to convert all tags of the html document to lowercase, find and replace code in the html file or to use a spell checker.

CSE HTML Validator Lite can be downloaded from the developer’s website. It is available for all Windows operating systems including Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

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Not everyone wants to pay to monitor websites though. The free portable software program SiteMonitor provides a local solution for the Windows operating system. It requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 and can be configured to monitor selected websites and notify the user if they become unreachable. It is a good alternative as long as it is run on a computer system that is online 24/7.

New urls can be added easily to SiteMonitor. All that it takes is to add a descriptive name, an url and HTML to match which is simply content that should appear on the website. The website monitoring software will check every 30 minutes by default; To much for important websites. The interval can be changed in the options. The options are also the place where the notification preferences can be edited. The website monitor provides two different types of reactions to website connection problems:

• Run a script or executable, e.g. a script that will restart a server or service
• Send email to notify a user about the connection problem

The amount of failures before either one of the reactions will be initiated can be configured in the same menu as well.

Below is the small php script that we use to check if the database is up and running on Ghacks:

<?php
$dbhost = 'localhost';
$dbuser = 'username';
$dbpass = 'password';

?>

replace username with the database username, password with the password of the username and databasename with the name of the database. Save it as database.php, upload it to your website and load the new file. It should display ok if the database is up and error if it is down. The url that points to the script can then be added to the website monitoring software to check if it returns ok. If it does the website is up, if it does not it is down.

Alternatives are the Website Monitor and Downloader Wysigot, Montastic or the Server Monitor Observu.

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Performing that task manually can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days depending on the type of website or project. Hundreds of factors can play a role in determining the real value of a website.

There is another solution albeit less accurate and not suitable for serious business. Website value calculators will analyze and calculate a value of a website in seconds. Stimator is one of those websites and it provides one of the slickest professional interfaces in the niche.

The value of a website is analyzed and calculated as soon as the user enters the domain name in the form on the page. Several different values like backlinks, traffic levels, social and inlinking scores, web recognition and linking data are computed and part of the calculation of the final value.

The site seems to be more accurate than most comparable sites as it lists $1,349,935 as the value of ghacks.net, hehe.

A report can be opened that is displaying several of the scores of the analyzed website. These scores are explained in the about page. The page does not say how they are computed but it lists factors that influence the score.

No value calculator will ever be dead on but there are some that can provide a first impression of a websites value. Serious website buyers on the other hand will never rely on these tools alone but perform a manual analysis before they consider bidding or buying a website.

Are you a webmaster? What is the value of your website according to the tool? Do you think it is dead on or way off?

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Opinions about those sites differ from letting them do what they want with your content to contacting lawyers and suing them. Clever webmasters can use content copying websites to their advantage if they play their cards right. Since most of those websites use RSS feeds to automatically post the copied contents they include links in those posts automatically. Some even post tags or related posts of the original site as well.

This means that every link that you post in the original article will be posted by them as well if they have automated the process which in turn means free inbound links to your website. It gets better. If they do link back to your site as they should they usually use the title of the article to do so. This means free targeted inbound links to the article on your website.

There are some sites that copy your content but do not post links at all. Experience has shown that contacting the site owners directly asking them to either remove the content or add a link using the article titles will be successful in most cases. There is not an easier way to get free targeted links than this way.

Here is one of the emails that we send out usually to offenders who do not link back to our site although they use our content on theirs:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I’m writing on behalf of the technology blog ghacks.net. It has come to our attention that a blog located at http://***/ is publishing articles without authorization.

We are asking that the person responsible either

a) gives credit where credit is due by linking to the articles properly and visible using the title of the article as the link anchor or
b) removes all content that has been taken from ghacks.net

best regards

This is usually enough to receive a response in less than 48 hours. All that have been contacted so far have added title links to the original articles.

How To Find Content Copying Websites:

There are several ways to find websites that copy your content. You can copy a passage of one of your articles in a search engine or use services that will list most of the sites that copy the content. Some of the services are Fair Share or Copy Gator.

Fair Share does offer an RSS feed that lists all the websites that have been using at least 20% of the words of an original article on their website displaying if the copycats link back to the original post or not. This makes it easy to identify those sites that do not link back and contact them.

Options if the site owners do not comply

Webmasters have a few choices if site owners do not react at all to the request. They could contact the hoster of the domain, lawyers who take matters from there or even advertisement companies who display their ads on those websites.

Final Thoughts

While some webmasters do not want to see their content at all on other websites others can take advantage of the fact that content copying websites exist by getting free, valid links from those sites. These sites might also send in traffic to the original site. The number one site that is using our contents is sending more than 3000 unique visitors per month our way.

Webmasters should not worry to much about search engine positions as search engines usually do a very good job of identifying the original site and the copycats. Duplicate content penalties will hit them and not the original site.

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Inexperienced users might decide to leave a comment on the website instead hoping that it will be spotted by the webmaster. Another option which has been discovered by Addictive Tips is the webmaster contact software (or script) Contact That Owner which will automatically retrieve the whois information of a selected website to retrieve the email address of the website owner.

It will furthermore display a small form on the website allowing the user to contact the webmaster directly from that form.

The form will display the email of the webmaster prominently which means it is equally possible to copy and paste it and process it in another email client. The form itself can be used to write a message to the webmaster directly. Users should keep in mind that the email will not be send from their email address this way. This means that it is essential to mention the reply email address in the form so that the webmaster has the means to reply.

The main advantage of the contact software How To Contact is the automatic retrieval of information which will make it easier for inexperienced users to discover a contact email address. Tech savvy users on the other hand will rely on manual domain lookups to discover the email address.

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Doc Shots tries to bring in more control to the webmaster by allowing them to present documents on their websites easily. The visitor be able to view a selected document right on the website in an overlay that is providing basic controls such as being able to download, print, search and zoom the document at hand. It feels like a document viewer on the web and resembles desktop document viewers enough to make it easy for visitors to use it.

Webmasters have to be registered users of the service before they can configure the service for their website. Registration is free on the other hand and not problematic or time consuming at all. The configuration of the document presentation script can be customized by setting the width and height of the overlay window. Other options include the display of related items and document storing policies.

Webmasters receive a JavaScript code in the end that they have to embed into their website to make use of the document presentation engine. The script will automatically recognize popular document formats such as .doc, .pdf, .ppt, .xls. Hoovering over document links or clicking on the documents will open the document presentation overlay on the same website.

The first viewer will experience a small delay while opening the document as the conversion is initiated at that time. It is therefor a good idea to be the first viewer so that regular visitors do not experience the delay. Visitors can still right-click the document and save it to their computer system directly.

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But this is naturally not the only way how work gets reproduced on the Internet. Other websites may cite passages of an article in their own articles which is a totally legit thing to do.

Keeping track of all the websites and discovering new websites that use your articles can be a time consuming task. A manual way to track them would be to enter key sentences into Google to find the websites that are indexed in Google that are using at least that sentence of your article.

An easier way is to use a service like Fairshare. Fairshare monitors RSS feeds that the user enters into their form on the homepage. It creates another RSS feed that will add all the websites as feed items that copy at least 20% of the words of an article of the initial RSS feed.

FairShare lists the percentage of the article that appeared on the other website, if a link back to the original site is present, if ads are displayed on the website and the url plus title of the article. Those information are excellent to discover the sites that are copying your articles.

It usually takes a few hours after adding a new RSS feed before the first feed items appear in the RSS feed of the copied articles. Fairshare will create another feed that posts a weekly summary of all the discovered items.

While FairShare is surely not discovering all websites that make use of other author’s articles it does a pretty good job at discovering the majority. The information provided are great to help webmasters depending on their use policy. Some webmasters probably only want to contact webmasters copying articles without linking back to the original content, others might want to ask websites that use ads to remove the content while some might want to ask all sites that copy 100% of their articles to remove them immediately.

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The author’s at Ghacks are Duty Fullfillers according to the analysis of Typealizer. Duty Fullfillers are the responsible and hardworking type that are careful about getting facts right and reluctant to take risks. Rarst on the other hand is a guardian, one of the organizing and efficient type who are attuned to setting goals and managing available resources to get the job done.

Most technology blogs seem to fall into those two categories, think Lifehacker (Duty Fullfillers) or Download Squad (Guardians). Typealizer works best with blogs but it can actually be used on many websites that are not blogs as well. Some websites cannot be processed at the moment including CNN but most English or Swedisch websites and blogs should return a result. (Perez Hilton turned out to be detected as a Thai blog..)

What type is your favorite blog? Let us known in the comments.

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Most webmasters have the decency to cite their source when they write about a topic that they have encountered on another website which is a good and honest thing to do. Almost all of them on the other hand use anchor names like via or sitename to link back to the website which is probably helping a new blog that wants to establish a name for itself and might help experienced visitors identify the source by reading the name.

It is however not really helping the webmaster who is maintaining the source website.Most search engines (still) rely heavily on anchor names. What you do is you tell the search engines that the source is about via or the sitename but do not give the search engine a single hint as to what the article is really about.

Lets take one basic example. Ghacks writes a post about the latest Firefox update. A brand new story that has not reached the masses yet. Instead of linking to that story using via or ghacks webmasters would do me a much bigger favor by using anchor names like firefox, firefox 3 or firefox update because this would give my article more weight in the search engines.

I have therefor decided to link to other blogs that I cite in my articles properly from now on. The link will contain one major keyword (a keyword can be comprised of one or multiple words) that I have identified in the post on the other website. This will help the other website in their search engine rankings in the major search engines. I will furthermore contact webmasters who link to my articles and ask them if they would like to consider doing the same.

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This means any result or value that they compute has to be taken with a grain of salt in the eye. Still, there are relatively good website value calculators and those that are way off and Cubestat is one of the good ones.

The process is fairly simple for the webmaster who wants to calculate the value of a website or the user who wants to know about the value of his favorite place on the Internet. Only the url of the website in question has to be entered, the rest is computed in the background by the Cubestat script.

Computation takes roughly 30 seconds. It depends if the website is already in the cache. If it is the results are displayed faster.

Cubestat is showing three website traffic graphs taken from Alexa, Compete and Quantcast, the Meta Info of the website and Index Data. Meta Info are the page title, the keywords and description.

The Index Data category is more interesting. It displays the number of backlinks in Google, Live and Yahoo, if the site is listed in DMOZ, the name of the owner and where the site and domain are hosted. All of that is factual data that is pulled from various services throughout the Internet.

Cubestat takes all these information into account and computes the website worth, the daily pageviews and the daily ad revenue of a website. I checked a few websites and it is definitely more accurate than most other services that I have used in the past. It is not dead on but the error margin is low.

No serious buyer would rely solely on tools like Cubestat especially if the price is a five-digit plus value but it can give a good indication without having to research all the figures personally.

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This might sound confusing and difficulty at first but it is not. I use it to check that the http and mysql services are running on my servers. The http connection can be checked with a php script that they offer on their website. Just download and upload it to your web server and make them observe the path that links to the script.

Users get notified in numerous ways if a service fails. They can receive emails, SMS, instant messenger notifications and even phone calls depending on the subscribed plan.

Livewatch is offering one free plan that is good for observing one element of a server, for example the http connection. Each account is getting a certain amount of free SMS and phone calls per month. The free account gets one free SMS per month and unlimited email notifications while the Premium account receives 30 SMS, 15 phone calls and unlimited emails as well.

If you manage multiple servers or want to check on various services running on the server you could subscribe to a paid plan (like I did).

The intervals that are used to check the services are lower in the paid plans as well. The services on a free account are checked every 10 minutes and every 5 minutes if an error was found while the Gold premium services are checked every minute.

SMS are send into foreign countries as well (the service is based in Germany) but are charged double the amount of a single SMS which means that two SMS are subtracted for every single SMS that is send out.

Take a look at the in depth feature list that compares the free and premium accounts.

Here is the database php checker that I’m using in combination with regular expressions to make sure my database is up and running:


$dbhost = 'localhost';
$dbuser = 'enter database user';
$dbpass = 'enter database password;
$conn = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass) or die ('Error');
$dbname = 'enter database name';
mysql_select_db($dbname);
if ($conn) {echo "ok";}
else {echo "fehler";}
?>

This simple script tries to connect to the MySQL database and prints ok if the connection was successful and Error if it was not. I’m using the regular expression /ok/ on the Livewatch website to check if ok is returned which means that the database is up. If ok is not returned the Livewatch service assumes the database is down and will notify me.

I recently had a chat with their excellent support and they offered a bonus for Ghacks readers. If you signup for an account you get an additional 50 cents in your account which is good for 3 SMS. (And no, this is not a referral link, I’m not getting anything if you signup for free or premium accounts. I just like the service very much)

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Some web services like Browsershots, standalone versions or virtualization was used to test a website in various Internet Explorer versions. This could be a thing of the past with the release if IE Tester (via Ajaxian), a standalone application that provides access to the rendering and javascript engines of Internet Explorer 8 beta 1, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 5.5.

A basic tab driven browser interface is provided that can display a website using each version of Internet Explorer on a per tab basis. It comes with a few additional controls like back and forward buttons and access to the Internet Options.

The most interesting feature by far is the ability to display tabs next to each other to be able to compare them on the same screen without having to switch between tabs. The software is an early alpha release with several problems like Java instances not working or Flash not working in IE6. It still works pretty well for most websites that do not make use of advanced scripts.

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We have two different approaches though. The first is to get a so called double ranking. If two pages of a website are on the same results page the lower ranking one gets moved just below the higher ranking one. If you have the number 1 spot the lower ranking one will get the number 2 spot even if it would only qualify for number 9 or 10.

That’s two spots of ten already. What happens if you submit a site to a social news or bookmarking website ? Right, it gets a new entry in the search engines that points to the original url that the marketer wants to promote. Many social sites like Digg have such a high standing at Google that their results are often seen in the top 10 or 20 if you search for a keyword.

There is another way that is currently possible. Google treats subdomains as if they were different domains. Marketers create keyword rich subdomains that are pushed in the search engines as well. So, even if you expect to see 10 different results the reality could be different.

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The changes are only temporary but you could make a screenshot and send them to your friends to have some fun with them. This is also a reminder that everything that is shown on screenshots can be easily faked. This is especially true for website revenue screenshots for instance.

All you need to do is load a website and load the following code in the address bar:

javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0

Make sure you paste everything in one line and hit enter afterwards. Once that is done you can easily edit elements on the website. I created a short video that shows how I edited the Microsoft homepage.

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I took a look at a online script called Web Page Optimizer a few months ago which simulated a visitors loading time and displayed the various elements on the website and how much time it took to load them. The script displayed some general recommendations and ideas how the loading times could be reduced.

While this script was great for a quick overview it did not give in depths recommendations and many webmasters had to research ways to optimize their webpages on their own.

Yslow is a Yahoo Firefox add-on that utilizes the famous Firebug add-on. Once installed id displays a small icon and the loading time of the website in the statusbar.

If a webmaster clicks on the icon a performance report will be generated and displayed afterwards using the Firebug interface.

It rates the performance of your website from grade A to F and displays individual elements and their score below. Those individual elements are always the same and only the grade of the website that you are optimizing differs.

A click on the icon on the right side of every entry displays additional information about it below. The Make fewer HTTP requests entry for instance displays the number of external Javascript, Stylesheet and CSS background images.

A Yahoo developers website will load if you do click on the element directly with in depth information about the subject. It contains tips and external links that explain how to optimize this element further. There is naturally no need for optimization if you received an A but an F should at least cause some concern.

One entry however is not aimed at the normal webmaster but at businesses. Use a CDN (content distribution network) is not normally an option for most webmasters because using one costs lots of money.

The stats link displays some interesting information as well. It compares the total size and http requests of an empty cache to an primed cache. Empty cache means users who have not been on your website before while primed cache means that they have been there before and still have some files in their browsers cache which speeds up page loading time.

What I really like about YSlow are the explanations on the Yahoo website. They are good to read and easy to understand and contain a wealth of information.

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A new service named social marker tries to step in and offer webmasters a solution that get rid of the repetitive typing. Once at their website you have the choice to submit your story to 32 social news and bookmarking websites with the option to check the ones that you would like to submit it to or to select profiles such as news, social, best, all and none of the sites.

The submission works like the following. You fill in the most relevant information about your article once at Socialmarker, those are Title, Tags, Excerpt and URL and hit submit afterwards. Socialmarker will load the first website of the list. You do need to login there of course but can choose that this login is saved for further sessions.

At the bottom of the screen is a short bar with the information that you entered before starting the process. You can drag and drop those details into the appropriate fields of the submission form at the various bookmarking sites. Sometimes those forms are already filled out.

The navigation at the top lets you load the next website in the list once the submission is finished at the current site. This takes some time because you will have to log into all those sites during the first submission round.

The second and all subsequent submissions however are more speedy because you do not have to log into the selected sites again. It takes about six minutes to submit the article to all bookmarking sites listed at Socialmarker.

This depends on your line speed of course and how fast your drag and drop skills are.

Socialmarker is great for webmasters who submit articles regularly to social bookmarking sites. The only drawback is that it only works in Firefox.

Read More:

Socialmarker

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There are some and they can be applied to most websites and those websites will earn good money from those tips but they are probably not the ultimate way either. Most tips will tell you the following:

• Use the large or medium rectangle and / or the wide skyscraper for best results.
• Blend the ads
• Add them as close as possible to your content

If you apply the ads this way you will get good results. A click through rate between 2-5% for instance but you never know for sure if this is indeed the best ad unit for your website.

It is also important to note that the best paying ad unit might not be one that you want to put up on your blog because it might turn visitors away from your site. Back to the topic, how would you find out which Adsense ads work best for your blog ?

The obvious answer is of course to try them all out and come to a conclusion afterwards. The not so obvious way is what I’m going to explain now. I would suggest that you try this out if your blog reaches at least 1000 page impressions per day, the more the better of course. It does not make much sense to try out different ad units and positions if your blog gets 50 visitors per day because this does not lead to data that you can rely on.

Wordpress Plugin:

A great way to test out different ad units, location and appearance is to use the excellent Wordpress plugin Adsense Paster if you happen to use Wordpress.

Adsense paster rotates ad units that you create in text files randomly which means that you can test several units without having to alter the code by hand.

General Method:

The following method has been found at the digital alchemy blog and can be used to test several ad units.

Factors:

Some factors that you should consider are:

• Ad unit size. Test out different sizes such as large and medium rectangle, half banner, full banner, the squares and so on
• Ad appearance. Blend units, make them stick out, use borders, don't use borders, alter link color, ad text, url color..
• Ad location. Let it float on the top left spot of your articles, on the top right spot, alone on top and the article below, at the bottom..
• Ad a second ad unit and see if it impacts revenue

Channels:

You have to setup channels to be able to track earnings. Every ad unit should get an own channel. Make sure you track the performance for several days - workdays are best for most sites - and remove ads that do not perform that well from your site.

Section Targeting:

Make sure you use Section Targeting which emphasizes certain parts of your website. You need to edit the source code of your blog and add the following code from google to it. You can add that code in single.php, index.php and page.php before and after the function that displays your blog post. It would look like the following in single.php

You can also deemphasize parts of your blog by using google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) instead of google_ad_section_start which is useful to deemphasize the sidebar for instance.

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Stumbleupon on the other hand is using a different approach. Their users vote and review sites using a toolbar. The main feature of Stumbleupon is the stumble feature. You select a category and click on stumble and a random website will be loaded. Websites will be shown more often the more votes and reviews they receive.

The difference between Digg and Stumbleupon (from a webmasters point of view) is that Digg is far more controlled by its users than Stumbleupon is. If you add a link to an article on your blog you will probably get flammed and dugg down pretty fast. The concept of Digg is that users decide if a story is worth making it to the frontpage. They can do this by “digging” (positive) the story or by “burying” (negative) it. The problem is that some “gangs” work on Digg that digg down articles as soon as they appear.

Lets say you post an article about a new version of Firefox, link to the Mozilla ftp site and describe the new features. This article will surely be dugg down simply because it is not linking directly to the Mozilla ftp site from Digg. If however a authority site comes along, let us say Lifehacker, Pc Magazine or Gizmodo the same article will make it to the frontpage without any problems. Even if they report about it later than you did.

The conclusion here is: Digg is great for sites that have a certain authority. Lifehacker could probably submit a article with no information whatsoever and would still make it to the frontpage.

Stumbleupon on the other hand is different. If you submit your site to the service it will drive traffic to your site right away. Not that much at the beginning but it is targeted traffic. If you do get additional reviews and “thumbs up” your traffic level will rise. I experienced it myself that you can very well get hundreds of daily visitors over a long period with 3-4 reviews of the site. Getting this amount of reviews is normally not a big problem, even for sites with not that many visitors. Remember that not only your regular visitors but also the users that visit your site from Stumbleupon may give you a thumbs up.

My conclusion is rather obvious. If you have a new website and want to get some traffic use Stumbleupon. Digg is only worth it if you are writing about something exclusively, new or groundbreaking.

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