Submitting your website to search engines is one way to drive traffic from external sources to your website, but there are many other ways, which do not require asking people to link back to your website.

Two services which I have been using to do this are, DIGG and Stumble. I cannot even start to stress enough about how valuable these two services are for website/blog authors! I have had thousands of hits to this website thanks to Digg and Stumble, and I am going to tell you now how to go about using them.

DIGG

To put it simply, Digg is an article posting and rating service. You post your articles on Digg for the public to read, and if they enjoyed the site, they can hit the Digg button. The more Diggs you get, the higher your article will rise in popularity. Another great feature about Digg is it’s category breakdown system - You can choose exactly where your article would fit in, so if you are like me, Webtrepreneur, I would submit my articles into the Technology - Internet News sections.

The easiest way to get your article submitted on Digg is to include a button under your article, like I have done. The code for your article would like something along these lines: <a href=”http://www.digg.com/submit”><img src=”digg.jpg border=”0″></a> This will allow people to submit the article for you as well. If you are a regular article writer and think Digg is the way to go, they also provide a great set of tools, which make it easier for you to allow people to Digg your articles, have a look at the Digg tools. They offer services such as:

• View recent stories from Digg on your personalized Google homepage.
• Allow your site’s visitors to digg your stories from your website, and submit your stories to Digg.
• See Digg articles at the top of your Google search results.
• Enable submissions from your site to display video thumbnails on Digg.

All in all, Digg have a lot to offer, and should not be ignored!

STUMBLE

Stumble, or more correctly named Stumbleupon is fantastic! Peronsally, I have had more success from this service than any other service online, and at the same time I have had a lot of fun, I will explain how.

Stumbleupon is a website/blog submission website, whereby you submit you website/blog into their database, and once you have done this people can stumble upon your website via a toolbar plugin for firefox. Similar to Digg, you submit your website, choose the various categories, and that’s it. The code to link your article to the Stumble engine is a bit more complex than I showed with Digg..

http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=http://webtrepreneur.co.za/free-advertising-blogvertisecoza/&title=Free%20Advertising%20-%20Blogvertise.co.za?

The beauty of the system is the fact that, once you have an account with Stumble, they will generate the above code for you, so you don’t need to worry too much about what I pasted above. Create an account, and take a look now.

Alright, the fun part about Stumble. When you signup for an account, you can choose a list of things you enjoy. Once you have done this, you can download the firefox plugin and start stumbling. Basically, you have three buttons in the the plugin. The first is the stumble button, which once clicked, will take your browser to a random website, based on your interests. Once you have arrived at the website, this is where the other two buttons come into play: “I like”, and “Don’t like”. If you like the website you were moved to by Stumble, then you click the “I like” button, and the stumble engine includes it into your personal profile, and if you didn’t enjoy it, you hit the other button. Stumble learns your preferences, and each time you Stumble, you will find that you enjoy the random sites more and more. I plugged in my interests, and have been using Stumble for a good couple of months, and almost every 1 out of 2 websites, I find myself wanting to bookmark!

Don’t ignore these services, they have proven to be incredible traffic drivers for most of my websites, and The Webtrepreneur would not only mention two of the many engines like this if he didn’t really have faith in them!

Happy Stumbling, and I hope you find something you Digg!