Hello again, my social networking friend!

Earlier today i went on digg and clicked on upcoming to use the recommendation engine for the first time.  I was surprised to see that the top 4 results for upcoming with the “most diggs”.  I do happen to digg most of the articles that get to the front page, and MakiMaki does happen to get quite a few articles to the front… so this makes a bit of sense.  Not to mention, his webmaster blog DoshDosh is one of my favorite sites for learning about social media and blogging, but how did digg know this?

Just an interesting bit of data on digg’s new recommendation engine captured in a screenshot.

First of all, Cafepress is a product merchant which allows you to make money selling your designs. The basic idea is to create a shop, add your designs to the shirts, coffee mugs, or stickers, and cafepress will sell the items for you. The only problem is, most people’s designs never get found because they are marketed poorly. For any product you want the internet’s public to see, you must market effectively.

The great thing about cafepress is the ability to share your designs without having to get your design past some snobby editor. You simply create an image and choose which products to put it on, and then your shop’s visitors can purchase the shirts. Since you’re already studying marketing for your own websites, you have an advantage over other cafepress users. Market your cafepress profile like you’d market a website, and make sure you have quality content in order to sell your products.

Key Notes on Cafepress:

• “For each member you recruit to CafePress, you will earn five percent (5%) of the base price of every sale they make for a period of one year from their join date, excluding self-buys. For example, if you refer a friend and they sell five white t-shirts, you will earn $3.49 (5% of $13.99 x 5 t-shirts).” -directly from their site.
  Cafepress has premade banners which you can use to get people to sign up:
• Go to this Page to find out what size an image should be to work best with a certain product. It’s important to know, because when you size an image wrong it ends up looking too small when it comes out on the shirt.
• Many cafepress users use squidoo pages to hep promote their cafepress shops. You can use your own website, blog, social networking profiles, myspace, or etcetera in order to promote your shop. You should advertise your cafepress shop just as you would advertise your website, minus worrying about pagerank.
• Quality and Quantity mix well: The more shirts you make, the more likely someone is to find your shirt in the marketplace. Though, shelling out crappy designs that you didn’t think out properly will hurt your shop’s reputation just like content on a regular website. Make sure your designs are quality, and you’ve reviewed them numerous times before releasing them to the public.
• Product Descriptions: Just like any other website, keywords and descriptions lead to search engine traffic. Always make sure to add descriptions to your cafepress products, because they will get you more traffic from search engines and the marketplace.
• You can affiliate with other cafepress members by linking to their products from your website. You get a portion of the money made from the sale when you do this.

You can get started selling shirts now by clicking on my referral link Here~ Yes I know, I’m a bit shameless about that sort of thing right? If you have anything against being referred by me, then just go to cafepress.com, but I’m not going to hyperlink that for you .

Good luck selling shirts~

You may have been under the impression that submitting your website to hundreds of search engines could boost your organic traffic, and improve your rankings in the long run. Then again, you know that it would take hours to submit your site to hundreds of search engines, and anything other than manual submission is out of the question. When search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN are dominating the search engine market because of their ability to automatically index new websites, you might wonder what the point of suggesting a url is anyways.

The biggest search engines of them all, Google, along with Yahoo and MSN are constantly searching the web for new websites and pages to index. LookLinkLove was actually indexed days after it’s creation because of links pointed towards it from popular websites. The common misconception of most people have is that suggesting a url will help get your site listed sooner. On the contrary though, suggesting a url just puts that website in a queue to be indexed behind thousands of other websites. That’s why sites like Google say that it make take up to 6 weeks for a site to be reviewed and indexed.

It’s easiest for you to just allow your site to be indexed naturally. If you were to link to a new site in your signature at a popular forum like Digitalpoint, then google’s spiders would follow the links back to your site and index it pronto. Basically, there is no need for you to suggest a url to your website, unless it was formerly blacklisted by google and the content has since changed.

Listed Downsides:

• Puts your site in the back of a six week queue
• Wastes your time
• A lot more complicated than just putting a link in your forum signatures
• Completely pointless?

Sorry for this short post, just consider it a quick tip sort of thing. Now you’re aware that submitting your site to search engines is probably one of the most pointless SEO tactics.

Why this is titled “Inconvenient Truths of the Digg Front Page”. People don’t want to believe the truth when it comes to social networking sites. There are two ways to get an article to the front of digg. The article must either be from a website that has a well established reputation with Digg users, or the submitter must have a profile lavished with friends and be In the Know of the Digg systematics (if that’s a word).  One more simple truth, only jerks with a heightened sense of self importance, and a feeling that they must shield digg users from the truth bury useful content because it is about getting to the front page of digg.

For the past month or so I have been testing out different ways to get to the front page of digg. None of the articles I’ve submitted have made it to the front page, but I consider this a (somewhat) fortunate learning experience. I now know plenty of information on what not to do in order to get a popular article on digg, and I’ve got lots to write about. There are plenty of obstacles you need to figure out how to jump over, and duck under in order to get your article recognized by other digg users.

Each time I failed at making an article popular I discovered one new thing that stopped me from doing so. So in a sense it’s like driving through a narrow maze in a car with no brakes. If you make one mistake you crash into a dead end, but if you memorize the bad steps you’ve taken and make sure not to do the same thing again, you’ll come out the maze without a scratch on your car. Lucky for me, the metaphorical car was free, and I never lost anything but a non-existent point off of my reputation.

First I’ll give you some plain facts, Digg’s attempt at getting the coolest articles to the front page has almost completely failed. Getting an article from your site to achieve popularity requires a viral article and lot’s of skills with social networking. Unfortunately for most digg users, they don’t realize that their presence will never be noticed without an aggressive strategy for success.

Why should you care about getting an article popular on digg? Well, if you can’t think of any reason why you’d really like to have a popular article on digg then you don’t deserve one. Whether your reason be because you want the fame, the traffic it brings, or for the warm feeling you get inside because you think people actually (is that mean? contemplating taking that word out) like you. If you’ve got a good reason to get to the front page, then you do deserve it.

Now, let’s get you geared for social networking so the next thing you submit to digg has a better chance of reaching front page. Then again, even if you don’t get to the front page following this advice, you’ll be headed in the right direction, and it will be easy for you to get past 100 diggs on something you submit. In fact, being able to get past 100 diggs is something I can guarantee, or your money back! (Face-palm for cliche marketing statement).

Use the Guidelines Below in Order to Make Sure Your Article Get’s some Diggs:

1. Build a Popular Profile on Digg
   If you have no friends on Digg then you’ve got no one to share your articles with. Unless you’re really lucky and someone clicks on ‘Upcoming‘ at the right time, nobody will ever see your submission. So go to the front page of digg, and click on one of the users with a front page article. You’ll notice that this person has about 700 friends you can steal, and each one would gladly be robbed in broad daylight. When you add a friend on digg they have the chance to add you back, or leave you as a fan. As long as the person has any friend space left they’ll usually add you back as a mutual friend.

   Mutual Friend: you can shout your diggs to them, and they can shout their diggs to you.
   If You’re Their Fan: They can shout things to you, and you can follow up on the things they submit, but not the other way around.
   If they’re a Fan of Yours: They will receive your shouts and get updates on your activity, but you won’t get their shouts or activity.

   So, go down popular digg users’ lists of friends and add them to your own arsenal. People are happy to have more friends as it helps them out as well. If they don’t add you back in a couple of days, then just remove them from your buddy list and get some new people. Also, make sure you only add active people, not people who haven’t been on digg for over 10 days.

   These mutual friends will help your digg count grow exponentially, and the more diggs your submission gets, the more visible it is to the rest of the community. That means you’ll start getting fans of your own in no time.

2. Your/The Website
   Never submit an article from a website that doesn’t look good, or have any other good content. You may think it’s sad that I say this, but a crappy site doesn’t belong on the front page of digg. Make sure the site with the article you’d like to submit has a decent design, and plenty of other content to keep readers interested. We don’t like the artists one-hit-wonders as a general rule.
3. Multiple Accounts:
   There are certain users on digg that use multiple accounts in order to digg and share their own articles. This method might work a little bit, but it’s against Digg’s terms of service, your accounts will be banned, and there are better ways to make your articles popular. One of those ways being the ability to send shouts to the massive amounts of friends you recently added.
4. Link Bait: (other reference)
   Your ability to effectively title your posts and articles is arguably one of the most important factors in getting to the front page of digg. Any article you’ve submitted that’s titled in a way that makes the contents sound obvious and drab is going to be tossed aside like dry playdo. There I go with the… similes and metaphors, or maybe it’s an analogy. Keep your titles short, make people curious as to what it’s about. If you can’t do that, then you better submit a pretty damn good article, because more than half the people on digg base their vote on nothing more than the title and the small summary underneath.
   
   
5. Lists, Guides, Digg, and Firefox
   I’ve heard numerous things about lists and guides being the two types of digg submissions to get to the front page the most often. With my own experimentation I found this to be quite true. my top submission is currently a list of the top 10 Firefox plugins of our time. Of course I didn’t use link-bait in my title, so I didn’t make it to the front page. Also, digg prefers hearing news about itself and firefox more than anything. So if you write anything about Digg or Firefox, chances are it will do better than a post about how ‘red heads have more freckles than the average brown haired person‘ or anything else less unusual.
6. Oh No, Someone Buried My Article
   Getting buried is probably the worst thing that could possibly happen to your article. For every person that buries your article, the likeliness that your article will hit the Front Page gets a little less likelier (LOLZ?). People happen to love controversial articles, but people on either side of the controversial argument have an opportunity to bury the article because they don’t like it, or they think it’s untrue. Try to keep your articles completely user friendly, and don’t give anyone the reason to bury it. People whose sole mission is to bury all the articles they can should skip over your article because they think it’s so wholesome.
7. Time Threshold
   Nothing more to say than, just try to get over 100 diggs before 24 hours is spent. As long as you can do this you should be well on your way to hitting the digg front page. All the rest depends on how much people enjoy your article.

After realizing these inconvenient truths and utilizing them, you may easily attain a position on the front page of digg, or atleast get over 100 diggs on your submission.

How many articles must your site have before it is deemed worthy enough to be shown to the general public? Some bloggers think it’s necessary to start building traffic right after your first good article. other bloggers believe that you need a pretty large sum of content before you should start marketing it. I believe in the latter as well, although I haven’t done a very good job of holding true to that principle this time around.

I can definitely see why it’s necessary to have a collection of articles before you start directing internet browsers to a website though. A good amount of content before you start marketing your blog would be around 20 articles with 500 or more words. With only a few articles a website looks new and unprofessional, not giving readers a very good reason to come back. Whereas, a website with a plentiful supply of words and pages will have visitors leaving your website and coming back to check out the rest of your content at other times.

Of course many bloggers get impatient, and after 5 articles or so they try to get their blog out to the public. First of all, I don’t blame anyone who gets a little antsy and tells their friends about their website (as long as they don’t give away the url). You need to be able to keep your site to yourself until it’s completely ready to market. If your site is leaked to the public earlier, chances are you’ll lose potential visitors later on in the game.

Good luck Keeping Quiet