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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: , , , , , , ,

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.

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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: , , , , , ,

23 Link Building and Traffic Driving Tactics for Blogs

September 22, 2008 By 20 Comments

I am constantly seeing posts on various webmaster and marketing forums asking how to drive traffic or gain backlinks for a blog.  I find it funny since blogging in my opinion opens so many different doors that would otherwise be closed.  The social media, blogging community, marketing community, and many more are willing to be return visitors to your blog if you do it correctly.  This blog has only a couple posts so far, starting less than a week ago, yet I have already gotten around 1500 backlinks and well over 1k unique visitors.  It isn’t that hard, simply write good content and then find people that are interested in what you have to say and you’ll be on your way to blogging success.

One main point first is that the focus should always be on the content before worrying about how you market it, get links to it, etc.  If your content sucks, nobody will care about what you have to say, what you are promoting, or what you do in the future.  The better your content, the less leg work you have to put in yourself in getting visitors.

Ways to build links and drive traffic to your blog:

  1. Create link bait, people love “Top 10″ lists, quirky fact and cultural phenomenon, breaking industry news, etc.  Good content is also good link bait!
  2. Use social media such as Twitter, MyBlogLog, Facebook, etc. to your advantage.  Do not abuse the system, just use it as it is designed while marketing yourself.
  3. Relevant link exchanges with sites within your niche, especially blogroll trades for bloggers as it is seen on every page.
  4. Comment on DoFollow blogs *cough*  You won’t have to look far!  If you use your imagination, you might find a PR 7 blog that is very lightly moderated fully dofollow and millions of visits a month, I’ll tell you the answer in 43 days.  Type in “dofollow blog search engine” in Google and you will find quite a few nice tools.
  5. Submit your blog to blog directories and blog aggregating websites such as Technorati (Remember to favorite this post!) ;)
  6. Submit your blog to good old fashion link directories (yes, they do still work for links, and no, they don’t work as well as 5 years ago).
  7. Use social bookmarking websites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, Sphinn, etc. to bring in big traffic and decent backlinks as many bloggers frequent these sites in search of content to link to.
  8. Link to other websites!  You would be surprised how many people check who is linking to them, and might give them a favorable mention later on.  I have found random people linking to me in my Yahoo Site Explorer backlinks before that I have decided to link to for the hell of it.
  9. Create articles and submit them to article directories such as Ezine Articles, Article Dashboard, iSnare, etc.
  10. Yahoo! Answers, this is a great way to get some visitors to your site as long as you don’t overtly spam them, the links are nofollow but a steady traffic flow is good for the health of any site.
  11. Start a contest and post it on popular forums and contest websites, this is a great way to get some interested visitors.  Make them work for it a little with comment contests, traffic contests, something creative.
  12. Create a WordPress theme and distribute it for free, if this doesn’t work pay somebody else to get a Sponser link stuck in the footer.
  13. Create a WordPress plugin that makes life easier for everyone (akismet anyone?).
  14. Find “Top Commentator” enabled blogs that will give you sitewide links for quality comments, and decent traffic from my experience.  ShoeMoney has this enabled, but this doesn’t mean you should go spam up his blog.
  15. Be a guest blogger on another blog, many people will be willing to allow other authors to share new insights in exchange for a couple links back to your site.
  16. Create a press release and distribute it to various PR sites, only do this if you have something that is actually news worthy but if played right it will work great.
  17. Keep your blog up to date!  By having an up to date blog it will make people far more likely to link to your site, and Google will love you for it.
  18. Create a Squidoo lens to build links and generate traffic (and hopefully earn some cash along the way).
  19. Use forums to boost your “expert” status while gaining quite a few backlinks, there are countless dofollow forums out there.
  20. Be creative, piss off a major industry expert such as ShoeMoney or John Chow to get them riled up, or sue a major corporation.
  21. Get your readers to participate in your site’s expansion, encourage them to use social media and to tell friends and family.  If your content is good enough, this will happen automatically!
  22. Create a good freebie such as an ebook to generate traffic, it will bring in people and if you do it right it will make them stick too.
  23. Flattery will get you everywhere, if you butter up some webmasters they will give you a link.  It never hurts to try….and no it won’t work with me :)

And now you are well on your way towards building links and gaining huge traffic for your blog.  Be creative, don’t be annoying and don’t go down to the level of spamming and you will be in a great position.  It is all about building long term visitors, traffic, links, and getting the word out.

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, SEO Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,