Sphinn is a little over a year old now and the Problogger blog has a tutorial for beginners on how to take advantage of the highly popular Internet Marketing social news site. The article is broken down to history, how to get started, how to navigate the site, and how to submit an article. Some pitfalls are discussed, but ultimately the value of Sphinn is seen:
For users, the benefits are being able to locate internet marketing themed posts that hopefully have some value and can add to your internet marketing knowledge. For industry writers and bloggers, one of your stories being submitted and going hot on Sphinn can bring your site exposure and traffic.
Everyone knows that a site like Digg and StumbleUpon, being that they're both not as niche sites, can give you traffic. The question, though, is "is this targeted traffic?" Most people (and even the commenters on the post) don't realize that this is the biggest and most valuable type of traffic because people are specifically seeking out articles that address Internet Marketing and Search.
But in the meantime, while Sphinn rocks in its own regard, there are also conversations of raising the bar. Right now, it's fairly obvious to regular users that you need 22 votes to hit the front page of Sphinn. The problem is that this system can be gamed -- and yes, there's one guy who keeps asking me for Sphinns even though I wrote this for him over a year ago. Thus, it's currently being discussed on Sphinn to raise the number of votes to 30 so that higher quality stuff rises to the top and the low quality and gamed content doesn't make it.
