Blogging Pointers

Liz Strauss has a great post up at her blog today titled “The Secret To Massive Digg/StumbleUpon Traffic Without Spamming.” It’s trademark Liz - highly readable, common sense applied in a brand new way, and very good advice. Essentially, she says, it all comes down to saying a proper “Thank you!” to the person or persons who started the snowball rolling. (See, your kindergarten teacher was right - everything you need to know in life …)

One thing though … it’s the title of her post. Is saying “thank you” to the originators (as excellent an idea as it is) really the secret to massive Digg/SU traffic? Or is it the secret to return visitors? I don’t see most users spreading the word that “this blogger said thank you and that’s so cool!”, so I’m not sure how the word would get out to prompt others to do the same for you. And expecting one person to Digg/Stumble you over and over isn’t really realistic.

But Liz makes one suggestion that I’d never thought of and just love:

While your story is still popular, link to your champion’s profile from your story. Place your link at the top of the story. That shows your thanks in a highly visible way. That link back also might send a ton of Digg/SU Users to your recommender’s profile. Chances are that will increase your his or her number of fans. You can bet a “thank you�? like that will be noticed. Even LifeHacker takes time to thank their Digg friends.

How brilliant is that?

You can talk to the President, Congress or anybody else until your blue in the face, but the only person with the power to put you on the front page of Digg is you.

Most of us already know, but for those of you that don’t, making your way to the front page of Digg.com can bring a wave of new readers, sometimes thirty thousand visits strong in one day. As expected, the goal of many is of course to be on the receiving end of this traffic burst, which can be very challenging to say the least. So how do you get there?

Start by visiting the Digg site and see what everyone is interested in. Digg users are very loyal followers and they know what they like. The most commonly Dugg articles I have found as of recent are focused on:

1. Technology
2. Politics
3. Digg or (being Dugg)
4. Humor

Incorporating any of these topics into your content may genuinely boost your chances of being Dugg. Now understand this doesn’t mean you have to be running a tech site to stand a chance. Take a look at the title of this post for example ” President Bush, Congress, Who Has The Power To Digg You?”. In this article I am giving tips to get Dugg, but was able to incorporate not only politics but also two popular topics in politics, Bush and Congress. Coming up with a creative title is half of the battle, so find some ways to include popular keywords in your titles.A great title is all you need to get people interested, the content is what will keep them there. As with blogging in general, write great, informative content and having something to do with the title is nice too. Top ten lists, reviews and criticism are always popular choices of writing and can go over well with the Digg users.

Get a jump start on the process and ask your friends, family and local grocer to Digg you. People tend to be more apt to digging your article if other people have already started the process. Nobody likes to be the first. This is not cheating and most likely your competitors are already doing this.

Finally you may consider crossing everything and closing your eyes until some thing happens. It is not as painful that way:)

Oh and now while I’m thinking about it, If you dugg this article then please Digg it.

With the masses traveling to MySpace.com each day to meet people, advertise their businesses and just have fun, it has become a huge player in driving traffic to everything from personal blogs to huge corporations. Many bloggers have jumped on the bandwagon in hopes of driving their fare share of traffic to their blogs in hopes of picking up readership and of course making money.

MySpace has rapidly evolved from a peer to peer meeting place into a business networking giant for many companies. I live in the home of Starbucks and that wonderful black brew and I have even seen some of the drive-thru coffee shops advertising their MySpace pages at the window. The trick to MySpace is making it work for you. When first starting out you need to take the time to get involved with their community, add some people to your friends list and write new material for your page. You will quickly notice that by simply adding some people to your friends list, some of their friends will add you and then their friends add you and so on. This is the quickest way to grow your popularity from within this networking giant.

When setting up your about me page make sure you mention your blog(s) and what their about. When you communicate (more…)

Ping! Ping! Ping! There you go three essential factors in driving traffic to your blog. Pinging the various social sites on the internet is a must if your plan is to drive serious targeted traffic to your blogs.

So why Technorati? Technorati.com is one of the largest and fastest growing social search engines on the web today. In the month of March alone they brought an astounding nine million unique visitors to their massive blog database. The majority of those visitors are there for one reason and that reason is simply to find people blogging their interests.

Don’t forget to use tags in your posts. Technorati is well known for the use of tags, or keywords, that are directly related to the content of your writings. Visitors at the Technorati site can perform a simple search for specific tags of their particular interests and get the results to match that specified criteria. So if your article is tagged “blogging” and the user performs a search for blogging tags you will fall into the search results. TypePad now offers a way to include technorati tags in your posts and there are several Wordpress plugins for including Technorati tag, one example that is gaining popularity is Bunnys Technorati Tags.

Technorati also features a list of the most popular Technorati tags. Writing around one of these popular tags could potentially create a huge influx of traffic overnight. However, beware of falsely tagging posts to increase traffic. This is considered spam and if reported will most likely get your blog blocked from Technorati’s services.