Track your Blog Performance, Make Friends, and Make Money Online with SocialSpark

I recently joined SocialSpark because of all the buzz about it in every blog I go, pretty much like with Entrecard back in January. SocialSpark and Pay Per Post are sister companies both owned by Izea; but a lot of bloggers are saying that it’s a lot easier to get your blog approved in SocialSpark compared to Pay Per Post. One interesting feature that SocialSpark boasts is its integration of social networking to the usual sponsored post program. SocialSpark also promises about creating unity between advertisers and bloggers. This I have yet to see; maybe when there will be more advertisers and competition of being first among bloggers isn’t that much of an issue. If you’re one of the small bloggers and has an interest in earning bucks every now and then through paid posts, give SocialSpark a try and see if it works for you.

Here's their code of ethics:
-100% Audit-able In-Post Disclosure
-100% Transparency
-100% Real Opinions
-100% Search Engine Friendly

Make Friends

SocialSpark gives you the ability to make friends with like minded bloggers who have also participated in their program. You can view their profile pages, rate them via a prop (thumbs up) or a drop (thumbs down), send them private messages or leave a comment in their profiles, and make friend requests to get in touch with them or just boast that you’ve made hundreds of networks inside SocialSpark.

Make Money

Generally you could earn something in between $5 to $30 from SocialSpark depending on the how much the advertiser can offer. The price fluctuates from time to time depending on the number of bloggers who will participate for that opportunity and, perhaps, the overall rank of your blog (traffic, pageviews, Alexa, Google, and ROI). Also there will be some offers where you won’t be qualified to take based on your blog’s ranking and reach.

There are two ways to earn money in SocialSpark: via blog sponsorship and sponsored posts. In blog sponsorship, the advertiser pays you an amount of money for each day that their ad shows up in your blog. I haven’t personally seen how it actually worked but they provide a screenshot of how it’s supposed to look like in your blog. Imagine Adbrite interstitials, I guess that’s how it feels like. Once you’ve opted to try blog sponsorships, you can choose how many days an ad shows up in your blog.

The other one is through sponsored posts. You are paid for writing a post about a particular product. The advertisers often require that you write words not less than a particular amount or you won’t be paid at all. Sometimes, they would also require screenshots or images along with your post. This post you’re reading is a sponsored post.

Although you won’t earn anything from this feature, I think it’s better to include it because it was designed to help bloggers avoid “blogger’s block” by giving them ideas to write about. There’s this feature called sparks. They are free opportunities placed by both bloggers and advertisers and are taken without pay. Sparks are a great way to interact with other bloggers and begin to create a community within SocialSpark.

View Analytics

SocialSpark utilizes IZEA’s own RealRank. It enables both advertisers and bloggers to view the specs of each blog right on the SocialSpark website. Izea’s Analytics include information such as page views, visitors, RealRank average, Alexa rank, and Google PageRank. You can use the analytics to check your blog’s performance, and at the same time a competitor’s performance as well.

Entrecard Purging

Today, I received an email about entrecard purging all accounts from its system who are using quick drop pages. What's a quick drop page, you may ask? Entrecard defined it as following:

Quick drop pages are single pages with your Entrecard widget, made to load quickly and display your widget and not much else. Many quick drop pages have just a widget, and maybe an ad or some other type of widget.

If you have a quick drop page, remove it now or suffer being removed from entrecard. This is just a quick reminder for everyone using entrecard. Check the email you registered to Entrecard or Entrecard's blog for more information about this.


technorati tags: entrecard, quick drop, purging

Increase Your Subscriber Count and More by Joining Blog Carnivals

I’ve been joining blog carnivals recently, and right now my article is being featured in one: How to Make Money Doing What You Love Carnival. Do you know why? Blog Carnivals have the power to help your blog in many ways. It will give your blog exposure to more audience, new subscribers, traffic, that much needed deep link to one of your articles, and increased ranking in both Google and Technorati. Of course, how it will affect your blog depends on how much time and effort you invest in it. To learn exactly how to get more from blog carnivals, just read on.

What’s a blog carnival?

To those who haven’t heard of the term yet, a blog carnival is a particular kind of blog community where permalinks (or links) to posts of blogs are submitted, collected, and published at a specific date. The posts submitted are usually based on a certain topic or theme. The host of a carnival publishes the collected links with its title, author and description in his/her blog on the specified date of its publishing (usually the deadline of submissions). To get a better idea of what a blog carnival is really about, take a look at blog carnival’s FAQs.

How to join blog carnivals?

Blog carnivals don’t require registration. All you need is a link to the post that you have published already and an email where you’ll receive a form that says you’ve submitted a post to this carnival and the details of the said carnival.

blog carnival email receipt

The only thing you have to do is fill-up the information needed for your link to be published properly.

blog carnival form

One thing to remember also is to submit your desired post/s to the appropriate carnival to avoid having your submission declined. From what I’ve read, since I’m fairly new to this thing, there are some carnivals that are strict about their submission policies and stuff so there will be times when your submissions will be revoked for some valid reasons. But I believe there will be more carnivals that’ll gladly accept your submissions, so don’t lose heart.

You can browse for the right carnival for your blog posts in Blog Carnival. Alternatively, if you’re lucky to spot one, some blogs announce a call for submissions to their upcoming carnival edition. Usually, they provide a link to where you can submit your posts. If not, you can still find it in Blog Carnival through patient browsing of their numerous carnivals, which you could sort by categories and date of editions by the way.

Benefits from joining a blog carnival

One way backlinks – Blog carnivals are made of compiled lists of link submissions from different bloggers; so, definitely, once it’s published, a backlink to your article (or should I call deep link) will be there. One way backlinks, most importantly deep links, will greatly benefit your blog in terms of search engine, Technorati, and Alexa rankings.

Boost in rankings – a backlink coming from one carnival is like a touch of gold for you simply because search engines, Technorati, and Alexa rank your blog based on the number of quality sites linking to it, the higher the PR the better. Now, most of these guys holding and hosting carnivals have decent PRs too. What do you think will happen if you’ve made lots of submissions to different carnivals?

Traffic – I’d like to say “boost your traffic” but basically it all depends on the marketing and popularity of the carnival plus your post headline’s catchiness which will determine how much traffic your blog will receive. Most definitely, though, you’ll be guaranteed traffic even how small it is once your link comes up in the carnival. To guarantee the carnival’s success, help promote it by submitting it to social media sites, e-mailing your friends and contacts about it, and promoting it in your blog as well.

One interesting aspect about blog carnivals is that, like other blog posts, they are indexed by search engines. Now, depending on their link popularity and keyword optimization, they will show up in search results every now and then. What this means is that they can still provide traffic even after they were published. However, it will not be as many as the week it was published.

More subscribers – Generally, traffic coming from the carnival are those who got curious about your submission and decided to take a peek at what you have to offer. If they like what they found in your blog, then it’s guaranteed that they will subscribe or get back every now and then to check on your blog. To take advantage of this traffic, make it easy for them to subscribe and always make quality posts as much as possible.

Tips on maximizing your benefits from your submission

1) Submit to the right carnival. It should be obvious that if your post is about blogging, submit it to blogging related carnivals. Submitting it to cooking carnivals will not get it posted. Also, the more appropriate the carnival to your post, the more its audience will find your blog interesting.

2) Submit to carnivals at least once a week. Your steady submissions will give you better traffic from all of the carnivals you’ve participated in and better rankings because of them also. Take advantage of this free marketing tool to expose your unknown blog to a wider set of audience.

3) Submit your best or pillar articles. It’s always up to you, but if you want to get better impression and acceptance from other people, it’s normal to always put your best foot forward. By submitting your masterpieces, they will get a better idea of what kind of content they can expect from you and what you’re interested in blogging about.

4) Get one catchy title. You should have done this early on when you published your post, but in case you haven’t it’s best to change it in a way that other people will more likely click it. You might not see its text field in the submission form early on, but after providing your permalink it will appear containing your post’s original title. You can manipulate it from here. Of course, your choices of catchy words should revolve around what your post is all about. Don’t make up “über” titles that’re completely different from what’s originally provided. Like in well-known social-bookmarking sites like digg, reddit, and stumbleupon, people will get mad at you if you do that.

5) Provide a short summary for your post. Hosts always include the summary of the post you’re submitting along with your link. This summary will provide your potential readers what you could offer in your post. It’s always better to provide one so you can use it to market your post effectively.

6) Get your posts in early. I got the idea from this article; “Best Practices for Driving Traffic with Blog Carnivals”. Usually, carnival hosts will post in the order that they receive the submissions. This will give you a fair advantage since the earlier your submission goes in, the higher your link will be positioned in the list, and thus more people would possibly pay attention and click it. Alternatively, hosts will be more likely to read and review ( and give a thumbs up) your post if it's in early as compared to the posts they receive an hour before the carnival deadline.

7) Promote the blog carnival. It’s a lesser known rule of thumb in blogging to promote those sites that link to you except spam. Why? Because the more these sites or pages get popular, the more PR juice and visitors you could get from it. Blog carnivals are one of those sites. You can start by sending it to digg, stumbleupon, reddit, delicious, and several other social bookmarking sites. Post about it in your blog. E-mail it to your contacts and friends. It all depends on where you can promote it effectively.

8) Make it easy to subscribe to your blog. Turn your visitors into regular readers by placing your subscribe button where they can immediately see it. You can also optimize your theme where they can see your best posts to better convince them to subscribe to your blog.

That’s it. Blog carnivals can do a lot to your blog, especially if you’re a beginner or interested in making more traffic. Only, you need to be focused and serious about it and, of course, pay attention to these tips and/or learn your way to better blog carnival submissions.



technorati tags: blog carnival, blogging, tips

Naruto Games plus Naruto’s Guide to Effective Blogging Equals… Naruto Optimization?

Hmmm, what a title? For those who are wondering why, I’m just trying my hands on keyword experimentations to see if it can boost my traffic from search engines. For this post I’m setting my eyes on the naruto keyword, naruto games specifically. Naruto’s climb to being one of the highly searched keyword in the web started picking momentum by 2006, perhaps fueled by its story line which gets better and better as the characters grow up and its ever growing fan base as well. Obviously, since the keyword is too saturated with competition, which could mean a pretty tough niche to break into, I decided to settle down to naruto games which has fewer strings pulling on it but can still rake in 2,000 plus searches per day. Along with naruto games, keyphrases such as naruto online games, online naruto games, download naruto games, and free online naruto games also generate some substantial search volumes. I just hope that this post will eventually manage to squeeze into a better spot in the search engine results one day.

Naruto's Keyword Trend

For those who are living in another dimension and aren’t aware of the “naruto hype” going on these days, Naruto is a story of a young ninja, named Naruto, who has a nine tailed demon fox, called Kyuubi, sealed inside him to save the village of Konohagakure from its destructive powers. Having the nine tailed demon trapped inside him, Naruto possessed immense powers ninjas of his age don’t have. Powerful as he is, the draw back of this gift was being ostracized by most of the villagers because of the beast inside him, a curse which he eventually managed to overcome because of his boisterous and cheerful personality. The story revolves around the adventures and misadventures of the main protagonist, enemies that get more and more powerful each time, and new ninja techniques which get cooler and cooler as episodes get concluded. If you want to know more about Naruto please visit his Wikipedia page.

Being a Naruto fan myself, I believe one can pick-up a lot of lessons from him which you could apply in life, as well as blogging. To begin with, Naruto is a simple character, very predictable, but true to his intentions and goals. You could see through him because of his transparent character. Did I strike any chord about blogging? As homage to Naruto’s immense nine-tailed chakra, I came up with a list of 9 lessons from the anime series which could seriously help you in your path to being a better blogger. I’ll call it the “nine jutsus of blogging”. Here it goes:

1) Simplicity and humility

According to his creator, Masashi Kishimoto, Uzumaki Naruto was purposely created as a simple and straight forward character because he is not very much interested in smarter and sophisticated heroes. Being that, it’s easier for fans to understand and, perhaps, relate to him. Besides being simple, Naruto is also humble in his ways. He might be boisterous, but he never boasted about what he has achieved or looked down on his fellow ninjas based on their shortcomings because he understood that he has greater shortcomings himself.

As a blogger, I believe there’s an art of keeping complicated things simple. It’s difficult but we should strive to perfect it for our readers. It’s keeping things informal, conversational, and straight to the point. That way information can be a lot easier to digest for most readers. Also, keeping your blogging ways simple will make your blogging life a lot less complicated. In the same way, humility should be an integral part of blogging. There’s nothing people avoid the most than those who are unapproachable and extremely full of themselves. Always keep your feet firmly on the ground. Additionally, talking to people about themselves and what they were looking for is always better than focusing about you and you alone.

2) Dream big

Naruto dreams of being a Hokage, or the leader and protector, of their village. He strives each day to be one and never loses it. As a blogger, we should always think and dream big because that will shape our actions. It’s your reason why you started this whole blogging thing so hold on to it and never let go. Strive each day to follow that dream and little by little you’ll be closer than what you think.

3) Determination

When it comes to protecting his friends and those important to him, the straightforward Naruto will never give up no matter what it takes, even if it means sacrificing his life. We’re not warrior ninjas so we don’t have to sacrifice our lives; but it doesn’t mean we won’t give the obstacles that go our way one hefty fight. If you want success in anything, it’s always important to be determined about it. Iron determination is what differentiates those at the top from the rest. Without it, I doubt that you’ll still be blogging after a few months or a year.

4) Be friendly

I guess this is important everywhere you go. In blogging, our version of friendliness is through connecting with our fellow bloggers and our generous linking to other sites. Of course, being nice to our fellow bloggers is also part of being friendly. Naruto’s cheerful qualities helped him make lots of friends not only in his village but in other territories as well. And it is through his friends that he draws strength, courage, and the determination to be better every time. We as bloggers, on the other hand, have better means of connecting with other bloggers and making friends with them rather than fighting enemies all day. By being friendly, you’ll get more followers, learn new things, and meet people whom you could run to if you need help on something about blogging.

5) Nothing compares hard work

Although lazy most of the time, Naruto works hard when it comes to training and learning new ninja skills. Through the guidance of his teachers he is able to perfect some ninja techniques that no body else can do like his massive shadow clone technique (kage bunshin no jutsu). If you work hard on something, it will show afterwards. Oftentimes, hard work exceeds those which are done in a short time just for the heck of producing one. You could see it in the quality and detail of the work. Blogging will always be better if it’s out of hard work. Copy and paste blog scrapers are always doomed to fail. Come out with something unique through hard work and the rewards will be better.

6) Be resourceful

Naruto is not a genius but he is resourceful. If he can’t achieve something through the tried and tested way, he compensates by finding other ways of doing it. The same applies to us. More often than not, you’ll find things not working your way no matter how hard you try. It is during these circumstances that you must be able to reinvent things to make it work your way. Maybe it’s your limited time for blogging, your contests, or your blogging projects, etc. What matters is that you discover a way to overcome set backs and make things work to your advantage.

7) Always be positive

Always hope for the best, that’s the skill no ninja in Konoha have seen except for Naruto. They are always calculating and fearing of the evil things that would come after. But for Naruto, the world is what you make of it. He always hopes that it will be better and he works hard to make it happen. By being positive, it’s easier to work because everything seems lighter and manageable. Additionally, by being positive, you help others because, mysteriously, a positive attitude can easily infect others. People respond better to positive thoughts than negative ones.

8) Learn from your mistakes

You’ve heard it everywhere. Guess what, you’ll also get it here; “learn from your mistakes”. Naruto is a hard-headed brat. Being such, he often ends up in trouble, but it is through these troubles that he learns what works and what doesn’t. He learns that rasengan works only when it gets into contact with its target, so obviously he had to make diversionary tactics to trap his enemy into making contact with the rasengan before releasing it. We as bloggers often commit mistakes, don’t fear if you did. Accept and correct it. Don’t be a complete “noob” who refuses to learn and be corrected. By learning from your mistakes, you become better every time you rise up.

9) Strive to become better

Rise up from your old self. Become better. Naruto’s enemies get stronger and stronger every passing episode. If he isn’t getting better each time, he’d be dead before the story ends. Every time he learns a new technique, acquire new friendship, learn important information and work cooperatively with his team mates, he becomes better than his former rebellious brat self. What we have in our reality is the same. Everytime you move forward, your problems also move forward with you, it’s a never ending cycle. That’s why the saying; “With great power comes great responsibility” was conceived in the first place. Expect more headaches and troubles in your blogging path; you’ll be facing more and more as you climb to the top. But you should not worry if you’re striving to be better each time.

Okay, that’s it. Did you like it? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below. And yes, for those who got here because of the naruto games, I haven’t forgotten about you. Below are the links of the best online naruto games I found through my searches. Trust me, I’ve read their reviews.

The Ninja RPG – The best so far.
Naruto Arena – Some good reviews but many say it’s complicated. Also their servers seem down for the moment.
Naruto Flash Games – Past time games in flash.

Did you like this post? How about I offer you another serving of Naruto blogging one more time? Here's the next Naruto post in case you're interested: Naruto Shippuden.

technorati tags: naruto, games, guide, blog tips

How to Boost Your Blog Traffic Using Keywords

Basically, keywords can do a lot of magic to your blog in terms of traffic through search engines. It is because search engines understand your blog through keywords. When someone tries to search for a certain keyword through Google, Yahoo, or MSN, it will show results of the sites they have indexed containing the word that someone is looking for. Depending on the keyword consistency of the page and the site as a whole, the search engines display their results according to the authority of the site on that particular keyword from the strongest to the weakest; where traffic, most of the time, is exclusive only to those who are displayed on the first to the tenth results page. By using keywords effectively in your posts, theoretically, you’ll increase your traffic from search engines because you’ll get your site displayed on the first five or ten search result pages of your keywords. At the same time, you’ll have audience who are interested in what you have to say or offer because you appeared in their searches.

The concept might be simple to look at from this point but, frankly, it is a lot of work. SEO practitioners call it “keyword research” which was first used on traditional websites. Bloggers adopted the idea because, basically, blogs are websites too but with a much different purpose compared to the traditional ones. The strategy behind the practice is basically building your site/blog or article around keywords to optimize it for search engine indexing. The question now is how to boost your traffic using keyword optimization? Here’s how:


Brain storm your keywords

Usually, experts would tell you to think of words or phrases based or relevant to your blog’s theme or niche. Then, you have to start jutting them down to come up with a list of around 5-10 words or phrases. Your categories and the tags you always use in social bookmarking sites when submitting your posts can help you in forming them.

You can do this if you want it this way, but personally I’d prefer another alternative rather than coming up with a relevant keyword.

Find the hottest keywords

Sometimes, you might want to fight fire with fire rather than build things slowly because the keywords you’ve been brainstorming about don’t get a sufficient search volume which you could call a boost in traffic. And one way to get that hot traffic is to get highly searched keywords into your blog. Where do you find it? There are available tools out there which can help you in this respect. Some come with a cost while others are free. I wouldn’t recommend anything since I haven’t used any at all. What I’ll show you, though, are found online, free to use, and doesn’t require any installation.


There’s Lycos 50 where you’ll find the top searches made by Lycos users. It might not be the same as what’s being searched in Google, but does Lycos users’ search trend need to be completely different from Google? I don’t think so. The list you’ll find here is updated weekly. Each Monday they tally up the hits for each query during the previous week and make certain adjustments to come up with the list. You can read about the adjustments here.


Another one is HotWords.com. They provide the top 10 daily and monthly searches. And from here, you’ll get an idea that internet is used mostly for porn because they are the words that always get on top of the list. To know more about how they collect their data, see here.

One draw back here is that there’s no guarantee that the particular keyword you chose will be popular for long since what’s popular this week or month might be buried 100 feet under the next month. Also, these sources will not promise you accurate results because what they have are always estimates collected with filters which can affect how the data is interpreted. So, it’s always safe to check your keywords of choice which you’ll learn on the next step.

Use keyword suggestion tools

These tools will help you understand better the keywords you’ve acquired earlier by giving you other related keywords and keyphrases to your original keywords. What’s more is that they also include the estimated number of searches for your keywords per day.


Free Keyword Suggestion Tool from Wordtracker is a free online tool that suggests relevant keyphrases based on your core keyword. Enter a keyword and see in the results a long trail of keyphrases related to your keyword and their corresponding number of estimated daily search volume.


Seo Book Keyword Suggestion Tool is another free online tool that cross references your keyword searches from Wordtracker, Google, Yahoo, and MSN and displays the estimated daily volume of the keyword including the relevant keyphrases. It’s similar to the first one but a lot better. What’s good about this tool is that it also contains additional tools along with the search results to help you understand and optimize your keyword.

Based on your gathered results, choose the keywords that have a long list of related search phrases and bigger search volume. Why? The search volume determines the number of traffic you’ll be getting through your keywords, while the number of related keyphrases, on the other hand, determines the other keyword combinations which could become your potential source of traffic besides your core keyword. In short, the more of them the better. Additionally, these keyword suggestion tools may also provide you with a better keyword or keyphrase that has more search volume compared to your original one.

Determine the competition

The next thing to do is to determine if there is a good chance you will achieve your prized high search engine ranking or if the competition for that phrase is already saturated. One good indicator for this is through the search engines themselves. Search for the keywords you have chosen from above and look at the number of the results found. The more results the more the competition there is in that keyword.

Also, another method of determining your chances of getting a share of traffic from the competition is through analyzing the results of your keyword searches which is pretty complicated. For that I’ll recommend the following links for you to get a better view of how complicated it is: The Facts You should Know about Keywords Competition Research, Some Good Things to Know when Researching Competition in the SERPs, Keyword Competition Metrics.

Complicated or not, one easy way to know if you really have a shot of getting a better position in search engines based in your keywords is to look up your competitor’s backlinks. Go to Alexa.com and see how many sites are linking to your competitors. The more established and popular sites are linking to them, the more difficult it will be for you to beat them at their game. If this is the case, try to revisit your keyword suggestion tools and look for a relevant keyphrase to your keyword and determine your competition again.

Your Onsite Keyword Optimization

Once you’ve finally captured the right keyword/s for your post, you need to optimize your article for those keywords to give it an edge on getting a better placement in search engine results. You’ve already seen your competitors’ keyword optimization previously so you have to beat or match what they’ve already achieved for you to get better search engine exposure. Here’s my article on how to do just that: Use Keywords as Much as Possible.

Regarding the backlinks to your post, this is the part where it’s out of your hands completely. For your article to get better search engine ranking, you need to have quality links pointing to that article and to your blog. Although it’s out of your control, you can pretty much influence how things will work your way. And here are my other articles on how to do just that: Generate Inbound Links, Why Deep Linking is better than Simple Reciprocal Linking.

When performing your onsite keyword optimization, avoid over-stuffing your blog with lots of keywords because, obviously, search engines recognize this kind of tactic as a common trademark of spammers. By doing so, you might get penalized and be banned from the search engine forever.

Write for your target audience and not for the keyword optimization alone. Basically, your traffic will be pretty much useless if you couldn’t engage your readers to come back for more and perhaps click on your ads.

If you’re trying to use the hot keywords, you might want to find a way to merge your blog’s topic or niche into the keyword you have so as not to have an off-topic article from your blog’s theme. This is a common trend among bloggers who “hijacks” keywords to prevent search engines (Google in particular) from penalizing their rankings because it’s a form of “gaming” the search algorithms in itself.

Conclusion

Keywords definitely have the power to give your blog that much coveted boost of traffic, given that you do it wisely. Give more time on keyword research and the rewards will be great, something that I too should place great importance besides social media optimizations. I have provided some online tools that I’ve been using before and some techniques I found through my research which you could use for your keyword campaigns in your blog. The steps or sequence given here don’t necessarily reflect the exact pattern or sequence keyword optimization and research should be done. In fact, if you research on articles done by SEO experts themselves, it goes in different ways. This serves only as a guide which is supposed to help you get a better idea about using keywords in general. And lastly, before anything else, you must place more importance on your content’s quality; keywords are supposed to follow your content’s form and not vice-versa.



technorati tags: keyword, seo, boost traffic

Pinay Mommy Online’s PEXLINKS Triple Love Project

Do you want to improve your Technorati ranking, RSS subscription, and get more people to drop entrecards on your blog. If the answer is all yes, then you have to join Pexlinks Triple Love Project, a project created by a “stay at home mommy blogger” of Pinay Mommy Online, Mommy Ruby. The idea is basically to have members who will subscribe, drop, and fave each other. The more participants the better the odds for everybody – the very reason why I’m promoting it here.

Did you ever remember the viral linking strategy back then, It didn’t worked for some people especially those who are using free blogging platforms except blogger, but it worked fairly in my love potion blog which placed it a step higher in Google pagerank. That’s because of a lot of backlinks to my homepage. My list almost got to a hundred, 85 actually (monitored via technorati) before it stopped coming in. This idea is somewhat the same, only, it’s not easy to just hop in since there are more efforts involved for the project to work. Here, you have to subscribe to others’ feeds, fave them in technorati, consistently drop on their entrecard widgets if you have the time, publish a post about the contest, and install the “blogrolling script” which contains the blogroll list of those who’ve participated. It’s quite tedious not to mention the updating of faves, subscription, and regular drops for new members but I guess it’s worth the effort since you’re trying to boost many of your blog’s aspect.

To get a better view of the benefits you’ll get, let’s make an example. Let’s say there are about a hundred members already. That would mean 100 subscribers to your blog, 100 fans in technorati, 100 entrecard droppers, and 100 backlinks to your blog if you join. That’s quite a lot if you ask me. I believe this project will benefit greatly most newbie bloggers out there who wants to get more visitors to their blog as well as those who have been stuck to the bottom of blogosphere’s dark abyss.

If you really want more from your blog, don’t miss Pexlinks Triple Love Project now and boost your technorati rankings, subscriber count, entrecard traffic, and of course your most precious backlinks.

***Here is the list of those who have joined already.***

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PEXLINKS TRIPLE LOVE PARTICIPANTS

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technorati tags: pinay mommy, boost traffic, boost subscriber, boost faves, entrecard

Digg Friends with Benefits

Nope, it’s not the FB you’re thinking about. It’s about having the ideal digg friends who’ll digg your shouts and more. We all know that there are different kinds of digg users. Some of them are good for you and your content promotion, while others are simply not interested. There are digg users who are picky with their friends, and then there are those who just befriend anyone they could get their eyes on. I guess being picky for a right reason saves you the effort of having to add too many friends in exchange for better submission promotion. Why add 100 friends when all you need is maybe a carefully chosen 75 or half of it and get the same benefits. Of course, it sounds ridiculous since we all have reasons why we join digg and why we add friends, but if you’re interested in getting more from your “please digg shouts”, maybe filtering out the less responsive digg users from your potential friend list is a better option.

I got the idea from this e-book entitled “Breaking the Digg Code” which I’ve just finished reading. This is not a review of this e-book by the way since I’m only going to share a bit of what you could learn inside. I guess the author of the book won’t be mad if I share a little of his work (which, I believe, was created primarily to boost the readership of his blog).


Digg users who have many friends, send shouts for diggs, submitted to dugg ratio is below 20 percent, are members for more than a month, and digg a lot of stories are the type of people that should pass as a beneficial digg friend. Here are the reasons why:

The number of dugg stories

Obviously if you’re not an active digger, it reflects in your profile. When you see a user who has only 500 stories dugg after being a member since April of 2007, chances are this user is only using digg occasionally. What are your chances then of having your shouts noticed by this guy? Occasionally perhaps. Of course, you also have to check how long the user has been a member. If it’s only two months or less, expect a lower number. Generally, I think you should be able to reach the 1000th digg after 4 months or less of being a member. That’s like a maximum of 10 diggs a day. If you want your submission to get diggs, look for active digg friends.

Submitted to digg ratio is less than 20%

If you divide the number of diggs to the number submissions, you should get 0.20 or less.

Ratio = Diggs / Submitted

Why? Let’s say that user dugg 10 stories today, 2 of which is his submitted content if it’s 20 percent. That leaves 8 more stories where your story could be one of it. That’s an optimal state to be in since not all of the remaining 8 may come from the shouts this user received. It will be shared, perhaps, by the stories in the front page, his finds in the upcoming page, and then the shouts from his friends of which you are one. That’s why it has to be 20 percent or less. The lesser it is, the more possibility that this user diggs what his friends are digging. Never ever make friends with a user whose diggs equal to his submissions (or something near that) for they are only submitting their own stories and don’t bother with the word “community”.

Friendly

You should only “add” diggers with friends. I’ve seen quite a lot of digg users who don’t have digg friends. And, usually, they are the ones who submit stories and seldom digg other’s submissions. You have no use for them. Most probably, they have some fans before you and their requests to be befriended back weren’t answered. Why then should you waste your time on them?

Another, issue that’s worth looking at is the number of friends a user have. I usually try to add those with 300 or more friends and I either get a slow reaction or none at all and I’m stuck to being a fan. I’m guessing that the more friends a digger have the more lousy fans they have too and you could be one of them which keep you from being added back. This is most true for power users who have legions of fans waiting to be kissed back by some ultimate being or something LOL. You have two options for this: either you do something for them to notice you, or stick to those with lesser friends. If you think they’re worth the time, then try to grab their attention by digging their submissions all the time.

Date Joined

One issue with digg is that it’s got lots of spammy and temporary profiles where the user profile gets used for a few weeks only and then poof, off they go to make a new one. It’s part of their tactic to avoid getting caught by the digg authority, I guess. So you have to be careful about adding users who have been a member for less than a month. It’s better to add those that have been in digg longer, such as 2 months perhaps.

Shout Fanatics

This is one important indication that the user you’re looking at will more likely digg what you shouted to him/her. If you’re sending shouts to other people, it’s always a given that you are also digging the shouts you receive. You can see the shout activity of a user through the “history tab” in their profile. There are users who send unusually high volume of shouts per day. Well, they can also be put to good use, I guess, besides their spammy character. If they’re really into it, maybe you can ask them to share your submitted story to their friends after you dugg all their shouts. But then if they’re nagging you like crazy and they don’t even digg any of what you’ve been shouting at them, just unfriend them and report to the digg authority if found “too spammy”.


These are just my ideas of a truly responsive and beneficial character in the digg community given that you want your stories to be promoted and hit the front page. Of course, it’s always up to you if you want your digg experience be dictated by virtues of plain promotional character alone. After all, there are some instances where a user can be a contradiction of these qualities and yet would still prove more than beneficial for you.



technorati tags: digg, social media, friends

The Z-list Blogger’s Comprehensive Guide to Getting Traffic from Digg

Are you a new blogger or, perhaps, one of the bottom dwellers that comprise the majority of the blogosphere (like me)? What are your chances of hitting the front page of digg, you may ask? Well, I have no exact numbers for that; but if you’re no social media genius then most probably it’s next to impossible. You can submit all your posts to digg but I can guarantee you that all your efforts will just go to waste. I am not trying to deter you from submitting your posts but for expecting to land on the front page, although not completely impossible, you should be realistic about it. What then can we expect from digg? I did some research before I temporarily vacated this blog for three weeks at most and I found out that it’s possible to get traffic from digg without necessarily hitting the front page. It might not be as massive as thousands a day but I can guarantee you that it will definitely be worth the effort. All you need is time and a focused effort to do it.

DIGG?

For beginners, digg is a social media site that churns out what’s cool and popular in and around the net at the moment. Submitted stories are voted upon by digg users and, based on the quality of those votes, the fate of these stories to get more exposure are determined. It has witnessed several reformatting in its algorithms to avoid its users from spamming, gaming, and monopolizing the system to project an image of diversity and democracy in its voting system which somehow unintentionally (according to some) stripped its top users of their vote’s weight just recently. Your submitted stories are first seen in the upcoming section which is easily buried from sight as more users also submit their stories later on. Now, your story’s fate depends on the hands of the entire digg community if they will bury it, never to be seen again on the face of digg universe, or be carried up to the front page where you get your much coveted massive traffic.

HOW TO GET THAT TRAFFIC?

About Your Story

Diggable content
Basically, you have to understand what kinds of stories or materials digg community like to dig. Judging from its popular archives here are some examples of blog posts that work well in digg:

• Lists
• How to guides
• Tech related (internet, games, Google, Microsoft, Linux, Mac, gadgets, get it?)
• Any fact stranger than fiction that a lot of people don’t know about and haven’t been dugg before
• Extremely outrageous, weird, funny, or amazing things
• Important newsworthy events that big news sites haven’t covered yet (because if they were they’d be in digg and it’s pointless to resubmit the same story)
• Global warming, oil prices (recent), and alternative fuel sources

If your blog deals with any of these then you’re a lucky son of a gun. If your blog’s about seo, blogging, or making money online, uhm, better think twice about submitting, or better yet submit it someplace else besides digg. Digg people really hate these kinds since, even how much people deny it, the fact remains that most spammers are from the money making (or related) ranks.

Diggable buttons
Not necessarily a part of driving traffic to your blog but installing digg buttons in each of your posts makes it easier for people to digg it and be exposed to a greater digg audience.

Diggable headline
When you submit a story, this is the first thing you fill out. Usually, by default, your post’s title appears here. You can change it for a specific purpose if you want. Your headlines must be catchy but related to your original. The title must be interesting enough to convince its readers to click and read your story, or better yet, digg it. Words like “top, first, new, how, best, greatest, and free” are perfect examples which you can add to your headlines as long as they are applicable. Tip: It’s a good habit to make your post title “digg oriented” before publishing it.

Diggable description
After the headline or title, this is the next people read. It’s short so you have to be able to engage their thoughts fast. It could be information to support your title, or additional reasons/info on why they have to read further. Give them what they want to know about your story that will make them want to actually read it. A lot of digg how to guides say that it’s okay to give false promises to get people digging which turns to traffic, but digg community is also known to be a dangerous crowd when angered which could haunt your blogging existence forever. So be careful if you’re going to use this kind of writing tactic.

About Your Digg Profile

Be an active digger
It’s really no secret that if you want traffic from digg and wants your content to be seen, you should really be active in promoting it but not necessarily submitting it. Submit your blog post (not all the time), submit other stories you really dig, digg other’s submissions (or what they dugg), get friends - it’s one of digg’s essential part, and take time to read the messages or shouts your friends are throwing at you unless they’re spam. Act and be part of the community. It is in being active that your profile gain more exposure to other digg users for them to also take a look and digg your submissions.

Use an avatar
Get some picture to represent your digg profile. Without one, it will be hard to remember you by and digg people just find it hard to trust profiles with generic identity even in pictures.

The Rules of the Game

Don’t submit your posts all the time
Digg users hate spamming along with shameless self-promotion. And if you always submit your posts in the system, it will be easy for them to brand you as a spammer. The key here is moderation or complete avoidance. If you think your post has that “digg appeal”, don’t push your luck by submitting it yourself as it will almost always be ignored except by your friends. The best way is always to get others to submit it unless there’s no one willing.

Submit other stories
Some digg users devote their time submitting up to100 or greater stories a day to gain authority and attention in digg. Clearly, I would say, it would take someone without a life to do this sort of activity, be it automated or not, since you have to enter some description and authentication code for each which would really take time. For us bloggers who are constantly brewing new ideas (or recycling old concepts) and tweaking our blog’s performance, we don’t have that much time at our disposal. So, I think it would be better and a lot more efficient if you’ll be submitting 2 to 3 stories a day, preferably those related to your niche or chosen digg topic (this thing I’m yet to do). The best way to find new stories to digg is through subscribing to well-known news sources. Alternatively, you can also submit your favorite or idol bloggers’ posts if you want. Just think of it as your contribution to the community, even if they don’t show that much appreciation.

Submit original stories
Don’t resubmit the same story as your own original article (also known as blog spamming). It’s just useless and considered gaming by the system. If it’s just a recap or a short summary of the original, just digg or submit the source. Of course there are times when it’s really time consuming trying to know if it’s the original, but do try to avoid it as much as possible.

Get many friends
Digg is a social media and has the word “social” all over it so having “friends” is part of its features. These friends will be the core source of your diggs which will help you get a bit of an exposure, and the core source of traffic because they will check out your submitted story if diggworthy or not. Add as many friends as possible. Of course, don’t expect all of them to friend you back so that your shouts will reach them. Just think of them as your allies in your mini-battles inside the digg universe.

Send shouts
Don’t forget to inform your friends about your recent stories. Shout them your new submission and let them digg it on their own volition. Don’t force them, they’re your friends. Don’t send shouts all the time if you’re making a lot of submissions. If there’s one thing a lot of digg users hate, it’s becoming too annoying to the point that they want to report you as a spammer.

Digg your friends’ dugg content and submitted stories
You don’t have to digg it all. Just show that you pay attention to their activity and you help them out with their submissions too. It’s like do unto others what you want others to do to you. Digg what they’re shouting unless you’re strongly convinced that it’s a useless piece of crap. But don’t bury their story too, they’re your friends, remember?

Pay attention to who’s digging your story
These are your friends to whom you owe a reciprocal digg. Those who don’t digg you, well, you can forget about their submissions occasionally. Befriend those who dugg it but aren’t your friends yet.

Digg stories from the upcoming section
This is the part where a lot of users forget to venture into simply because it’s hard to get a hold of this page as it changes fast each minute due to massive submissions. Try to look for some interesting submissions and digg. This is an opportunity to get more friends. I’m not sure if it’s true for all, but I got some of my digg friends from digging their pathetic (lol) submissions in the upcoming section. Just kidding with the pathetic part.

Leave comments
This is the hidden gem that can give you extra traffic besides submission. It’s like commenting on blogs. Leave useful information if you’re dropping a url, and make sure that the url will contribute to the story, or else the community will see it as just spam and will appear hidden as default from the others who will care to read the comments. Also it’s not wise to leave comments in the popular section as there will be more comments in that particular story before yours which makes it harder to get yours read by interested parties but easier for troll diggers to vote out of the picture. The upcoming section is always the best source if you wish to be the first. Always make sure too that it’s not always a url to your blog that you’re leaving or it might get banned from digg permanently. It can give great benefits but commenting can also pose some sticky and worrisome situations for your blog. You might want to read this guide (Guide to Traffic from Comment Diggs) before undergoing a commenting spree.

Right timing
This is also one of the key techniques to get better exposure for your submission even if it doesn’t get to the front page. Digg has its low and peak hours. Since majority of digg users are coming from North America, it’s always safe to assume that you should time your submissions based on the usage patterns of this territories. According to this article (A Comprehensive Guide to Going Viral on Digg Part 1), there are time trends where digg submissions shoot up the graphs and hit the front page. These times are: 8:30am-10:30am,1:00pm-3:00pm, 4:00pm-6:00pm, and 8:00pm-10:00pm (Pacific Standard Time). That would be between 11:30pm-1:30am, 4:00-6:00am, 7:00am-9:00am, and 11:00am-1:00pm if here in the Philippines. Basically, if you don’t want your submission to get buried by hundreds of submissions in the upcoming pages these are the right times to send them and get more people to view it.

CONCLUSION

A well-crafted title and description of your submissions will always capture attention, hence traffic. Plus, observing digg’s unwritten rules will make your submission perform a lot better. What more if you time it when more people are able to see it? Like I said earlier, this guide will not help you get to the front page of digg but we cannot always discount the possibility of your submissions ending in the front page if you employed these techniques. After all, it was from articles that will teach you how to get to the front page. Even so, there’s no guarantee of terrific traffic since, obviously, it all depends on the quality of your submissions even how much you time, play fair, or promote it. But then, even if you don’t have that great a content, there will still be traffic coming from your friends (that’s why it’s important to get many), those really interested in what you have to offer, and from the comments you’ve been making. But always remember to play it right and avoid getting it beyond what the digg community can tolerate.



technorati tags: digg, traffic, smo