Over the last few days I have made some changes to the layout of SmmGuru.com and added some new ways for people to find me. What I found was a super easy way to increase the amount of people who follow you on Twitter and other networks.

All I did was add links to various social media profiles in the footer of the site. While I can’t definitively prove that the new followers came from the footer link, there was defiantly been an increase in followers since I added it. Just a simple tip to those looking to increase their followers on various outlets. I have also seen increases on SocialBrowse, and StumbleUpon as well.

Another thing I am noticing is that once people become avid readers of your blog they want to connect with you on other services as well. Listing your profiles on other social networks is a great way to increase your brand viability, and give your readers new ways to remain updated. If you have not done so, I recommend putting up some links to your profiles now and see what you have been missing.

One of the best things you can do when starting a new blog is submit it ti every blog related site you can. Here are 48 of the best places you can submit your blog. This will help create backlinks to your blog and get you some starting traffic that you can use to grow. And we all know what big traffic brings… Direct links to submit pages included.

Top 48 Places To Submit Your Blog – Don’t Forget To Bookmark

• Dmoz Open Directory Project
• B4Blogs Directory – Submit Page
• Best Blogs – Submit Page
• TailRank
• Blawg – Submit Page
• Top Blog Area – Submit Page
• Bigger Blogger
• BlogAdr – Submit Page
• Aviva Directory – Submit Page
• BlogBunch – Submit Page
• BlogCode – Submit Page
• Blog Directory – Submit Page
• Blog Watch
• 5 Star Blogs – Submit Page
• Bloggapedia
• BloggerNow
• Blogging Fusion – Submit Page
• Read A Blog – Submit Page
• SpillBean
• BlogIntro – Submit Page
• Blog Listing – Submit Page
• Bloggernity – Submit Page
• BlogListing.net – Submit Page
• Blogoozle – Submit Page
• BlogPulse – Submit Page
• Technorati – Submit Page
• BlogRankings
• Blogarama – Submit Page
• Blogs Collection – Submit Page
• MyBlogDirectory
• BlogSweet
• Blog Top List – Submit Page
• Blog Universe – Submit Page
• Blogz – Submit Page
• Brit Blog – Submit Page
• Blog Dust – Submit Page
• Blogdup – Submit Page
• BlogFlux – Submit Page
• GetBlogs
• Globe of Blogs – Submit Page
• Eaton Web Blog Directory
• FindingBlog – Submit Page
• I Blog Business – Submit Page
• LS Blogs – Submit Page
• BlogSearch – Submit Page
• Strategic Board – Submit Page
• Super Blog Directory – Submit Page
• Small Business Blog Directory – Submit Page

For all of you novices this should get you started on the right foot.

Building a strong StumbleUpon account can lead you to large success in building an audience. Here are 36 different articles and tips on how to build the best StumbleUpon account possible.

Don’t forget to subscribe to SMMGuru.com!

StumbleUpon 101

• StumbleUpon Official FAQ The O.G. version.
• How To Stumble – Pretty straight forward, they will tech you how to stumble.
• Unoffical StumbleUpon FAQ – Again… Pretty self-explanatory
• Beginners Guide to StumbleUpon
• StumbleUpon Help Forum – StumbleUpon’s official help forums.

Become A StumbleUpon Celebrity

• StumbleRank – Ranks the top StumbleUpon users.
• How to Become a Top StumbleUpon User (or Why You Really Shouldn’t Bother)
• StumbleUpon – How to make yourself a good stumbler
• stumbleGods – Learn StumbleUpon from those with the most powerful thumbs on the service.
• How to Use StumbleUpon Like a Pro
• How do you become a StumbleUpon power user? Ask a 16 year old.
• Making a Power Account on StumbleUpon

The StumbleUpon Network

• Whiteboard Friday – “How to Win Friends & Influence People” – SEOMOZ video on establishing yourself on these networks.
• Building Your Blog with StumbleUpon
• Share Your Stuff: Effectively and Ethically Submitting Pages to StumbleUpon & Stumblers
• stumbleXchange – Use at your own risk!
• Are you banned by StumbleUpon? What is the consequence?
• Organic Stumbling Tip

Use StumbleUpon For Traffic

• A Comprehensive Guide to StumbleUpon: How to Build Massive Traffic to Your Website – A great article at Dosh Dosh on how to create a powerful StumbleUpon account.
• How to Draw StumbleUpon Users Into Your Blog – A nice ProBlogger.net post on retaining your StumbleUpon traffic.
• How to Use StumbleUpon to Promote – Information on using StumbleUpon as a promotional tool.
• StumbleUpon Optimization: Leveraging Photo Stumbles for More Web Traffic – Learn how pictures in your content can induce traffic from StumbleUpon.
• The Why, How and Who of Marketing in StumbleUpon – Combining StumbleUpon with marketing.
• 5 Tactics for Driving Traffic From StumbleUpon – Five more ways to drive traffic with StumbleUpon.
• The Ultimate Guide to Leveraging StumbleUpon – An article on leveraging StumbleUpon with stats included.
• How Important is StumbleUpon? – A thorough look at StumbleUpon.

Business Use of StumbleUpon

• Run a StumbleUpon Advertising Campaign For Your Blog – Use StumbleUpon’s advertising to drive traffic to your blog.
• Stumbleupon can get your AdSense Account Banned for Invalid Impressions Fraud – An important read for anyone who makes most of their money from AdSense.
• How to Use StumbleUpon for Your Business: The Definitive Guide – A break down of StumbleUpon for Business users.

Advanced Topics

• Advanced Stumbling – A wiki page with some advanced Stumbling tactics discussed.
• Using StumbleUpon PhotoBlog It!
• Stumbleupon mathematics for stumblers – Learn how StumbleUpon decides where to send its users.

Third Party StumbleUpon Tools

• StumbleCrumble WordPress Plugin – Show your latest Stumbles.
• StumbleUpon Facebook Application – Same as the above, but for Facebook.
• Del.icio.us Stumble – Convert your del.icio.us bookmarks into stumbles.
• StumbleUpon WYSIWYG Editor

And there you have it. Using these great articles and tools you should be able to take over the web (or maby just your niche ) in no time. The great advantage to building strong accounts on sites like these is that later on when you are starting a new project for example you have some leverage. Once it’s built, you have a powerful user base at your fingertips.

So over the last couple weeks I got six emails from people asking why their ads where rejected. Five of the six emails where for dating related ads and after getting some more details I noticed that all of the promos where legit. The problem seems to be people are just disreguarding Facebook’s policies and not trying to adhere because they’re to dam lazy. Follow these tips to get your dating ads through Facebook’s approval.

Your Ads MUST Be Targeted
In order to run your dating ads you need to keep them all targeted. “Relashonsip Status” must be set to single, and a single value of EITHER male or female must be selected. The selected age range must start at 18, anything lower and your ads will be rejected. The “Interested In” parameter must also be used and set to a single value of EITHER male or female once again.

Image And Ad Text
When choosing an image, you cannot use anything “provacative” or “innaporopriate.” Obviously this is one of those grey areas that will require some testing. However, if it looks to much like pr0n chances are your getting rejected. Also, the ad text and/or image must “clearly state and represent the company or product that is being advertised.” In other words just make sure the name of the dating service is visible.

Hopefully this will help… Dating ads are totaly still making $$$. Just be creative and you cant go wrong. The sad truth is that there seems to be a never ending number of lonely people out there meaning you will always be able to make money. The hard part is finding a way to make good profits, and adhere to all the policies.

Normally when you think of viral marketing your don’t think of blogs at all. You think videos on YouTube, and every other social media outlet. However, both personal and business blogs have potential to be viral marketing. No matter how good of an SMM or SEO you are, it will take time to build an audience but viral marketing does it for you.

Network Your Ass Off - Branch out to those in your field, making friends regardless of how large or small their blogs are can be helpful. Going viral requires every ounce of visibility possible. Comment, and try to include relevant links to posts on other blogs. This will ensure that you have established yourself in your space.

USE Social Media - Get out there on Digg, del.icio.us and others. They can greatly increase the amount of potential people to link to your content. Check out this list of 198 social media sites to find a bunch in your niche. Keep in mind that you will need some quality content first.

Blog Viral - To become a viral source, you have to create viral content. This in itself is a whole other story but the bottom line is make it useful. You can always go the comedy rout but when it comes to most blogs, creating something people can use is going to be much more beneficial. Create How-To’s, walkthroughs, and of course Tips & Tricks.

Format Wisely - People love to jump right into content without having to deal with other crap. Putting your main points in a list fashion will suite much better. Bullets, numbers, w/e…. Just make sure it pops from the rest of page, it’s easy to find, and its easy to read.

You blog can become viral. Create content worthy of being viral and sure enough users will flock o your blog. The next step is using the link juice, traffic, and search rankings to your benefit.

Social media optimization is possibly one of the most helpful tools to build traffic. The amount of people who use social networks on a daily basis is already huge, and continues to grow daily. To leverage the power of social media, you need to start at the source and have your website up to par before you push it to the masses.

Optimize Your Site or Blog
Before you get yourself on the bandwagon, you will need to make sure your website is ready. You have to create content that’s not only interesting, but intriguing and informative. Fill your content with details, links, videos, images, and other collaborative tools that allow visitors to get involved on your site. Offer something appealing, something they cannot get elsewhere. This will ensure they come back to you for their fix. Stressing the quality content again, don’t just post stuff for the sake of putting it up. If its not quality, it will reflect poorly on yourself and visitors may not come back.

Get Buttons!
Pretty much every social media site has some kind of button or widget that allows your visitors to take action right from your website. Make sure to include these buttons from the outlets you use most. Adding Digg and Stumble buttons for instance (if it fits your type of content) can make it much easier to gain a front page Digg sumission or a top Stumble. These buttons also make it much easier to share content, which builds links (SERPS) and traffic. You also want to make sure that if you offer RSS, that every person knows about it. Make your subscription offers so that no one can miss them.

SMO For Link Building
One of the great side effects of social media is it creates many backlinks to you when done right. This ensures that when the initial surge dies down, your search engine standings are in it for the long term. Join every possible social site you can and start to flesh out your online identity. As it grows, you will become more and more linked. Content will be spread faster, and to more people which again provides more chances for links. This is really a no-brainer, it’s easy to see how social media optimization can build links.

Stay Active Online
This will be a tipping point for your SMO campaign. Going out and registering yourself, throwing up a link on your profile, and calling it a day won’t do. Update your social media profile daily and become a part of the community. You can not leverage social media until you are a part of it. While this may seem time consuming, good things come to those who wait. But if you don’t have the time to do it yourself, there are plenty of consultants out there. This may be something to take advantage of especially if you are trying to market your business.

One of the great things about social media optimization is that it allows you to go guerrilla. Instead of investing large amounts of time and money on advertising campaigns, you can go out and use yourself for the marketing. Leveraging social media comes down to how well you can create content, how fast you can network, and how well you can network.

There’s no denying that WordPress has needed to overhaul the comment system for some time now. With Automattic’s recent acquisition of IntenseDebate, Wordpress 2.7 will be seeing some welcomed new features for the comment system. The update will see an integrated version of the threaded commenting system right out of the box and there is a plugin being developed to allow for more usage of ID’s features.

Although they went back into an invite only mode, the site is expected to be back into full swing not to far down the road. Automattic will bring a lot of attention to the service with it’s massive user base on Wordpress.com, and private install base from Wordpress.org. My guess is Automattic is getting everything humming on their servers to handle the load and do some testing before they really push it out there. Should be good, I have been waiting for integrated threaded comments for a while, the plugins just don’t do it for me.

I’m tired of seeing these social media “consultants” online, marketing social media as if it where a “Get Your Traffic Now!” kind of deal. This is my first warning if you are looking for someone to do consulting for you. Social media is not about “if you build it they will come”, but build it and solidify your presence and brand online. It’s about creating visibility beyond the search engines, and inside large social networks. Look for a consultant that can tell you the difference between a personal campaign, and a professional one. I cant tell you how often I see businesses spend big money on a SMM campaign and walk away with nothing but a sexy Facebook profile and a handful of Tweets. Later they find out that the $1,500 they paid in consulting got them nothing but college guys looking to hook up lol. Building a targeted and beneficial social media profile is they key.

Anyways, look out for those saying they will send you dope amounts of trafficz because it’s most likely B.S. Anyone who knows social media marketing knows the traffic comes second to the branding aspect regardless of how large or small the amount of traffic is.

Just wanted to do a quick post in regards to Twitter and their spam policies. For the most part they are pretty easy going, but they do have measures in place to keep order. Here’s the bottom line on what Twitter defines as spam:

1. Following accounts in order to gain attention to your account or links there within.
2. Creating updates just to rank in search engines.
3. Creating multiple accounts in order to promote one thing.
4. Sending a large amount of @replies that are not genuine replies.
5. Disguising links, writing about one thing and linking to another.

Pretty easy to follow here people. Basically what this says is unless you are abusing the service to a larger extent, they really don’t mind self promotion. Twitter realizes that many personal brands and companies use the service to increase their reach. Just don’t piss them off because they will ban your ass in a heartbeat.

There’s a beta service on the block called Twiddeo that really kills 12 seconds if you ask me. Created by vSocial, the platform runs off Twitter, the Disqus comment system, and vSocial’s custom video player. This is also one of the first sites to include some of the latest and greatest web2.0 features. Twiddeo does not require a unique login and password. You login using your existing Twitter credentials.

Another sick feature is the ability to post videos from your mobile phone via email. Twiddeo provides an @twiddeo.com address that allows you to send video via any device with email capabilities. You can also upload files from your PC, or do a live webcam capture. After getting your video in, you can add a Twitter message as well. You are limited to 113 characters for your Twiddeo URL to be automatically inserted.

Another genius idea from Twiddeo, they created their own Greasemonkey script that puts the Twiddeo player right on Twitter. That way if you would rather stick to Twitter instead of both you can do so. The service looks promissing, vSocial initally launched it as a demo and decided to make it a full on service.