You are here: Home / 2008 / Archives for October 2008

Why Digg Users Don’t “Digg” You

October 29, 2008 By 1 Comment

In one of my first posts on this blog, Using Social Bookmarking Responsibly, I talked about how people far too often abuse the system rather than work with it.  Lately I have been seeing more and more “Digg exchanges” both on Digg itself and various social blog networks such as BlogCatalog.  It isn’t quite to the point it was when DigitalPoint was running rampant with digg exchanges or the glory days or DiggBoss, but it also isn’t a pretty scene.

The thing I always find funny, is that the people that are trying to exploit this Digg traffic are typically submitting stories so far from the Digg base that it is comical.  I wish I could find one that I saw a month ago, because commentary on it would definitely make it to the front page.  It was a post a travel website that was about visiting Puerto Rico that randomly injected “We use Linux for our server and we love Obama AND Ron Paul!”, which at least shows they get the concept.

These are the reasons why your post will NOT make it to the front page of Digg, despite the fact that you would really like that:

  • Your post is plastered in affiliate links
  • You are a travel agency, cable company, fake rolex salesman, pharmaceutical company, or “mak mone on internet!” website.
  • You are far too obviously appealing to the Digg crowd by overstating your love for the current Digg fad.  (I love: Obama, Ron Paul, Linux, Macs, internet meme’s, hacking, microchips, Nader, Google, trashing Palin, sharks [don't ask me, lately that keeps making front page], Nvidia, dissing Fox News, video games, Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, anti-creationism, people “fail.”ing).
  • You cannot consider your mastery of the English language to even be “conversational” (Kind of like how my roommate speaks “conversational Spanish” on his resume).
  • You don’t include one of the above topics.
  • You post something with no chance of going viral, you need quality content such as Sneezing Panda
  • You are over the age of 60
  • You are under the age of 15
  • You are part of either: “The Establishment” or “The Problem”
  • Your posts all include that really annoying embedded Digg button despite none of them being interesting
  • You smell like a Republican
  • You can’t recognize any of the top 100 Digg’ers
  • You are “too cool for school”
  • Nobody cares about what you are trying to get people to Digg, since it is bogged down in ads.
  • Most important of all: You actually don’t realize that this post is sarcastic yet true.

So there you have it, if you wish to see 75,000 visitors on your website so they can crash your servers and then point you towards a Digg post on why you shouldn’t use Windows hosting, study this list and make the necessary modifications.

*cough* And on that note: My Barack Obama.

Feel free to sign up for my RSS feed or comment on this post :-)

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Effectively Using Your Time

October 28, 2008 By 1 Comment

One thing that I have learned over the past month is how to effectively use my time.  As a result of pledging a fraternity combined with midterms and various projects I have had no spare time to post on this blog or to keep up with my other affiliate marketing projects I was working on.  Thankfully I have survived pledging and now I am in the process of recouping my time, and I noticed that despite today being by far my busiest day, I have gotten a massive amount of work done.

A problem that is very prevalent in in the internet marketing community is dead weight loss, the time that you spend on YouTube rather than pumping out websites or blog comments, etc.  The more you focus on the prize, the better your profits will be and the better your marketing will work.  Once you get into a rhythm it is amazing how productive you can be online and how many long term subscribers you can gain per hour of networking efforts.

If you intend to do internet marketing as a full time or part time job is becomes even more important to utilize your time efficiently.  One thing that I am about to start doing myself is setting up a weekly schedule for the various things I do, one of which will be a concerted effort to at least post every other day on this blog if not daily.  I am also about to step into the travel niche for the first time so I am going to have to spend quite a few hours doing market research to see what others do to set themselves up for success.

In hindsight when I started my marketing journey a year ago today, I could’ve done so many things differently but the various failures allowed me to quickly learn how to actually spend my time.   One lesson that only took a week or so to realize was that simply going around on forums talking about how awesome my site was wouldn’t actually generate traffic.

The best way to utilize your time is to put in initial effort upfront to come up with a logical and possible plan.  For instance, it would not be a logical plan to do absolutely nothing but directory submissions every time you decide to build backlinks, distribution is key to a successful search engine optimization campaign.  My current priorities are as follows:

  1. Posting on this blog more often to compensate for my 2 week vacation
  2. Researching the travel niche both with major brands such as Hotels.com and smaller websites
  3. Building social networking ties for this website and a handful of my other sites
  4. Forum posting and blog commenting within the internet marketing niche so I can see how the world has changed in the past 2 weeks.
  5. Re-monetizing 3 of my sites which I haven’t touched in months yet still have traffic
  6. Finishing a free e-book/automated newsletter for this blog
  7. Various link building tactics in general for this blog
  8. Creating that travel site I talked about.

While I have many more things I would like to do, I will allocate my time accordingly as I go through this list.  My goal is to have another 50 RSS subscribers within a month so I’ll have to get back to posting and promoting my blog. When you make your own list, ask yourself first if you want to work on increasing traffic or increasing backlinks, and then move down the list from there.

Thanks to all of you that are still subscribed and I apologize for my extended leave of absence.  Now go find something productive to do :-)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

15 Ways to Decrease Your Visitor Base

October 10, 2008 By 13 Comments

This week I have literally been to hundreds of different blogs, and with a majority of them I instantly saw problems of one sort or another that made me cringe.  With the new wave of bloggers entering the ‘sphere I have seen people that write one of three types of content: content clearly designed for search engines, content for people, and blatant advertisements.  Obviously out of these three choices, only one will actually help grow your visitor base, RSS subscribers, repeat commentators, etc. and I will allow you to take a guess which one it is!

Below are the top 15 ways to make sure that anyone that would normally be interested in what you have to say flee from your site and go elsewhere for their information.  If you don’t believe me, simply try it yourself for a few weeks and see what it does to your site :-)

  1. Start your post with a hoplink for a ClickBank affiliate product, this is always promising.
  2. Spend more than half your content asking your visitors to do things for you (email friends, social bookmarking submissions, comments, subscribe via email). *cough* You don’t mind, right?
  3. Don’t spell check your posts, tehre is no raeson y u need gud grammor to mak money on internet!!
  4. Don’t use paragraphs, people love to read solid chunks of text.
  5. Don’t include any links, images, bold/italics, or anything that might make people look at your website for longer than 7 seconds.
  6. Allow any comment to go unmoderated, everyone loves reading about various ED pills while they try to get their information.
  7. Include completely off topic posts, I love hearing about your love for beluga whales in your “internet marketing blog”.
  8. Don’t utilize social media, they are unlikely to click on your PPC ads so listen to the people on DigitalPoint that say that this traffic is therefore useless.  No need to have actually interested readers.
  9. Decline all trackbacks, whenever somebody is interested in your blog and talks about it you should hide this fact from others while pissing off the other blogger.
  10. Make sure to divulge your hate for everything, everyone loves a blog that is simply a long rant.
  11. Go on internet marketing forums and say “Hey look, I found this awesome site: [insert site]!!!” while also having it in your signature, nobody will guess it is yours and make fun of it.
  12. Use pop-unders, pop-ups, and pop-overs as well as exit ads to get people to sign up for you affiliate products, because clearly people will appreciate this.
  13. Always hotlink images from other sites, especially ones that clearly visit your site as well, nobody would ever change the image to something incredibly offensive.  While you are at it, make sure you have lots of dead pages (404) on your site.
  14. Lies!  Make sure you lie to your readers as much as possible… I made $17 million today just by writing this blog post!
  15. Don’t offer any useful content, ever.  All content should be written to make money or to help with Google.  Useful content would never develop any links naturally, it must all be artificial.

There you go, it is just that simple.  Follow these easy steps and you will be well on your way towards losing all of your RSS subscribers and daily visitors.  Simply rinse and repeat, inserting a copy & pasted ad copy as your posts every once in a while and you won’t have to worry about people chewing up your bandwidth.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Monitoring Your Backlinks

October 8, 2008 By 3 Comments

One of the most enjoyable parts of internet marketing is checking your statistics, I try to limit how often I do it so that I don’t waste time on it yet we all know the joy of checking your ClickBank account and seeing some cash tacked onto your monthly check.  When I am creating a static website that has stand-alone content that is not often updated I love checking the number of links leading into it.

Often on forums I hear people asking where to get a good backlink checker, search engine results placement checker, etc.  I am a big fan of new tools, so if you know of a great tool feel free to post it in the comments and I might stick it into this post.  Here’s the list of tools that I typically use once a week for my websites:

Yahoo Site Explorer – A tool that displays all of the backlinks to your website that are in Yahoo’s index, as the second largest search engine this results in a very good overall picture of your backlinks.  Google’s “link:” command is basically worthless but Yahoo is willing to divulge the extent of their link discoveries.

Search Engine Genie Google Position Checker – One of my absolute favorites, this is a tool that you can use unlimited times (free!) for checking where your website ranks in Google for a given search term 1000 rankings deep.  I use it all the time, so they deserve a free link, I highly recommend it.

SmartPageRank Backlink Checker Tool – This is another great tool, it checks the number of backlinks to your site and then gives you the option to also get the PR of those pages, anchor text, and presence of “nofollow” tags on the links.

Google Blog Search – A great tool for bloggers as it shows the links incoming to your site from other blogs.  Not everything that links to you will generate a ping, so this is a great way for bloggers to check how they fare in the blogosphere.

For traffic checking I typically use Google Analytics and MyBlogLog, I prefer the layout of MyBlogLog to G.A. so I typically check that more often than analytics.

Remember not to get too caught up in statistics, many people will literally spend hours checking how much money they are making, traffic they are gaining, etc.  A watched pot never boils, and the time you spend checking stats will take away from the time you spend building links and traffic.

If you have any other great tools, feel free to post them.  If not, subscribe to my RSS feed :-)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Using Social Networks for Links and Traffic

October 6, 2008 By 3 Comments

Social networks are a great thing for internet marketers, especially as they can be used effectively for any level of experience as an internet marketer.  One of my first reactions when I made my first website was to send out a message to all my friends via FaceBook and used that as a source of traffic for the first couple days.  I quickly realized that since it was simply people curious what my site looked like, that it wouldn’t actually generate revenue nor would it create lasting subscribers.  This is a lesson that I still carry with me as I continue to use social networks to my advantage.

For initial traffic to this blog I utilized the sources that internet marketers and bloggers go to in order to get information, forums and marketing networks.  I have x,xxx posts on DigitalPoint and quite a few also on v7n and webmaster talk, all of which are great sources of targeted traffic as long as you use them correctly.  As for social networks, I mostly used MyBlogLog, MySpace, FriendFeed, Twitter, and BlogCatalog to get traffic and RSS subscribers, which has worked out quite well as I have noticed that quite a few of you are also submitting my articles to social bookmarking networks, which I appreciate.

When using these resources, simply realize that if you want to get the maximum use of your time you should research the audience that you wish to develop for your own niche.  In my case, it is quite easy as I am trying to help out all internet marketers and most bloggers would also consider themselves to be marketers to some extent, as everybody would like to make a few bucks off their efforts.  Obviously you won’t know thousands of people online, which is why you should search for people that have similar interests as you in public profiles, etc. and these are the people you should seek various relationships with.  The purpose of these networks in their essence, is to meet people with similar interests and discuss common issues, tap into this and you will have an interested target audience developing.

The key to balancing this relationship of network friend and your personal business interests is quite simple, don’t spam them with overbearing messages, etc. because that will scare people off, and offer good content that people want to read.  If you offer good content your business will expand by itself, it shouldn’t need too much of a push but social networks and social media are great ways to get some eyes on your content so that you can get a few people to stick and then let it spread from there.

Here’s a few of the sites I used:

The other thing to take into consideration with any type of social media/networking/bookmarking traffic is that it won’t be overly profitable.  Don’t expect large traffic numbers to equate to conversions of any sort, as traffic typically won’t click advertisements or buy affiliate products.

One interesting thing I have been watching as a result of this web2.0 traffic is how easily I gain and lose RSS subscribers, on days that I post I average 22 new subscribers, while on days I don’t post I average 17 lost subscribers.  On that note, feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , ,
« Older Posts