I’m a nobody. Scratch that; I was a nobody.  I work as a personal trainer in Toronto; I had no connections, knew nothing about blogging, and hadn’t written anything since University. 

What I did have was an idea and, with the right know-how, an idea is powerful enough to break through all barriers.

I’m not the first person on the Internet to talk about fitness.  On the contrary, I’m about the 1 000 000^th.  My idea, though, was to be different and I decided to cover topics that nobody else was covering. 

You see, every fitness guru on the planet gives suggestions pertaining to exercise prescription, while nobody was effectively teaching trainers how to actually train.  After all, isn’t learning how to effective teach more important than a fancy new version of the squat?

That was my idea: “I’m going to be the one to bring non-exercise prescription advice to personal trainers.”

I launched the Personal Trainer Development Center (PTDC) in April of 2011 and it has become a main resource for personal trainers passionate about getting better.  It already brings in a nice monthly passive income and will provide a great forum for me to sell my book in April of 2012.

The question I get asked constantly is how I made friends with some of the best fitness pros in the World and consistently get them to take part in my site without being able to pay them.  These are folks who charge $200-500 to write elsewhere and give me their article for free.  To take it one step further, I know bloggers who put out brilliant information weekly.  Too bad their mothers are the only ones reading their blogs.

The answer doesn’t lie in SEO and doesn’t lie in buying links.  Those things matter but come later on.  The first step in building a house is a strong foundation.  That foundation hinges on both the relationships you’re able to build and your creative problem solving ability.

This article is the first time I’ve ever written about why I carefully hand-picked the people to be involved in my site and how the power of my idea has grown to both a money-making enterprise and a beacon of change in a badly controlled industry.  Apply these principles to your own industry and watch your influence grow.

Do your research

If you write it, they won’t come.  Content is only king if people read your content and care who you are. 

The first step is getting a thorough understanding of who the movers and shakers are in the informational sector of your industry.  I took a full year to study the fitness internet informational world.  Before launching my site I had research done into who the influencers were and who were the people behind the scenes acting as puppeteers. 

I opened a new email account and subscribed to everybody’s newsletter in addition to adding as many blogs as possible in my reader.  From there, I made notes not only on content but on who was linking to whom.  I was then able to ascertain which bloggers had relationships with whom and who seemed to be competing.

What I quickly realized is that in the fitness world there were a number of distinct “camps.”  Each of these camps had their head guru behind the scenes and top infopreneurs putting out resources.  Peel away the layers and I found all of the soldiers spreading information.

There is good news and bad news here.  The bad news is that you’re too late.  I can promise that these camps and levels already exist in your industry.  The good news is that there aren’t many bloggers who have figured this out yet and you have a great opportunity to become acquainted with these camps. 

Look at it this way: the systems of spreading information are already set up for you.  That’s the hard part.  So how do you break into these camps?

Create a committee of coaches

Anybody can contribute to the PTDC but I have a special section for “coaches” where I highlight their profiles and link back to them.  These coaches are my advisory committee.  I don’t ask for much from them but keep them on an email list.  Camaraderie has evolved where the coaches are now proud to be part of the team and many have built relationships with each other.

If you want to build a community, I recommend having an advisory committee and introducing them.  One of the biggest benefits you can give to new potential contributors is the ability to network with your existing following.

Start strategically small

At this point, your site should be built.  Don’t blast it off to the heads of the aforementioned camps.  You will be ignored.  During your research, though, you took careful notes of the foot soldiers right? Here’s where they come in handy. 

These foot soldiers are trusted within their chosen camp and will act as your person on the inside.  Here’s how I did it.

I noticed that many of the gurus offer internships.  One by one these interns become household fitness names.  It was obvious to me that the gurus weren’t only teaching them fitness, they were also teaching them the internet marketing game. 

In identifying the foot soldiers, I made special note of the folks who had done top tier internships and had small websites popping up or were starting to be quoted on the major blogs.  These were my targets.  I made sure to Like their Facebook updates and comment where warranted.  I also commented on their blogs.  After some back and forth among the comments I sent them a private message asking if they would like to be involved in my site as coaches.

I had a warm opening, as we had had some contact previously, and getting them on as coaches allowed me access to their networks (which, conveniently, consisted of the camps I was desperately trying to break into).

Identifying the foot soldiers in your industry is a great way of gaining entry into the trusted gurus camps.  These people are just as hungry as you are and will jump at the opportunity to network and be part of something bigger than them.

Republish your coaches’ old content

Now that I had a small but well-connected gang of coaches, it was time to approach the influencers.  Armed with my vision and some early success because of good content, I wrote them a message.  Out of the ten I contacted, I had a 90% response rate, and out of those 90%, every one agreed to come on board. 

It was right then that I knew the PTDC was going to make it big.  So how did I get their participation without being able to pay them?

I realized that all of these top fitness pros had been writing for years.  As a result both of their longevity in combination with poorly built sites, I realized that their old material was getting little to no traffic. 

I went through their archives before speaking to them and mentioned a couple of key articles that I had figured they forgot about.  I discussed how these articles would be a great addition to the site and were needed to help the industry.  They supported my powerful idea.

Each of the gurus agreed to come on the team.  I then sent them a list of the articles I wanted to republish and got the okay for each one.  Not only did I get a bank of articles to use for the coming months, so content wouldn’t run dry, I also had given these folks a great forum to attract more readers without any work.

Once two or three top pros were on board, they started referring me other “friends” who might be interested.  Now I also had the advantage of offering new coaches a powerful new network.

While doing your research, make sure to go through the archives of the gurus you found.  Keep a file on your computer of their old articles that support your idea.  It is a great way to stimulate initial traffic to your site.

Creatively solve problems

This process was not always rosey, and there were a lot of problems in building up the PTDC that had to be dealt with.  One I want to cover here is how I approached the top coaches. 

As a new blogger, your only currency is links, and sending out cold calls or messages to top writers won’t get you any response.  After a failed attempt I went a different route and started a weekly blog entitled Online Personal Trainer Blog Posts of the Week. 

It wasn’t much extra work since I was already reading these blogs anyway.  All I changed was to make a file and when I liked a post I kept the link and included it in the article.

Here’s the catch.  I knew which influential bloggers I wanted to approach next and the Posts of the Week blog was my way of making sure they noticed me before I sent them a message.  I linked to their blog and tagged them on Facebook in addition to mentioning them on Twitter.  They would almost always interact back. 

Adding their post to the list was my way of saying, “Hey! I noticed you do good work. Come look at my site and the great info we provide.”  Nobody is every surprised when I send them a message an more as they have all already seen the site.

You will also have problems building up and here is my recommendation to you: figure out who on the internet can help you solve your problem.  Don’t approach them immediately.  Instead, creatively find a way to make them notice you.

Summing it up

Follow Metcalfe’s Law.  Whether you are a new blogger or an existing blogger trying to increase your influence, remember that you are only as valuable as the number of nodes on your network.  Figure out who is already effectively doing what you want to do and find a way into their good books. 

Armed with your powerful idea and with the help of your advisory board your reach will explode.  Remember: content is only king if there are people to read it.

Jonathan Goodman is a personal trainer and blogger.  His powerful idea led him to create the Personal Trainer Development Center and maintain a personal site. 

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to Establish Influence from Scratch

I learned a lot from it myself (I’ll share one thing that instantly had results for me below) and we had literally hundreds of comments from those attending saying how worthwhile it was. Here’s just a few of over 250 comments:

Based upon the amazing feedback and the fact that over 2000 people registered for the webinar but we could only fit in 1000 – we’ve decided to release the recording to those who missed out.

We’ll leave this recording up for a week or so so don’t miss out on listening in by doing it today.

You can listen to the hour of teaching and 20 minutes of Q&A (which was great too) here.

You will need a notepad and pen or a word doc to make some notes with because there is a heap of rich information to take in.

One Tip I learned that Instantly Increased My Facebook Results

As I said at the end of the call – there’s so much to learn when it comes to using Facebook to market your blog. I myself am taking a course that Amy is running to learn more. As I listened to her yesterday I jotted down a number of action items.

One was around the use of images. Amy mentioned in the webinar that images are the number 1 thing that people are sharing on Facebook. While I knew this I hadn’t really acted on the information. So this morning here’s a little experiment that I did:

Normally when a new post goes up on my photography blog I post an update like this:

What you see there is the status update on our page as it happens if you simply add a link to the status update box. It automatically pulls in an image from the post, the title of the post and the first line or two. I do these updates manually each day and they drive some pretty nice traffic. You can see in this case that after 25 minutes of being live that update was ‘liked’ 3 times and shared once. I’d estimate that around 100 people came and looked at the post in that 25 minute period.

Taking Amy’s teaching on board today I decided to do a followup status update with the same post a little while later – this time I decided to upload the same photo that you see above and to write something about the photo (including the link).

Here’s how it looked:

The photo is bigger and more eye catching and you can immediately see what happened as a result. 18 times as many people ‘liked it’. 7 people commented. While there were no shares I’ll bet that this type of update will typically get shared more than the other type. Interestingly since adding this update I saw a spike in traffic coming to that post that I’d estimate was around 400 people.

Update: the ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ are continuing to come in one this one.

Key take home lesson? If you have an visually interesting image in your post consider uploading it and adding the link in the description of your image rather than just sharing the link and letting Facebook pull in the image. I’m certainly going to experiment some more with this technique.

Listen to the Full Webinar for Free Here

This is just one action item I picked up from Amy in the above webinar. I’ve got another 10 action items that I’m going to implement in the coming week.

Enjoy the full webinar for yourself here and learn how to tap into the billion plus people on Facebook.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How I Got 18 Times More ‘Likes’ on a Facebook Update

Your blog’s readers probably have Facebook profiles already, and making your own Facebook profile is easy enough. Aside from allowing you to create a profile and connect with your friends from elementary school, Facebook has several features that can connect your blog readers and help you find new ones.

Create a Facebook Group

Your readers have a common interest – your blog’s subject. My readers are preparing for the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT). Maybe yours are interested in knitting, running, or making money online. Just as they have subscribed to your blog, they will join your Facebook group.

At the beginning of December 2008, I created the 2009 LSAT Study / Discussion Facebook Group. Someone else had created a 2008 LSAT Group, and I wanted to be the person to create the 2009 group, so I started early. When someone is searching Facebook for an LSAT group to join this year, they’ll see my group has over 100 members, but someone else’s group on the same topic only has 3, guess which group they’ll join.

Note: I didn’t make the group about my blog directly – I made it broader. Why? So people searching on Facebook for LSAT-related groups would feel welcome to join. If they thought it was limited to my blog’s readers, the prospective member might not even visit the group page, which means he/she would never see the link to my blog.

So I created a group and placed a prominent link to my blog on the top, but it only had one member – me. Not very impressive, right? I didn’t want my readers to think my group and blog were unpopular, so I immediately invited all of my Facebook friends to join the group. Some of my Facebook friends were already planning to take the LSAT, so inviting them to join my new Facebook group had two additional benefits:

1. It informed them of my blog if they didn’t know about it already.

2. Facebook’s news feed told all their friends, making the group a viral marketing mechanism for the blog..

How Readers Use the Facebook Group

Of course, the Facebook group is more than a viral marketing mechanism too. It helps your readers to connect with each other in a way comments don’t. While comments are generally responses to your postings, Facebook’s discussion boards allow direct interaction between readers. My readers have used the Facebook group to find LSAT study partners and form study groups by posting messages on the discussion board and the Wall. How did I tell my readers about the Facebook Group? I posted a link to it on the side of my blog, and I made a brief blog post about it for those who hadn’t noticed the link.

Marketing Your Facebook Group, and Your Blog, in Other Facebook Groups

Search Facebook for groups on your topic and related ones. In each of these groups, you can post a message on the group Wall or discussion board, or you can use the Post a Link feature to notify the group’s members of your group and your blog. Warning: don’t do all three in the same group at the same time – it’s overkill and may get you banned from the group. By promoting your Facebook group at first, instead of promoting your blog, you decrease the likelihood that the group administrator will remove your message.

After doing all of this, Facebook became one of my biggest sources of traffic, and I don’t even have to do much to keep the Facebook traffic coming. In order to get more readers, you need to have a presence where they are. For me and for many bloggers these days, our present and future readers spend their time in social networking sites.

What about you? Have you used Facebook or other social networking sites to promote your blog? Have you found it to be effective?

Bio: Steve Schwartz is a professional LSAT tutor living in New York City. He updates his Ace the LSAT blog every week with free LSAT tips and tricks.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to Use Facebook to Promote Your Blog

My analysis was stimulated by a question from a reader who in response to last week’s two posts examining the place of Digg and Social Bookmarkingin a bloggers priorities asked me:

What role does Social Bookmarking traffic play in your blog?

I decided to dig into the metrics on DPS and find out the answer… or at least that is what I started out doing…..

As I began to analyze the stats I realized that DPS has four main referrers of traffic – each are quite different from the others and yet each are very important. What follows in this post is me thinking out loud on each source of traffic and what it means to my blog.

Looking at the big picture

Lets start by looking at the big picture of the traffic coming into DPS. For the purpose of this post I’ll go back to the start of 2007 with my analysis (the time I started using Google Analytics) and I will only be looking at traffic coming into the DPS blog (ie this doesn’t include data on the forums).

Here’s a snapshot of all traffic coming into the DPS blog since 1 January 2007 (click to enlarge all images in this post).

You can see over the last 22 months that the DPS blog has had steady growth. There have been 11.5 million visitors, around 25 million page views and they stay on the site around two and a half minutes per visit.

At 1 January the average daily visitor numbers were around 4,000-5,000 visitors. At present they average around 23,000-25,000.

Looking specifically at the main sources of traffic to the blog – there are four that are responsible for a little under 70% of all of the above traffic:

1. Google (26%)
2. Direct Traffic (RSS, Newsletters, Browser Bookmarks etc) (21%)
3. StumbleUpon (11%)
4. Digg (9%)

The next highest referrers are significantly lower in how much traffic they bring in and include Yahoo, many other blogs (big and small) and Delicious.

As you can see – Google is a fairly important factor in my blog. Add other search traffic from Yahoo, MSN, AOL and search traffic is responsible for around 30% of the overall traffic.

If I was to categorize all of the social bookmarking traffic (Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit, Popurls etc it accounts for around 24% of overall traffic (a little higher than ‘direct’).

OK – so this information is mildly interesting (to me at least) but when I dig down a little further and do some analysis of each type of traffic I find it more illuminating.

Digg Traffic

Since last week we were talking about Digg, lets start with that.

Here’s how Digg traffic to the DPS blog has looked over the last 22 months.

Straight away we can see the nature of Digg traffic. It is either there or it isn’t. The spikes can be fairly significant (in most cases they range from 10,000 to 30,000 visitors) but between them the traffic from Digg rarely gets over 100 visitors a day.

Lets look at a few other stats on Digg visitors over this period:

• They viewed 1.39 pages per visit (site average was 2.17)
• They spent an average of 54 seconds on the site (site average was 2 minutes and 35 seconds)

So in comparison to overall averages Digg users are fairly fleeting (although note as fleeting as I hear some people saying).

One other thing worth saying about Digg visitors. I’ve heard a lot of people say that they don’t ‘convert’ to regular readers. So lets have a look at my newsletter signups for the latest ‘Digg Event’ on DPS (that last spike on the chart).

As you’ll see there was a definite increase in subscriber numbers on the day of my last Digg event (Nov 13th). Of course that day had 14,000 visitors from Digg to the site and subscriber numbers were only up around 150 subscribers – so Digg users don’t become loyal readers in huge numbers – but some of them do convert. I’d suspect that RSS subscribers would increase by a similar sort of rate after a Digg event.

I’ve noticed similar sorts of increases in subscriber numbers on other ‘Digg events’. They don’t convert massively but I always do pick up extra readers each time – the stats on the site tend to look like this chart taken from my post – How to Build a ‘Digg Culture’ on your Blog:

This is actually one of the biggest benefits of social bookmarking traffic for me. While the actual spike in traffic is nice – the real benefit comes from those readers you’re able to convert to regular readers. 100 extra readers adds up to thousands of page views over a year.

One more stat on ‘conversion to loyalty’:

Over the last few months I’ve had a test running on Google Analtyics that analyzes how many visitors ‘convert’ to subscribers. I’ve set up a ‘Goal’ on Google Analytics that is triggered as achieved when people reach the thank you page for my newsletter subscription (meaning when they convert to verified subscribers).

Digg Users get to this page 0.48% of the time. This is in comparison to an average of 2.24% for the overall site.

Do Digg Users Click Ads?

One of the great things about Google Analytics now is that you can track AdSense earnings if you link your AdSense and Analytics accounts (they’re still rolling this feature for some).

While AdSense TOS prohibits sharing of too much information on earnings I’ll share some vague stats with you on how different readers ‘convert’ with ads.

• The CPM (earnings per 1000 page views) has converted with Digg readers at about half the site average.
• The CTR (click through rate) of Digg users is about a third of the site average.

So the common perception that Digg users don’t click ads is backed up – to a point. Some of them do click and when you consider that you can get 30,000 of them visiting your site in a day this can add up.

Keep in mind that Digg traffic can be useful for monetizing a site in other ways – particularly when you’re making money on a CPM basis where you’re paid per page view.

StumbleUpon Traffic

StumbleUpon actually sends me more traffic than Digg does over time. Here’s how the traffic from SU looks over the last 22 months.

Here we see that the nature of Stumble Upon traffic is actually quite different from Digg. While both are ‘bookmarking’ sites they are really quite different. When a post gets popular on StumbleUpon the traffic it generates is spread out over days (and even weeks and months). There’s often no single day when you get masses of traffic but rather it’s more of a slow burner (I’ve written more about this in a post titled Why StumbleUpon Sends More Traffic than Digg).

You’ll see that StumbleUpon traffic has actually grown significantly over time. What I put this down to is that as I’ve written more and more posts on my blog there have been more entry points for SU traffic. While traffic grows and then falls off to particular posts on SU if you have multiple posts generating traffic you can actually see it build to significant numbers (like they were in the period of June/July this year where I had about 6-7 posts doing very well in SU simultaneously).

Lets look at a couple of other metrics on the SU traffic:

• They viewed 1.62 pages per visit (site average was 2.17)
• They spent an average of 1 minute and 7 seconds on the site (site average was 2 minutes and 35 seconds)

So StumbleUpon traffic is a little more sticky than Digg traffic. They view more pages and stick around longer.

Do StumbleUpon users signup for the newsletter and become loyal? My stats show that 0.51% of them have reached the thank you page on my newsletter subscription process. Slightly higher than Digg users but a lot lower than overall site averages.

Do StumbleUpon users click ads?

Interestingly StumbleUpon users seem to click on ads less than Digg users with the limited amount of stats that I have on this. The CPM that I’m seeing with SU users is very similar to that for Digg users but the CTR was about a third of Digg users (and about a tenth of overall site averages).

Search Engine Traffic

My number one traffic source on DPS is that from search engines. Google takes the lions share of this but I’ve added in the others into this analysis (interestingly Yahoo has been on the increase of late). Here’s how the search engine traffic has grown over the last 22 months.

Again – a very different shaped chart to the others. The two spikes in traffic are both to do with search traffic increasing for terms around ‘fireworks photography’ at around 4th July – but other than that it’s very steady growth with little weekly spikes and troughs in traffic but not much else to note.

This traffic has gone up over time for a couple of main reasons:

1. I’ve been adding content – the more pages you have the more entry points that search engines can send people to

2. The sites authority has grown over time – the longer you’re around the more links you have pointing at your blog and the more authoritative search engines begin to give you.

Lets look at a couple of other stats from Search Engine Traffic:

• They viewed 2.55 pages per visit (site average was 2.17)
• They spent an average of 3 minutes and 20 seconds on the site (site average was 2 minutes and 35 seconds)

Interestingly Google readers view 2.51 pages and spend 3 minutes and 16 seconds while Yahoo readers view over 3 pages and spend over 4 minutes on the site.

In terms of ‘conversion’ via the newsletter – 2.72% of search engine visitors have made it to the thank you page (again it’s better for Yahoo than Google). This is better than the site average making search traffic more sticky than social media traffic.

Do Search Engine Readers Click Ads?

The common perception is that search engine referrals are more profitable when it comes to CPC advertising programs like AdSense. My stats back this up.

I’m seeing the CPM of my search traffic as about 10% higher than the site average and CTR up by about 10% also. Interestingly I’m seeing Yahoo traffic as about 30% higher than Google.

Direct Traffic

The last category of traffic that I want to analyze is what Google Analytics classifies as ‘direct’ traffic. This traffic includes those coming in from desktop RSS subscribers, newsletters, browser bookmarks, type in traffic etc. Here’s how this traffic has looked over the last 22 months.

Again we see a fairly steady growth in this area. The weekly spikes coincide with when I’ve sent out newsletters. The bigger spikes mainly coincide with when we’ve run competitions in our newsletters.

The reason for the growth in this traffic is largely that I’ve worked very hard on building a newsletter list for this blog (particularly over the last year).

Lets look at some more stats on this direct traffic:

• They viewed 2.28 pages per visit (site average was 2.17)
• They spent an average of 2 minutes and 55 seconds on the site (site average was 2 minutes and 35 seconds)

Both of these stats are higher than the site average but lower than search engine traffic. However considering that many of these visitors come to the site on a weekly basis and view hundreds of pages a year these averages are pretty good.

In terms of ‘goal conversion’ (or getting these people to my thank you page of the newsletter signup – they convert at 2.08%. This is slightly under the site average but considering many of them have already signed up – it’s pretty good.

Do Direct Referrals Click Ads?

This one interested me because I suspected that these highly loyal readers would become pretty blind to AdSense ads over time. However they are bang on average for the site with both CTR and CPM performance almost exactly on the site average.

Concluding Thoughts

I know this post has been rather long and so I will keep my concluding thoughts brief (I considered posting this as a series of posts but hope it’s more helpful seeing everything side by side).

All traffic has its place and serves different purposes.

One of the main things that strikes me about this exercise is that while some people write off different types of traffic – that together they come together in fairly significant ways.

For example – Digg traffic may not be that sticky or profitable – however as I think back to the early days of DPS it was the early series of Digg spikes that helped to get the blog going.

Even going back before January 2007 (before the charts above) DPS was on the front page of Digg quite a few times. Each time this happened the site step ups in loyal readers to the blog. This helped it grow even though at the time the site wasn’t generating much search traffic.

Overtime search has been increasingly important to the site in finding new visitors. The Digg spikes are handy and still draw people in that have not seen us before but in many ways they’ve served their purpose for the site and now our Google and Yahoo authority has kicked in we’re starting to see more benefits from there.

As I look forward I see both ‘search’ and ‘direct’ traffic as taking over even more from social bookmarking traffic. If things continue to grow as they are search and direct traffic will out number even the biggest spikes that the site might get from Digg.

This doesn’t mean I’ll not value the bookmarking traffic – but it’ll play less of a roll.

Social Bookmarking as an SEO tool

One last unproven idea that has been lingering in my mind lately is the importance of social bookmarking as an SEO strategy. I’m not sure how much of an impact it has had on the growth of search traffic on DPS but surely all of the links to DPS from Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit and other social bookmarking sites have had an impact upon the site’s search authority.

Even posts that don’t get to the front page of Digg that are bookmarked there must at least be getting some search engine juice from the bookmark.

More than that – getting on the front page of Digg or going popular on Delicious often has the flow on effect of being linked to by a lot of other blogs and websites that watch these pages. For example my last appearance on the popular page on Delicious stimulated at least 30 or so links from other blogs. Again – each link is adding to the search engine authority of the blog.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Search, Social and Direct Traffic – [TRAFFIC ANALYSIS]

Leveraging places that you have presence online could include:

1. Twitter Background Image:

I’ve been using a background image on Twitter that has URLs of other places that I’m online and it’s gotten a lot of interest. While the links are not clickable they do highlight other places that you hangout online – including your blog.

It is impossible to track how many people are impacted by background images but I do know of a number of people who have found my blogs through mine.

2. Profile Pages on Social Media

The other obvious place on Twitter to promote your blog (apart from your tweets themselves) is your profile section which enables you to say a few things about yourself (160 characters) as well as leaving a link.

Almost every social media site going around has an opportunity like this to add a link to other places of online presence in a profile page. The sky is really the limit – do it on Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, MySpace, StubmleUpon, Digg, Flickr, YouTube…. the list could go on and on.

3. Social Media Sites (eg – Facebook)

There are numerous ways to leverage social networking sites and to drive traffic back to your blog. I’ve already mentioned how you can do this using the ‘profile’ area above but there are often other ways also.

Sites like Facebook also allow you to pull in RSS feeds so that you can have your wall updated every time you post something new on your blog. Look out for opportunities to import RSS feeds – these are increasingly popular and can be really effective.

There are also lots of applications that allow you to promote your content – one that many bloggers us is BlogNetworks.

4. Email Signature

One of the most common ways that website and blog owners have used to promote their blog is to use the ‘signature’ area at the bottom of emails.

It makes sense to use this – if you’re anything like me you are emailing hundreds of people a week (or day) and could potentially be reaching a lot of new readers or reinforcing your brand with older ones.

Note: Feedburner even offer a service that allows you to show your latest posts from your blog in your email signature.

5. Forum Signatures

This is another fairly common one but one that I’ve seen can be quite powerful at times (if used well with a good forum strategy).

The signature alone won’t always drive traffic but as we covered here recently on ProBlogger if you use it in conjunction with being a useful contributer it can be highly effective at driving traffic.

Many forums also allow you to add links to profile pages.

6. Blog Comments

Many bloggers spend a lot of time reading and commenting upon other blogs in their niche.

Every time you comment on another blog you can be potentially adding to or taking away from your blog’s brand. Every comment is an opportunity to connect with both the blogger behind the blog and their readers.

The best way to drive traffic from blog comments is to leave helpful, useful, stimulating, insightful, controversial comments. Do this over time and people will want to know more of who you are and what else you do.

7. LinkedIn ‘Questions and Answers’

One great social networking site that many bloggers have profiles on is LinkedIn (my profile is here). Just being a part of LinkedIn can help promote your blog but their Question and Answer tool is another opportunity that many bloggers fail to use.

You don’t want to make your use of the feature too self promotional but good questions can be effective at reinforcing your brand and even stimulating people to visit your blog (if well written). Also answering other people’s questions can get you on their radar – there are lots of ‘open’ questions which give you opportunity to do this.

8. YouTube (and other Video and Photosharing sites)

Many bloggers create videos and upload them to sites like YouTube. There are numerous opportunities to leverage this. For starters you can add links in your profile page, you can add links to the video description of every video you upload (they work best if they are at the start of the description) and you can add your URL into your video (as a pre roll or post-roll ‘credit’).

Similarly sites like Flickr allow some linking within your profile pages and the pages where you show photos.

9. Your Other Blogs

Many bloggers have more than one blog. While they could be on diverse topics and not really suitable to regularly cross promote within your content there are still opportunities for interlinking them.

One such place is in the ‘about page’ of your blogs. People often go to these pages to find out more about the author – as a result it’s appropriate to include links to other projects/blogs that you’re working on here.

If your blogs are related in topic and it is relevant to mention them in your post then you should be doing so.

10. Guest Posting

I’ve written a lot about the power of guest posts so won’t go on about it again here – however it’s another great opportunity to develop an online presence that can be powerfully leveraged to draw readers back to your blog (and to build your brand).

Read more about guest posting at:

• Finding New Readers with Guest Posting
• How to Maximize the Benefits of Guest Posts

Final Thoughts

The above techniques can potentially drive traffic to your blog but as I’ve written this post I’m reminded of a post I wrote some time back on building your personal brand – one straw at a time. All of the above activities don’t just drive traffic – they collectively build your brand.

The other thing I’ll finish by saying is that ‘relevancy’ is the key to all of the above driving traffic to your blog.

For example – if your YouTube account just has personal videos it’s less likely to drive traffic to your blog if it’s on a topic similar to your actual blog. The same is true for each of the 10 points above.

What other ways do you drive traffic to your blog from other places that you have an online presence? What works best for you?

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

10 Ways to Find Readers for Your Blog By Leveraging Other Online Presence

I emailed to ask him why he stopped and his response was:

“I can’t keep up with the advances in technology. Every day there is a new tool, widget or social networking site to test out. I can’t keep up. I’m feeling overwhelmed by it. So I gave up.”

This is a sentiment I’m hearing a lot lately. Bloggers are increasingly feeling the pressure to have their fingers in lots of pies at once and are feeling overwhelmed by the choice and effort needed to ‘keep up’.

We look at people like Robert Scoble who manage to keep blogs afloat, produce videos, engage with thousands of people on Twitter, FriendFeed and who knows how many other social accounts – all while having a family and traveling the world speaking at conferences! Our efforts in comparison to people like Robert pale by comparison….

If you’re feeling this pressure I’d like to talk to you today and give you a few words of encouragement.

Image by danielgebhart

5 Tips for Overwhelmed Bloggers

1. You’re Not Alone

There are days when I look at the things that I do and feel like I’m going backwards. I’m lucky enough to be able to dedicate full time hours (in fact I’m probably doing this 60-70 hours a week) to what I do – and I there are times when I can’t keep up!

You’re not alone. I hear stories of people who can’t ‘keep up’ every day.

2. Focus Upon Your Core Tasks

My Mum isn’t on Facebook, she’s never heard of Twitter, she thinks YouTube is a deodorant stick and things RSS is something most people keep in their boxer shorts.

Sometimes it feels like we’re falling behind in adopting technology but it is good remind ourselves that what we do do online is actually ahead of the curve of the majority of ‘real people’.

What I remind myself on those days when I feel overwhelmed by it all is that 95% of the people who read my main blog don’t really care that much about social media or web 2.0 – they’re coming to my blog to read information on how to use their cameras.

As a result my core task is to develop that content and to distribute it using mediums that they are familiar with. My core task is NOT to have my finger on the pulse of every new technology. While it can be helpful to know about the latest widgets and tools to become distracted by them could actually be taking me further away from my audience.

3. Be Smart, Establish Boundaries and Focus Your Energies

I am not suggesting that we all ignore social media, emerging web technologies or forget about Web 2.0.

There is a lot to like about Web 2.0 and it can bring a lot of life to your blogging. However unless you’re blogging about Technology or have a very Web Savvy audience you’d do well to pick and choose what you do and don’t focus your attention on and to put boundaries around these activities.

I wish I could list the 3 tools and technologies that you should focus upon – but it will differ for each blog and every topic – but rather than focusing upon everything, narrow your focus and pick a few achievable technologies to ‘play’ with at a time. My approach with social media has always be to pick up new technologies one at a time rather than to start with multiple ones at once.

Picking new tools to play with one at a time allows you to fully understand it, work out how it might work for you and to add it to your natural work flow. Do too many new things at once and you’re not likely to be able to integrate them into your life to it’s potential.

Remember my post from last week on Home bases and Outposts and how it relates to Social Media – while spending time on outposts can be useful you also need to spend time on your home base – that needs to be your priority.

On Boundaries – One of the techniques that I use to help me to put boundaries around the things that I do is to use Batch Processing. Put most simply it is about setting aside blocks of time to work on tasks in a focused way instead of flitting from one thing to another all day.

4. They are Tools – Refocus Upon Your Goals

Sometimes the tools and technologies become bigger than they need to be. I am constantly reminding myself to spend less time focusing upon the tools and more time focusing upon my goals.

If you know what you want to achieve you can then decide how to move towards that desired goal. In doing so you can select the best tools for the job. If you start with the medium or the tools and try to fit it to your ‘goals’ and objectives you’ll just get muddled.

Web 2.0 technologies can help you achieve your goals – but they are much more effective if you know what you want to achieve.

5. Have Fun

Sometimes I take things too seriously. Sure – blogging has become a business and a way of sustaining my family so there needs to be some element of taking it seriously – but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun. Social media is a space that is at it’s best when it is fun and playful. Let it bog you down and you’re kind of defeating the purpose of it all.

What would you add as a tip for people feeling overwhelmed by social media and Web 2.0 technologies?

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Feeling Overwhelmed by Social Media and Web 2.0? – Here Are 5 Tips For You

Produced by Dr. Micael Wesch and his team at Kansas State University – via David.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

If you have a spare 55 minutes and 33 seconds this weekend….

At the end of that post I said that I would post some tips today for affiliate marketers on how perhaps they should engage in the practice on Twitter (if at all).

As I mentioned in the previous, post I’m not anti affiliate marketing or doing it via new media – but I think the ‘method’ and ‘attitude’ of the marketer is very very important. It can mean the difference between conversion or not – it can also mean the difference between keeping followers and losing them.

Before I get into some Twitter specific tips let me share a previous article with some general affiliate marketing tips for bloggers.

Let me also say that I’m still not convinced that Twitter is the best place for affiliate marketing. However if you do choose to do it on Twitter here are some starting points:

Tips for Promoting Affiliate Products on Twitter

1. Relevancy is Key

One of the things that I noticed earlier in the week about those who were promoting the affiliate product on Twitter (an AdSense tips product) was that quite a few of them were not normally writing about anything to do with AdSense. Adding a link to an affiliate product that has little to do with what you normally write about on Twitter is not smart. For starters it won’t convert and secondly it potentially will annoy your readers. If you’re going to directly promote products from Twitter make sure they are relevant to the followers you have.

2. Personalization Matters

Another obvious flaw in many of the tweets that we saw in the example mentioned in the previous post were that they were identical to everyone else’s. We saw Joel Comm set up a system where he pre-populated tweets with a script that simply told those reading it to go download a product. Joel actually stopped by my previous post and reflected (among other things) that those who personalized their messages converted better than those who did not. I think this says a lot. A personal recommendation is going to get a much better response in terms of actual conversions and it is far less likely to hurt your relationship with your followers as the tweet will be in your voice and hopefully out of your experience with the product.

3. Genuine Recommendations

My policy with affiliate marketing is to only recommend products that I have used or have had someone close to me who I trust use and recommend. This is again something that will add weight to your recommendation and increase conversion – but it’ll also help your reputation and stop you from promoting products that are rubbish. Recommend a product that doesn’t work and your own reputation and any trust you’ve built up with those who follow your advice will suffer. Don’t sacrifice your own brand for the sake of a few quick dollars.

4. Be Conversational

I have used affiliate links directly on Twitter on three occasions (from memory). In each instance they were Amazon Associate links and they were a part of a conversation that I was having with other Twitter users (from memory they were at times when followers asked me for recommendations on products). The links that I left were relevant, the conversations were started by others and they fit naturally into the conversation. From memory I declared that they were affiliate links on at least two of those occasions. The opposite of this ‘conversational’ tweeting is the ‘cold call’ tweet which comes out of the blue.

5. Link to Affiliate Products Indirectly

If I were to recommend one tips above others it would be this one. I think it would be much more effective and less intrusive with the culture on Twitter to tweet a link to a post you’ve written on your blog that includes an affiliate link – than to tweet the affiliate link directly. Write up a review of the product on your blog, give a balanced review, share why the product is relevant to your readers, tell them who would benefit most from it etc. And THEN tweet a link to the review. The problem with Twitter is that you’ve got 140 or so characters and to really do the product you’re promoting service and to give your readers a well balanced review you need more than that.

6. Moderation is Important

In any affiliate marketing (and perhaps all types of marketing) those who you are speaking with will begin to ‘switch off’ and become blind to your promotions if you hit them too many times with marketing messages. This will especially be true on Twitter where I see the audience is highly skeptical to marketing messages, are attuned to transparency and where they can very quickly opt out of receiving future communication with you. Not only can they opt out when your messages get too much – they often subscribe or follow you on the basis of what you’ve already written. If all you ever do is promote products (or yourself) you’re unlikely to grow a readership or become anyone with any kind of influence on Twitter.

7. Listen to Your Followers

The thing I love most about Twitter is that it a listening device. A lot of people use it and promote it as a broadcasting tool (which is can be useful for) but I’m increasingly finding it to be a fantastic way to hear what people are thinking – both about life in general but also you. If you engage in affiliate marketing on twitter make sure you stay in tune with how people respond. This doesn’t just mean watching what people ‘reply’ to you but also means watching what happens to subscriber numbers after you tweet and also watching what people say about you without using your @username (you can set up an RSS feed on Twitter search to watch for keywords like your name).

8. Be Useful

This is a fairly general Twitter tip but it applies to affiliate marketing. If you’re going to promote a product on Twitter make sure it’s highly useful to your followers. This is connected to being relevant – but goes beyond it. I find that the more useful my Twittering is the more positive feedback I get from followers. The same is true from blogging and interestingly enough it applies to the products I’ve promoted over the years. The best feedback that I can possibly get after an affiliate product campaign is from someone who bought the product and thanks me for recommending it because they found it useful. To me this is the ultimate feedback because it means I’ve not only made a little money, but more importantly I have a reader who is happy, who remains loyal and who is perhaps even more loyal than they were before I made the recommendation. This really comes down to smart selection of products to recommend – make sure that they are the best!

There you have it – my guide for Affiliate Marketing on Twitter.

Have Your Say about Affiliate Marketing on Twitter

I’m aware that some will still be pretty anti the idea of promoting affiliate products on Twitter (and I remain unconvinced except through the indirect method of promoting links on your blog rather than direct ones that I mention above) but IF you’re going to do it – those are my starting points.

I’d love to hear more discussion on this topic though. Marketing on Twitter (and all kinds of social media sites) will only continue to happen more and more so the more we discuss it the better!

update: Get more posts like this at my new blog TwiTip: Twitter Tips.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

8 Tips for Affiliate Marketers on Using Twitter

Here’s how it looks.

So I have two reactions to this.

1. How much more politics does Twitter need?

I’m sick of the ‘election bar’ that continues to appear when I visit Twitter. I’ve closed it many times but it continues to appear. I thought perhaps it was just me or at least just a frustration that other Non US Twitter users had seeing that Election promotion – but when I tweeted about it I only had 2-3 out of 50-60 responses that were positive about the election bar (including US Twitter users).

WIth the election bar and now a sidebar link Twitter seems to be moving away from their ‘what are you doing’ type focus. Sure a lot of the world is ‘doing’ elections but a large number of the world is also sick of them.

I do think that the US election is important but I’d love to see them give us the choice to opt out of this type of ‘promotion’ or at least to know if it’s an ad or not. But maybe that’s just me?

2. Is this a partnership, paid link… or?

My first reaction when seeing the link was that it looked a lot like an advertisement. There’s no marking of it as such but it does seem a little odd to just have an unexplained link to a political site just sitting there on the sidebar of a social media site under one’s stats.

When you look at the ‘source code’ of a twitter page you see that the link is tagged as a ‘promotion’ (click to enlarge the source code):

Interesting…. but what is a promotion?

On the site it links to (Current.com) it says that Current and Twitter have ‘teamed up’ – so it looks like some kind of ‘partnership’ but that doesn’t really explain it fully.

Now I’ve got nothing against Twitter monetizing with advertising, but I’d love for them to disclose whether that is actually an ad or not. If it is – they might want to ‘nofollow’ it or they might just find themselves penalized by Google for trying to game them (or for helping someone else game them at least).

What do you think?

Update – Evan Williams from Twitter has kindly commented below clarifying the situation. You can read his comments here. The most important clarification (in my mind) is that the link is not a paid link at all but a voluntary link. Thanks Evan!

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Is Twitter Selling Links and What in the World is a ‘Promotion’

What do you think about affiliate marketing on Twitter?

Lately I’ve noticed more and more affiliate marketers getting onto twitter. There’s been a real buzz about it actually in many internet marketing circles – almost like it’s the latest ‘new’ thing (I guess it is relatively new).

The unfortunate thing is that the model I’m seeing some internet marketers use on Twitter is quite spammy. Some have spammed Twitter so much directly that they’ve been booted off.

Today I got an email from Joel Comm. I’m one of his affiliates and have promoted some of his books and ebooks previously. We’ve met in person and I admire his knowledge of internet marketing greatly. However todays email didn’t really sit that well with me and I’d love to hear your opinion on it.

Joel is currently promoting an AdSense Secrets ebook. I actually like his writing on AdSense and some of what he teaches helped me a lot in the early days of getting into blogging.

I’ve promoted his AdSense stuff before and would probably do it again – but not in the way he’s asking his affiliates to do it this time.

The promotion he’s asking people to do is to Tweet a link to his book. Not only has he asked us to tweet about it (something I wouldn’t be anti doing to some extend) he’s given his affiliates a link to make the whole process automated.

All you have to do is click the link and it sets up a tweet in your own twitter account (if you’re logged in) and it embeds an affiliate link into the tweet automatically for you so you can earn money if people make a purchase of one of Joels products as a result of clicking on your link ($10 a month for each month they stay in his program).

Looking at Twitter Search just now it seems that his tactic is working – to some extent.

I wouldn’t call it a raging success (yet) but with 30 or so people tweeting about it (largely using the automated script Joel’s provided) there’s been some take up of it.

Now on some levels I don’t have a problem with Joel’s campaign. I am not against affiliate marketing, I’m not against promoting products in new media – however there’s something that has been playing on my mind about this all day.

To be honest I’m not completely sure why I don’t like it (as I say above I don’t have a problem with some of the principles behind it) but there’s something that doesn’t sit well with me about this.

Risky Behavior and Spam

I think one of my main problems with it is that it almost seems like Joels asking others to engage in a little risky behavior for him and putting them a little at risk. Twitter is pretty anti spam and while he’s not done it directly the search results do look quite spammy when you line them all up and see the exact same message over and over and over again. I wonder how Twitter will respond to this and who will suffer? Joel or those who tweet it?

Impersonal Marketing

Another thing that I am reacting against with this strategy is that the tweets Joel is suggesting seem very impersonal.

“Download Joel Comm’s Adsense Secrets For FREE! “

This just doesn’t resonate with me as the type of message that would do well on Twitter. A message out of the blue about someone encouraging a download. I’m not sure it’s where affiliate marketing is going online either.

My own experimenting with affiliate marketing over the last few years is that it works best out of relationship and trust with those that you recommend products to. I find that promoting products do best when you are able to give an honest review of them, when you’re able to tell people who they are best suited for etc

This is actually why I think blogging is an ideal message for affiliate marketing. It’s a great place to build trust, fully review a product and give a balanced recommendation – 140 or so characters just doesn’t seem enough to do much to do most of that.

I guess what I’m coming to is that a tweet like this doesn’t really sit comfortably with my style of affiliate marketing.

What do you Think about Affiliate Marketing on Twitter?

But that is just me – what about you? Does affiliate marketing belong on Twitter? If so – how would you do it?

To be clear – I’m not wanting to start an anti Joel Comm thread of discussion here – like I say, I like the guy and don’t have anything against his products, but I am interested to hear what you think about the topic of affiliate marketing on twitter (and other forms of social media). Over to you….

How Affiliate Marketers Should Use Twitter?

It’s pretty easy to say you don’t like affiliate links on Twitter and not say anything constructive. So tomorrow I’d like to attempt to put forward some ideas on how Twitter (and other social media sites) could be used by affiliate marketers appropriately and effectively. Keep an eye on my RSS feed over the next 24 hours to see when the post goes live.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Affiliate Marketing on Twitter – Does it Belong?

This new option will appear in the ‘Syndicate’ section of the admin area of sending out new newsletters.

It’s a cool little feature that should help publishers extend their newsletter reach.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Aweber to Add Twitter Updates Feature

This post is an attempt to make some sense of it. I’d value your thoughts in comments to help me take these half thought through ideas to something more concrete.

Those who have been following me for a while know that I not only spend a lot of time on my blogs but also invest significant time on sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn…. (the list could go on).

What’s my strategy? Why invest so much time into sites that I don’t actually own?

To be honest there are days when i wonder if I have a strategy at all. There’s so much I don’t know about social media and how it fits into what I do – some days it just feels messy. However in the midst of it all there are moments of clarity.

Home Bases and Outposts

Today I was watching a video of a presentation by Chris Brogan and a short segment of it resonated strongly and put words to the way I use social media. He talked about:

• Home Bases
• Outposts
• Passports

He’s used these concepts numerous times on his blog before (here and here for example) but today it got my attention a little more than previously – particularly the idea of the ‘Home Base’ and that of the ‘Outpost’.

A home base is a place online that you own, that is your online ‘home’. For me I have two home bases – ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. For me my home bases are blogs but for others they will be other types of websites.

Outposts are places that you have an online presence out in other parts of the web that you might not ‘own’. I’d previously being using the word ‘satellites’ to describe this but I think ‘outposts’ works better.

Outposts will mean different things to different people and businesses. Here’s how it looks for me as I think about my home base of ProBlogger.

As you’ll see, most of my ‘outposts’ are social media sites – however for others an outpost could also include forums, other community sites and even the comments sections of other blogs.

Each of the outposts that you see above are places that I have accounts and am attempting to grow my online presence (some better than others). These ‘outposts’ are sites where I:

• add content
• build relationships
• test ideas
• grow a profile
• listen
• experiment
• make connections
• try to be useful
• play

Out of this combination of activities many things come. Relationships, ideas, traffic, resources, partnerships, community and much more emerge from the outposts – much of it making my home base stronger.

Two Way Streams and Outposts Taking on a Life of Their Own

The outposts do drive some traffic back to the home base, but many of the benefits are less tangible and have more to do with building the brand and influences of my blogs.

Also worth noting is that the outposts don’t just feed the homebase (it isn’t just a one way thing)- but the homebase feeds the outposts and sometimes the outpost seems to take on a life of its own and becomes the real place of action where without really trying a community emerges.

For example this week I discovered that a small (but growing) group of ProBlogger readers had been interacting with my content and one another on my Facebook Profile – despite the fact that I’d not spent more than 20 minutes on Facebook in the previous three months. Just the fact that I link to Facebook and pull in my Twitter activity means that the ‘community’ there has sprung up (now that I’m aware of what’s going on I can participate and feed the community.

This Post is Half Finished

I laugh when people occasionally refer to me as a social media expert.

You see while I’ve managed to grow a reasonable social media presence over the last few years there is still much to learn. As a result I’d love to here your thoughts on what I’ve written and how you see and use social media in your blogging and business. Your comments will take this post a step closer to completion – looking forward to how it ends!

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Home Bases and Outposts – How I use Social Media in My Blogging

We produced lists of bloggers who use Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg and Plurk.

One of the other popular type of profiles submitted was Facebook. So over the last week we’ve constructed a list of Bloggers who use Facebook (or at least those who participated in the ‘Love-In’). You can see it here there are 270 included in the list).

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

270 Bloggers that Use Facebook

Are you getting ready to launch a new project? Have you worked for months, or possibly even years trying to complete your vision and make it ready for the big launch day?

If you find yourself in a similar predicament to the one that I was recently in, your final, self-imposed project deadline is looming on the horizon and you really hope to spread the message about your new venture to as many people as possible. However, you lack the proper funds to finance a press release campaign, which would get the word out to the world that your ‘baby’ is now active, ready, and online.

Surely, you don’t want to fall short now, do you?

Recently, in collaboration with Leo Babauta of Zen Habits and some other bloggers, I launched Train for Humanity, which is a new humanitarian non-profit organization.

Everyone who participated in the project either donated their time or worked at greatly reduced rates. Yet, when it came to the launch day we didn’t have a budget to pay for newswire services. Press release submissions are quite expensive and can cost up to $400.00.

Additionally, paying for press coverage sort of goes against part of our mission, which is to use the tools that are available to us online for free and to show people that with a little creativity and innovation you can create projects that will help to address global crises.

Thus, our best option for launching Train for Humanity was to use various social media networks that we had at our disposal.

The question then becomes, what social media sites should you target?

During phase one of our pilot project we are really keen to spread the message of what ‘we’ are about and we also want to build a community of like minded people who support this new concept of getting fit (exercising) and using blogging and the internet to raise awareness and funds for humanitarian issues.

In order to help us spread the word on launch day we decided to focus our efforts on Twitter, StumbleUpon, Plurk, and triiibes. Fortunately, we didn’t have to go into the process blind, as we were able to refer to the following ProBlogger resources for assistance:

• How to Use Twitter – Tips for Bloggers
•  Plurk 1 Month In – Small Can be Good
• How to Draw StumbleUpon Users Into Your Blog

Launch Day

Our launch day was September 9, 2008 and although it went pretty well I learned quite a few lessons along the way that either supported what I already believed, or that I will be certain to implement next time I have a new business or website to promote.

Five Social Media Launch Lessons I Learned

1. Timing is key - the hour of day (and even the day) that you choose to announce your launch is critical. Particularly with sites like Twitter and Plurk. Because Leo lives in Guam we wanted to accommodate his workday, which meant that we launched at 7:00am U.S. east coast time. This time worked out really well in the Australian and European markets, but most of the American workforce was still at home. In hindsight it probably would have been better to have the flurry of ‘tweets’ and plurks start at around 10:00am.

2. Utilize community influencers – have well regarded ‘trust agents’ within the various communities help to get your story out. We were fortunate to have StumbleUpon power user theNanny612 submit our site to SU. Likewise, Chris Brogan was kind enough to ‘tweet’ the launch announcement on Twitter. If you follow this ‘trust agent’ strategy, I don’t think emailing them out of the blue (if you have never interacted before) and asking for a tweet or stumble works very well. Spend the time and get to know people before you ask for a favor. Actually, it is probably best to follow Jeff Pulver’s social media model of giving 95% of the time and asking for assistance 5% of the time.

3. Make your time count – during the weeks leading up to the launch I was really busy running my full time business here in the Caribbean, as well as, putting the final touches on Train for Humanity. Unfortunately, my participation and interaction in both the Plurk and triiibes communities just about ceased. When I posted the launch announcement on both sites, neither garnered much attention. Think about it, you wouldn’t just show up to a bar or other social spot that you have visited a couple of times and start asking people to help promote your new business would you? Certainly, it’s my fault that the launch announcements in both locations did poorly as I had not invested enough time. Whatever sites you decide to target make sure you are an active participant.

4. Prepare your message - people are busy so when it comes to launch day have your message ready and make it easy for people talk about you. We created a special page called, “Spread the Word” which contained a link to an informative sample blog post about what Train for Humanity is and we also had written a “tweet” and plurk that supporters could easily copy and paste to get our message out.

5. Have redundancy in place – you might not think that reliable internet service would be an issue in this day and age. Please, when getting ready to launch, make sure your internet provider isn’t going to bail on you and also try to have a backup plan ready. This might sound easy or even elementary, but I live on a small 10×3 mile island and when a thunder and lightening storm passed over us at 4:00p.m. on launch day, I was suddenly without internet and would only have intermittent service for the next three days. Not really a great strategy when you are relying on the net and social media for your launch.

I always like to think that key to social media , whether you looking to use it as a springboard for your next launch or just be an active participant, is “being human” and that the most important aspect is to interact in a constructive, non-confrontational manner just like you would in any other day-to-day social situation.

Next time your ready to launch a website or new business and don’t have the proper budget for a press release, why don’t you consider using social media.

Have you launched any of your ventures using only social media? If yes, what were some of the lessons that you learned?

Mark Hayward, along with Dan Clements, Leo Babauta, and Andrew Flusche, is the creator and co-founder of the recently launched Train for Humanity. Their mission is simple: getting fit + social media + blogging = social good. During the pilot project they are hoping to raise awareness and funds for orphans and refugees in Darfur.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Launching Your Next Venture Using Social Media – 5 Lessons Learned

It’s ironic that arguably the biggest challenges for a blogger come when they are least experienced–when their blog is just a few weeks or months old.

Any blogger will tell you that turning a new, undiscovered blog into a hot piece of web property is not easy. The Darren Rowses, Leo Babautas and Yaro Staraks of the world went through this same difficult teething period, like everyone else.

The accepted idea is that when you first launch your blog, growth will be very slow because you’re only able to toot your own horn to gather new visitors, by commenting and leaving links back to your blog, by asking for links and by guest-posting.

All these actions will help your blog grow, but it might take several months before your blog generates any kind of real traction and things start happening without you to push them along.

But what if there was a way to grow a new blog quickly?

I want to suggest that there is one method for growth of a new blog that can be more effective than any other, yet it’s commonly overlooked. It is very possible to grow a young blog with very little starting traffic mainly on the back of StumbleUpon. Here’s how.

The premise

How would you feel about receiving 1,000 visitors on the first day of your new blog’s launch? How would you feel about receiving 1,000 visitors on any day? This number might seem unattainable to you at the moment, but it isn’t. Not with a little preparation.

The ingredients for this strategy are:

1. A network of at least twenty active StumbleUpon users.
2. Stumble-worthy content.

Did you know that you can use the StumbleUpon toolbar to send pages to your StumbleUpon friends with a little message asking for a quick stumble? If your network of SU friends knows you and likes you, and the content is good, they’ll be more than happy to oblige. Each stumble can bring several hundred visitors to your blog. Reviews arguably carry even more weight when determining the amount of traffic that is sent to your content.

If you can get 20 people to stumble a single page you send to them, you could receive not just one thousand visitors, but possibly more than that. If your content is good enough to go viral on its own, you could receive several thousand, or several tens of thousands!

That’s all well and good, but it’s also easier said than done. And like most things that are easier said than done, it’s very much worth doing. You might have found yourself a little troubled at the two ‘ingredients’ outlined above. After all, how do you ‘build a network of at least twenty active StumbleUpon users?’ What can you do to make sure your content is ‘stumble-worthy’ (whatever that means)?

Photo by Toronja Azul.

The how

First, let’s deal with building a network of StumbleUpon friends. Once your blog takes off you’ll find this easy. Readers will ‘friend’ you and, because they like your stuff, will probably help you whenever you ask for it, as long as you’re willing to do the same in return. The problem is that your blog hasn’t taken off yet, so how do you create your network?

Unfortunately, the answer isn’t StumbleUpon. It’s not a great place to meet new people on its own. Instead, try emailing other bloggers who are also in the same situation and working to get their blog off the ground, and ask if they would like to be friends on StumbleUpon. If you want to increase your odds of that blogger actually being on StumbleUpon, look for a link to their profile on their About page. You could even go through the comments at ProBlogger. I expect most ProBlogger users know the value of having a StumbleUpon account by now!

The truth is that if you befriend people in this manner (being, for mutual benefit) you’re going to have stumble their stuff as much as they stumble yours. If you’re getting friends from anywhere you can, you’re not always going to like what they send you, but you should still be willing to stumble it as an investment in your own blog. Social media purists will disagree with me here, and if so, you’re welcome to build a network by other means (spending five to ten hours on StumbleUpon a week will do it).

If you have some choice as to who you add to your network, try to collect people who consistently produce content that you like.

You should expect this networking strategy to be successful because most bloggers feel guilty about sending their stuff to people for stumbles but really wish they could do it. Some do it anyway. I don’t know many bloggers, particularly new bloggers who are also going through a challenging ‘baby blog’ period, who wouldn’t welcome the approach of someone who is more than happy to stumble their stuff.

The logistics of this aren’t immediately obvious but they’re quite simple once you remember them.

Sending pages to others

To send pages, you have to install the StumbleUpon toolbar.

Once you’ve navigated to the page you want to send to another user, click ‘Send to’ on the toolbar and select the target user from the drop-down menu. You can send a message to accompany the page. Generally you should ask for the specific action you want (stumble, or occasionally a review), and most importantly, offer to help out the other person in return.

If you’re always asking for stumbles and never giving them, people will tire of you quickly. That being said, you should be vigilant to make sure the people you send pages to are actually stumbling your stuff. If not, there’s no need to be angry as it’s their choice, but you should work on adding a new, active user to your network in their place.

Creating content that works with StumbleUpon

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, you need to build your ability to create content that is well-optimized for StumbleUpon. If you are continually getting stumbles on content that is clearly not suitable for social media then the StumbleUpon algorithm is likely to stop sending traffic to your blog all-together. If all your stumbles are coming from mutual friends and not from unaffiliated users then this is a pretty good sign that your content is not actually stumble-worthy.

If it sounds scary, it isn’t. As long as you provide genuine value for others, your content should generate some stumbles without your help. Best of all, there are a few solid principles you can follow to create content that is consistently well-optimized for StumbleUpon traffic.

Here are two posts I’ve written previously at ProBlogger about writing great Stumble-worthy content and converting the resulting StumbleUpon visitors into loyal readers:

• How to Write Posts That Set StumbleUpon on Fire
• How to Draw StumbleUpon Users Into Your Blog

While pursuing this strategy, continue to expand your network of SU friends and send content to different people each time. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest StumbleUpon’s algorithm rewards blogs that are stumbled by a wide variety of users, rather than the same people all the time.

Try this strategy and see if you can get more traffic than ever before. Good luck!

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to Grow a Young Blog With StumbleUpon

Bloggers are fiercely divided when it comes to deciding the value of social media traffic.

Some crave it or even become addicted to it, writing every post with an aim to hit the front-page of Digg and spending hours trying to promote their own content. Others feel it has little value and largely ignore it, citing poor rates of conversion into ads clicked and subscribers gained. Others loathe social media traffic for the atmosphere it brings (real or imagined) and will do anything to avoid being discovered by social media–usually the result of being hit by a slew of negative comments on a post that rubbed digg users the wrong way.

Regardless of which camp you find yourself in, I want to take an objective look at the real value of a social media visitor for bloggers trying to make money online. If I can be allowed to skip to the end before I’ve even started, my argument is that social media visitors are neither a godsend or a curse. Instead, they’re great for some things, and not so great for others.

1. Not for clicking on ads

It has been well-documented that visitors from social media platforms like Digg and StumbleUpon click on ads much less often compared to search visitors. Various theories have been put forward as to why this is, but I think it’s simply because social media visitors are ‘focused’ browsing. They are in the middle of doing something (using social media, usually at a fast pace), and are therefore less likely to wander off in a new direction by clicking an ad. Another reason is that social media users spend more time online than the average web user and are more likely to have developed a sort of ‘blindness’ to ads.

If all your ads are CPC (cost per click) then social media traffic is not going to add much direct monetary value to your blog–though they may go on to do so indirectly. Instead, focus on search traffic and links for direct income. By contrast, if you use a mixture of CPC and CPM (cost per thousand impression) ads, or only CPM ads, social media traffic will have more value for you. This is because it’s…

2. Really good for page views

A stint on the Digg front-page or becoming hot on StumbleUpon can send more visitors than many blogs receive in a month. Whatever these visitors are doing when they arrive at your blog, they still register on your stat counter and provide ‘impressions’ (page views) to present to potential advertisers. This may also cause your Alexa rank to increase.

Page views are the determining factor in how much a CPM advertisement is worth on your blog. More page views equals higher prices, and social media traffic can drastically increase your page views. For this reason, it’s an important source of traffic for anyone offering CPM advertising.

One potential pitfall to be wary of is that, though advertisers are probably only looking at number of page views and not the source, some will want to know where it all came from. In my experience, though, most advertisers don’t ask this question. If they end up buying an ad spot on your blog they might find the click-throughs to be disproportionate to the amount of impressions they’ve paid for. This is mainly an issue when the blog has a very high proportion of social media traffic compared to other sources. Advertisers who find click-throughs are low will be unlikely to renew with you. If this turns out to be a problem for your blog, try weighting social media traffic differently when calculating your rates. After all, social media visitors are…

3. Not initially invested in your blog

People often complain that social media visitors are disrespectful or plain rude, particularly when they come from Digg. However, it’s not hard to see why social media visitors would be tougher than your usual blog visitor. They may not follow many individual blogs. They may have clicked on a submission based on its headline and not quite known what they were getting. They might have clicked through to your blog just because they think your topic is stupid (maybe you write about a sports team that they despise, or a politician they loathe).

Search visitors are generally too busy looking for something to be nasty, and referral visitors are probably already reading other blogs in your niche, and are unlikely to find yours suddenly provokes them to lash out. When they arrive at your blog, they are partially invested in it. Social media visitors are not. At least, they don’t start out that way.

Photo by Johan Larsson.

A number of people are particularly bothered by the comments that digg users leave on their blogs. These are less troubling when you know why they occur. At digg, the comment culture there operates on a system of ‘diggs’ and ‘buries’. Comments that the community likes tend to get ‘dugg’ and comments the community doesn’t like tend to get ‘buried’. There isn’t any reward or penalty for either, but that doesn’t stop people fighting for imaginary brownie points. The quickest route to a ‘dugg’ comment is to post something insightful, add something to the content, make a joke about something mentioned in the story or to criticize or insult the content or its author–often trying to be funny at the same time, but sometimes not. Digg users have a lot of stories to read and, err, a lot of ground to make up on Mr. BabyMan, so they’ll usually go the quickest and easiest option: a witty remark, or a criticism, or an insult, or some combination of the three.

When the digg users get to your content itself they often approach commenting with the same attitude as they did when they were at digg, because digg is often where they’ve ‘learned’ how to approach commenting. Sometimes the results can be genuinely funny and clever, but other-times they can be a bit depressing! Usually this depends on the particular combination of digg users with your content’s topic. Sometimes digg comments will add a breath of fresh air to your blog and other-times you’ll wish you could delete them (and hey, you can). After all, they’re never going to come back, right?

Not necessarily…

4. Can yield new subscribers depending on the topic

A common question about social media traffic is why it often doesn’t translate into a subscriber boost. Some people claim it never does. Not for them, perhaps, but I’ve heard many stories of people gaining–and keeping–subscribers when their content goes popular on social media (and this is something I’ve personally experienced on my own blog).

For those who’ve never experienced a subscriber boost from social media traffic, you’re probably thinking: “OK then, what am I, apparently, doing wrong?”

The answer is: nothing. Social media users are generally interested in some topics in a deep way and not others. Just because they liked your post on personal bio-domes doesn’t mean they want to read about environmentally friendly inventions every day (thought it doesn’t mean they won’t either). This probably appeals to the visitor’s ‘surface interest’. They might read about the topic once in a while but not have any real passion for it. They might also find that, though they loved the post they just voted for, the rest of your blog is on a slightly different topic that they’re not interested in. After all, a lot of people bring new topics into their blog because they have more appeal to social media, but perhaps the social media visitor is interested in that topic and not any of the others you write about?

Photo by ojbyrne

From my own use of Digg, for example, I often Digg stories related to the environment and environmental innovation but I don’t subscribe to any blogs on this topic. I’m interested in it but don’t consider subscribing because I don’t have time to read blogs that don’t directly benefit the work that I do online. I do the same for content on video gaming, computers, technological innovation and so on. It’s not that I have a predisposition not to subscribe, but rather that I’m exposed to a lot of content I wouldn’t seek out otherwise, and that I am happy to enjoy in small doses.

It’s also worth remembering that many social media visitors interact with web content primarily through social media, rather than through RSS feeds or by bookmarking a handful of their favorite blogs. Their favorite social media platform delivers so much content they enjoy and is so time-consuming to be involved in that many–but certainly not all– don’t have the desire or time to follow blogs that may or may not produce good content in future. Is this to suggest all social media visitors fit this mould? Not at all, but it might help explain why they are less likely than referral and direct traffic to stick around for the long-haul.

If you do want to turn social media traffic into subscribers, make sure your social media optimized content sticks very close to the topics you write about on a daily basis. Aside from that, you might just have to hope that people interested in the topic of your blog are also likely to be reading blogs on a regular basis.

5. Likely to have a well-developed network

Social media is often just that: social. An active social media user might be in regular contact with dozens of other users and regularly share content with them. If your content hits a nerve (in a good or bad way) it is likely to be shared through that network by word-of-mouth as well as on the service itself. If the recommendation is positive then this can be a good way to get engaged readers visiting your blog. The recommendation of a friend gives them a reason to be much more invested than the average social media user.

6. Can trigger a domino effect on other social media platforms

If you look at the profile of an active social media user, you’re likely to find that they are not putting all their eggs in one basket. Many digg users have active StumbleUpon accounts, and so on. A stumble may also lead to a digg and delicious bookmark. A reddit may lead to a mixx. This can lead to a ‘domino effect’ where your content goes popular on more than one service. That’s not a bad situation to be in–unless your blog goes down, of course!

7. Can help promote other content in future

A social media visitor who votes for your content and then decides to visit your blog in future can be a valuable asset to you. They might submit future content to social media, or refer other social media using friends to your blog. The best way to have social media success is to have loyal readers who are active on social media.

It’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking of social media visitors as ‘this other thing’, separate from your audience–a teeming mass doing their own thing somewhere else and occasionally paying a visit. At least some proportion of your own most loyal readers are likely to be using social media.

8. Are good for search rankings

Digg, delicious and Reddit in particular are good for this. When a story becomes popular many social media users link to it, in addition to Digg itself, which is a very high PR site. Many people even autopublish delicious bookmarks to their blogs. Going popular on any of these services can connect dozens of high-quality links into your blogs (and, as always, a whole bunch of scrapers).

As much as I love StumbleUpon, it is weakest here. So much of the interaction with it occurs through the toolbar rather than through a webpage. There is no iconic page of ‘Top stories’ on StumbleUpon (I’m pretty sure there is a page for popular stories, but it receives little attention compared to the ‘front pages’ of Digg, delicious and Reddit). There is no general RSS feed to subscribe to. What all of this means is that going popular on StumbleUpon rarely brings a whole bunch of incoming links with it, causing it to have less SEO benefit than success on the others.

***

With the above eight points I hope I’ve led you to think about the value of social media visitors to your own blog. They can certainly provide plenty of value, but tapping into that value will require that you begin to get a sense of the faces behind social media traffic, and to understand the ‘culture’ of social media, which leads to certain behaviours being prevalent in its users and others not so. The more realistic your expectations are, the better you will become at harnessing social media traffic.

While reading posts like this does help, you can never truly ‘get’ social media and its culture until you immerse yourself in it. You certainly don’t need to be a power-user (and for most this is unlikely to be an efficient use of your time), but spending a couple of hours a week participating in a social media service you enjoy will provide invaluable knowledge about your audience. I’d suggest going with at least one of the big three that most people are using: StumbleUpon, Digg or Reddit. In fact, I want to suggest that using a social media service for even an hour will teach you more about writing social media optimized content than any blog post you could read.

You should always strive to know your audience better.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

What is the Real Value of a Social Media Visitor?

Click to play

In this video post I reflect upon the one of the downsides of changing your blog’s brand and/or design.

While updating blog design, logos and avatars in social media sites can bring a lot of life to a blog and present you with an up to date and fresh web presence – one of the negatives is that you can actually stop the momentum that you might have already created with your previous branding.

This is a lesson that applies when thinking about blog design but also even the simple avatars you choose for your Twitter and other social media profiles.

I’m interested to hear your experiences of both how changing your online ‘branding’ has led to confusion but also how you would suggest bloggers do it in a way that builds upon previous branding.

This post was brought to you by Business Week Exchange.

PS: sorry for the audio quality on this video. I recorded it in a public space and there was a little too much background noise.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Present a Consistent Brand in Your Blogging

However the downside of a site the power of Digg linking to one of your articles is that it is an authoritative site in the eyes of Google.

Yesterday one of my posts – 15 Stunning Lightning Images – got to the front page of Digg. It was actually an old post that I’d recently updated and moved back onto the front page and it already had done pretty well on social media sites so had some link equity already.

The front page appearance on Digg brought a fresh influx of visitors which was fantastic but here’s what I saw in Google’s search results when I searched for Lightning Images this morning:

Yep – Digg out ranks the post it links to.

I fully expect this to change at some point as Google’s rankings are in constant states of change and even the link to my post above will give it a little extra authority but it is an issue that many bloggers face and should be aware of when submitting their posts to social media sites, or other sites and forums with established authority on Google. update: the DPS article now outranks the Digg one.

I’ve seen this same thing happen again and again on Digg but also when a site gets linked to like a site like Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Engadget etc who link back to the source of their story but use a similar title for their post to the post they’re linking to.

I don’t think this is the problem of the sites linking to posts – it’s probably more an issue for Google to work on – but post this as a little warning for bloggers active in promoting their blog posts on other sites.

It is still a good thing to get on the front page of Digg, just one consequence of doing so to keep in mind.

TIP: One quick tip for those of you who suffer from this problem. If you have any control for how your posts are submitted to Digg, try to get the title to be something different to the title of your blog post. For example, if the title of the Digg submission above had been ‘Lightning Pictures’ or something completely different like ‘Flash, Bang – 15 Images of Storms that Will Rock Your World’ then it wouldn’t rank as high for ‘lightning images’ as my own post.

Of course not everyone has control over how their posts are linked to – but if you do, it’s worth keeping in mind.

Update: OK – some have seen this post as me saying that this is a disaster, that people should avoid Digg, me overacting. Perhaps the way I wrote this conveyed that I thought it was a massive problem – it’s not massive, it’s not a disaster, it’s not the worst thing that could happen to a blogger – it’s simply one downside. I’ve commented on this more deeply below here.

All I attempted to do with this post was to point out one thing that people might be interested in when they have their posts on Digg. It’s not the be all and end all, getting on the front page of Digg is still a good thing, it’s just one of the consequences of it.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

A Downside of Getting to the Front Page of Digg

This lure of massive traffic has many bloggers ‘buzzing’ today. But is it worth getting buzzed about (OK, I’ll stop with the buzz talk now)?

Read Write Web today asks some questions about Buzz and muses that Buzz could be a system with more editorial control than Digg (particularly with what gets to the front page of Yahoo).

My advice to publishers is to not become obsessed by Yahoo Buzz but to keep an open mind.

I’m seeing bloggers either proclaiming it as the answer to all their traffic needs or writing it off as something that won’t last – but somewhere between these two extremes will be the truth.

As with all social media sites – Yahoo Buzz will appeal to a certain type of audience and reader and will therefore present different opportunities to different publishers.

You can submit stories to Buzz here and get Buzz Buttons for your Blog here.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

The Buzz about Yahoo Buzz

I’ve had questions about getting to the front page of Digg many times in the last few weeks so thought I’d put together a guide with a process for doing it. By no means is this something that will guarantee you success on Digg – but from my experience it’ll increase your chances to follow some of this advice.

1. The Content

If there’s one factor that can influence the success of a post on Digg it is the actual content that is submitted. This should go without saying but I chat to bloggers all the time who tell me they have no success with Digg and when I look at the posts they’re submitting – they’re just all wrong.

Digg users like a certain type of story and it can be well worth your time doing a little research into what works and doesn’t work by spending some time on Digg:

• Topics – a large range of topics work on Digg but some are more likely to work than others. For example Tech, Offbeat, some Entertainment stories can work really well – but if you have a craft blog or are blogging about cats you might need to work a little harder. It’s not impossible to do well on digg with some of these less popular topics – but you’ll need to think carefully about how you present it (read on)
• Voice - one way to rank well for a more obscure topic is to write your post in a style that grabs attention and appeals to the Digg crowd. They’re a bunch that likes humor, irreverence and quirky stuff – so if you’re writing on cats you would do better to do something off the wall like strap a camera to one than to write about something more serious.
• Titles – sadly, some stories get voted up and down on Digg simply based up their title. Take time to get it right.
• Page Layout - make sure your blog’s design is well laid out, not stuffed withe ads, professional looking and not cheap and nasty. Pictures can work well.
• Format – some people say that the best way to get on the front page of Digg is to write ‘list’ posts. I agree – but also find that when you write a more comprehensive and in depth article that this can also appeal.

For more on the type of content that works on Digg I’d highly recommend that you read Maki’s post on how to create Digg-Friendly Content.

2. The Submitter

The person who submits your post to Digg can be a very important factor in how well it does.

From talking to hardcore Diggers there are two theories going around in how to approach who should submit your Diggs (and these theories change depending upon what Digg is doing with their Algorithm:

• Power Diggers – one approach is to find a power Digger to submit your posts for you. What happens when you have one of these Diggers submits a story is that it gets seen by their friends on Digg and voted up quite quickly. You can expect to see 100 or so Diggs within a few hours of them submitting it. Once the initial rush dies off things tend to slow with Power Diggers – although just having their name on your post can create buzz and additional diggs.
• Small Time Diggers - another approach is to have posts submitted by lesser known Diggers. The theory here is that it can take these Diggers less votes to get to the front page while a Power Digger can take a lot more.

Whichever method of submission – in the majority of cases on Digg it’s not enough. As a result you might also want to consider some of the following.

3. On Page Digg Cues

One important factor in drumming up some more organic Diggs to go with those that your submitter naturally brings is to add visual cues on your posts inviting people to Digg the story.

• Digg offers a variety of Digg Badges for you to use
• The ‘Digg This’ button is also fairly influential
• Also check out the Digg Widget – this is particularly good because you can get it to show any recent posts from your blog that have been submitted to Digg. Put it in your sidebar and it means people who are on any page on your blog know there’s something climbing up the ranks in Digg (not just those who are on the post itself).

Don’t feel you have to use these buttons on every post. I actually will use them more when there’s a post climbing up Digg.

Lastly – add a text link to an upcoming post inviting readers to submit it. Again – I wouldn’t do this on every post but it can be effective when you’ve got something on the rise.

4. Giving it a ‘Nudge’

So you’ve got some great content that’s been submitted to Digg, you’ve got visual cues in place that will make it easy for readers to Digg it – now it’s time to give your post a nudge.

There are a number of ways to do this. Some are more blatant than others.

• Ask for Diggs - lets start with the obvious, one way to get Diggs is to ask for them. You can do this in any number of ways and using any number of tools. Some will shoot quick requests to people that they know using instant messaging, others ask on social messaging services like Twitter, others have email lists that they utilize. The key with asking for Diggs is to think about who you ask and how often. Work out who is open to invitations and work with them, but only on your best stuff. If you ask for Diggs on every single post you write you might annoy people more than anything else.
• Shout It - Digg has a tool on each digg page that enables you to ‘share’ the story – it’s there to help promote stories on Digg so use it. This enables you to email people, blog it or ‘shout’ it with your friends on Digg. Shouting can be a great way to get a story in front of other active Digg users. Once again – don’t shout too often – pick your best stories for this type of thing. Also know that the more you digg your friend’s stories when they shout them to you the more chance there is that they’ll reciprocate. If you’re looking for Digg friends – start with this list.
• Drive Traffic to Your Post - another technique that is less blatant that asking for Diggs is to work instead (or as well) at driving traffic to the post you’re working to get on the front page of Digg. Here’s the thing – if you have a post with ‘digg this’ buttons and you’re able to get another popular blog or site to link to it you’ll increase the chance for organic diggs. You’ve got 24 hours once a story is submitted to Digg, so if you think you’ve got something that other sites would be interested in make sure you send them links at the start of the 24 hours (or even before it’s submitted).
• Other Social Bookmarking Sites Help – I quite often notice that the posts that do well for me on Digg will often do well for me on Delicious or StumbleUpon first (although sometimes it happens the other way around). What happens is that when you get on the popular page of Delicious users of that service who also use Digg will bookmark your story in both places. As a result it can be worth working on ‘nudging’ votes in multiple places.

You’ll notice that on this point I said to give your post a ‘nudge’ rather than spam every person you know asking them to vote. Subtle promotion of your posts on Digg is recommended for two reasons – firstly you’ll annoy everyone you know if you’re constantly asking for Diggs and secondly, Digg has measures in place to track people who are manipulating their system and too many people voting up your stories too quickly or from the one source could send warning bells ringing and get your story buried.

5. Educating Readers

Lastly I want to talk about something that has less of an immediate impact upon a specific Digg campaign – but which over time can help.

Educate your readers about social bookmarking.

Many blog readers have never heard of Digg so finding ways to show them what the service is and how they can use it can have a real impact. The more of them who know what it is the more likely it is that they’ll use it – something that will benefit you as you begin to create a Digg Culture on your blog.

6. Organic Diggs

There comes a point in every story’s rise (and fall) on Digg where you have to stand back and let things happen.

What you’ll find is that at some point most successful Digg stories enter the ‘upcoming’ and ‘recommended’ lists and a certain amount of natural and organic digging begins to happen by people who you don’t know. This is where you see if your story has the legs to go all the way or whether it’ll be buried by people.

This is where you realize that it’s not about how many people you can get to Digg a story from your network that matters but whether you’ve actually written something that appeals to Diggers – because if you’ve written something bad you’ll find the story gets buried and all your hard work has gone to waste.

One more thing….

Let me finish with one more piece of advice. Don’t become obsessed with Digg.

I see a lot of bloggers obsessing over climbing the rankings on Digg and while it can bring a lot of traffic to your blog and be worth the effort to promote some of your posts on it when you become obsessed you can fall into these traps:

1. Only ever writing for Digg – I wrote about this earlier in the week but if all you ever write is content aimed at the Digg audience blogging can end up being a bit of an empty experience.

2. Spending All Day on Digg and Not on Your Blog – I’ve come across a lot of people on Digg that could benefit from spending a little less time trying to game Digg and a little more time investing into building a quality blog. The funny thing is that if they actually built a better blog they’d probably end up doing better at succeeding on Digg.

3. Submitting every post to Digg – not every post that you make will be ‘diggable’ – and that’s ok. IF you’re going to use some of the above techniques I would recommend that you only do it with your very very best content. Choose that content that people would want to naturally pass on to a friend or bookmark for later – this is the type of content that will do well on Digg – concentrate on promoting these ones, not your day to day posting.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How To Get to the Front Page of Digg – 6 Ingredients of a Successful Digg Campaign