It’s Facebook!  It’s Stumbleupon!  It’s Flickr!  It’s WHAT IS HOT!

Two months ago I had not even heard about Pinterest.  Today I can’t turn-around without reading more about it and according to Alexa, (a decent barometer of website traffic) Pinterest is going through the roof!

The Pinterest terms don’t allow outright spamming and I doubt the spammers would be successful anyway because nobody would follow them – but if done properly Pinterest can be a good way to increase your brand recognition especially if your brand/product/website is visual in nature.

Don’t miss out on the next big thing, jump in before it’s too late!

The most amazing thing about this is that it seems to indicate that people actually still use Digg. : How To Get On Digg’s Front Page

After avoiding it for years, I’ve finally added some Facebook integration with the website. I don’t know why I avoided Facebook this long. I’m not sure if thought Facebook was just a ‘fad’ or I just didn’t think it would help in any way or maybe I thought that the integration would be too difficult. So far it turns out I was wrong on just about all counts.

It’s fairly easy to integrate things like Facebook “Like” buttons, “Facepiles”, etc. There are several Drupal Modules for Facebook to choose from. Which one you decide on depends on what you want to do, and compatibility with your existing modules – I started with the Facebook Social plugins integration module which is pretty simple to setup and gives you instructions for creating your Facebook App ID, etc. I had Facebook Social plugins up and running in just a few minutes – so much for being difficult.

It’s hardly been 48 hours since I built a “Facebook Page” for the website, and we’ve already gotten a few “likes”. Also, by adding the Facebook “Like” button to all of our pages I am now able to see how many times those pages had been ‘shared’ or “liked” over the years. I was shocked to see many pages that had been shared or liked hundreds of times! Facebook also has a great little analytics package called “Insights“, that once setup provides a webmaster with some startling demographics information about the people visiting your page.

Perhaps the most surprising of all are the results of the Facebook advertising campaign I setup. I was able to buy a CPM ad for only a few cents per 1,000 views. Even more surprising is that according to Adsense & Google Analytics, the CTR and earnings for visitors coming from Facebook is incredibility high! Man.. I was really wrong about that one..

As far as Facebook being a ‘fad’.. This is the one I was most wrong about. Over 600million Facebook members and still growing proves me more wrong every day!

If you haven’t setup a Facebook presence or at least tried/testing running a Facebook ad campaign I recommend you give it a try. You can see/follow/”Like” our new Facebook page (above) or my “public” Facebook profile (using my middle name instead of last name) here:

My Personal Page |

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In the last few months I activated “comment notification” modules/add-ins at both the website and here in the blog.  I was using these modules long ago but deactivated them due to problems I was having with my email server.  I never got around to reactivating them and now I’m kicking myself.   “Comment notification” modules like Comment Notify for Drupal and Comment Notifier for WordPress give members and anonymous visitors the option to receive an email any time someone else replies to a post that they have commented on.  These email reminders bring visitors back to your website and can spur additional comments/conversation.   This can not only help keep your traffic numbers up, but the additional comments posted are more user-generated content to feed the ever-hungry Google Bots.

It may take time for the number of visitors being notified (and coming back to your site or blog) to “ramp up” – It’s been about 90 days since I activated the Drupal Comment Notify module at the site, and we’re now sending about 500-700 notifications per day.  Here at the blog which gets less traffic than GrownUpGeek.com, about 100 notices per week are being sent.  Assuming that 75% of people that get the comment notifications (that they opted-in for) return to site to check the new comments, that’s several thousand visitors per month that we would not have otherwise.

Using comment notifications to keep visitors engaged and returning to your website or blog may be one of those common-sense “no shit Sherlock!” ideas, but if you are a new webmaster/blogger, just hadn’t thought of it, or ‘forgot’ about it like I did, you might want to give it a try.   If you already have comment notifications enabled on your blog or website, post a comment and let me know how it’s been working for you, and be sure to add your email address so you get notified of followup posts!