Hello again, my social networking friend!

Many people hope that after starting their website off it will eventually sell itself. This is possible, but can be a bit difficult for webmasters to grasp. Then, even after the concept is grasped the goal is still pretty hard to achieve. This method will involve a lot of skills when it comes to social networking, and social marketing. So without delving into an elaborate guide without any prior knowledge of social networking, check out these great guides from some of my favorite sites.

1. It Takes a Gathering to Build a Crowd | ProBlogger
   Learn how to get a following on social networking sites like digg.
2. Relationships and Online Social Networks | DoshDosh
   Learn about getting to know your contacts on social networking sites like Twitter and Plurk.
3. These guides don’t cover everything there is to know about social networking, but if you’d like to learn more then you’re only a google search away. Try “how to market using social networking“.

The theory is, that if you have quite a few followers on quite a few social networking websites, and you can figure out how to interlink them all together then you’ll have a self marketing site. Articles will get to the front page of multiple social networking sites, and you will only need to submit to one of them in order to do that. For Example: If you were to submit to Digg, your activity would be updated on your Jaiku profile, and you would get visitors from there as well. A marketing guru I know is putting this theory to the test, and trying to maximize on its effect with his new site Badoozie. With his viral content, and loads of much-needed experience in marketing I’m sure that this site will be successful.

The same goes with your blog posts, you can set things up so whenever you post it automatically notifies social networking sites you are a member of. Sites like Technorati, and other pinging sites are the most basic of information sharing websites. The biggest difference between Technorati and Digg is that Technorati is a search engine for blog posts, where Digg is a place in which the most popular article succeeds (with the right push).

This is the subscribe box at badoozie, optimized so that readers who use social networking sites realize it is easy to submit his articles. One flaw I see is the text Subscribe, which many people still associate with paying for a membership. According to CopyBlogger, you can increase your subscription rate by quite a bit just by altering that text. Try changing the text from Subscribe to something like “Get News from Us By Email“.

The key to social marketing is how you use your words. If you were to do everything in uniform and never do anything new, or say anything new, then what reason would someone have for reading your blog. Even more important, why would they want to share your content with their friends?

A blog without viral content, or proper grammar and punctuation is more than likely never going to get popular. Also, a blog without any content at all is obviously not going to be a good product to market. Wait till you get at least 20-30 posts or so before you start marketing your website. If your first article gets to the front page of digg, most users will think of your site as a probable one-hit-wonder and not subscribe to your RSS.

Once you’ve set your site up to market itself and developed a stable following of loyal readers you won’t need to submit your own articles any more. Your own readers, and friends from the social networking sites your blog is pinging will submit the articles for you. Plus, since you’re automatically pinging sites with the new content on your blogs, you’ll notice a fluctuation of traffic every time you publish a new post.

If you examine some of the sites that are constantly on the front page of digg, and other social networking sites, you’ll see that they’ve put this method to work. Then, you can decide whether or not that type of marketing is write for you and figure out how to do it for your own website!

With sites like Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, and etc… What makes people think that hosting their own blogs are necessary? Features are constantly being upped on sites like blogger, which definitely draws people into using it, but does it stop experienced webmasters from hosting their own blogs? After years of experienced making, optimizing, and marketing websites, the pros and cons of a non self-hosted blog become quite clear. Social media is the biggest factor when determining if your site should be self hosted, or not.

Pros

• Many people simply choose a blog service like blogger because it doesn’t cost any money. Since other blog services like typepad do cost money but have generally the same pros and cons, we’ll leave this positive attribute as just a sort of bonus.
• You can get as much traffic as you want, use as much bandwidth as you must, and your site shouldn’t ever go down. Since your site has no bandwidth limits, you’re free to make the front page of digg, where you might have crashed your site if you were hosting it yourself.
• Uptime is maximized. With a blog you don’t host yourself, your uptime will probably be much higher than if you bought hosting from some whacked out, 3rd world host you thought would be good.
• There are plenty of features, and ways to easily integrate advertisements into your blogger blogs.
• Your pr will go up significantly faster, with significantly less work, just because your domain is a subdomain of a popular website. Which means it’s possible for your work to rank higher on Search Engine Rankings than self-hosted content.

Cons

• Your site is less valuable to advertisers that are looking for pr. Less people want links on blogger sites because they see them as unprofessional compared to blog’s that you host on your own. Also, since your site is running off of a subdomain, the link has less value anyways.
• When you don’t host the blog yourself, you have less customizability of its features. While blog hosts are doing their best to make this statement untrue, it will be some time before you’ll be able to do everything a self-hosted blog can do.
• Your site has less credibility just because you didn’t pay for your hosting. Sorry, but it’s true, I think of sites that are made for free to be almost on par with Barney.

All though it may seem like the pros far out weigh the cons, that’s not really true. All though there is more bullet points under Pros, the importance of the Cons should not be taken lightly. The credibility of your website is of the utmost importance when it comes to the ??????? – PROFIT! factor.

In conclusion, if you’ve got the money to spend on a decent webhost (bluehost), then just do it.

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.

Let me Cut to the Chase:

This post is all in good fun, I don’t actually think old people are dunce because they don’t use IE, and I don’t think people that use IE in general are stupid. The post was written in a rather offensive writing style, but please be aware that I’m just joking around. So, with that in mind, everything thing I say can and will be held against me, but I don’t mean most of it.

There are currently two browsers that dominate the internet, one of which sucks, and one that everybody loves. Of course everyone already knows that these two browsers are Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. What you might not know is that Internet Explorer users are either afraid of change, senile, or they don’t use the computer much. When people don’t use their computer very much, it obviously wouldn’t matter if they used internet explorer or Mozilla Firefox, partially because they had no idea either one of them existed.

Many people just refer to their internet explorer, as Internet. If they found out of another way to connect to the internet then they would probably explode and spurt guts of stupidity all over their bedroom. Nipping the bud from the very beginning is the best thing someone could do. I would find it humorous, and a great justice if the default homepage for new microsoft computers was mozilla.com instead of msn.

Think about it though, if someone pointed a finger at you and asked you which program you wanted to use to surf the internet, before you knew anything about either program, which you would use? I’m guessing most of you would’ve answered firefox. Despite your answer being plenty biased already… I would’ve chosen it because Mozilla Firefox sounds way cooler than Internet Explorer.Then again, if it was my first time on the computer, and someone sat me down, and told me to choose between firefox or Internet Explorer then I doubt I would notice that Firefox was better.

You have to be tech savvy to really enjoy the wonders of Firefox, their marketing scheme, and the pretty colors in their logo. Maybe, if you were a natural to the internet, then you could sit down and decide that Firefox was better than IE7 without batting an eyelid.

Despite Internet Explorer User’s lack of intelligence, many of them can vouch for their precious IE7. For example (not a very good one), I tried switching my dads computer from IE7 to Firefox. I thought I was doing him the biggest favor by switching his browsers. He ended up yelling at me and forcing me to switch it back. I don’t know whether this is because he missed his bookmarks, or because genuinely liked IE7 better than Firefox. I know one thing for certain though; being senile definitely had something to do with it.

I feel distanced from all Internet Explorer users, probably because they have different interests than me. Seriously the only people that use it are the people that are to stupid to change it, don’t see any point in changing it, or don’t have the time to change it. I’ve had to change the browser to FF for both of my parents, so obviously old people are dunce when it comes to internet browsing software. To be honest though, as long as you don’t plan on spending a lot of time on the internet, and enjoying a feature rich experience isn’t in your best interest, than it really doesn’t matter which browser you use.

My feelings towards internet explorer users are left alone in the outside world though. My computer class had to use internet explorer because that’s what comes installed on the computer. Being built in to the computer seems to make the program more trustable… The truth is, I haven’t used IE7 on my computer since I used it to find firefox and download it. When I’ve turned on my Internet Explorer to check how a web page looks in that browser, I get some random popup and for some reason a bunch of toolbars are hovering over the content.

If you want a good internet browsing experience, then go with Firefox… If not for any of the reason above, then get it because of the cool addons. If everyone was as educated as you now are about the two leading internet browsers, the lead dev and his mom would be the only people using Internet Explorer 7.

Look Link Love

In a perfect world, only the websites people like would be at the top of the search engine results. In a perfect world, webmasters would focus only on building up their content so that people wanted to read it. In a perfect world, Search Engine Optimization Does. Not. Exist. Google is trying harder and harder to stop webmasters from gaming their websites to the top of the search engines. I’m assuming that they’ll never be able to completely end webmaster’s ability to purchase success.

A friend brought this to my attention when he told me that most webmaster’s were spammers. Buying, selling, and trading links are all against google’s wishes. Though Google is not the law of the internet, they’re plenty powerful to make it seem so. As far as I’m concerned, Google is right to deem the actions of certain webmasters’ wrong, or right.

Think about it, if the websites with the best content were at the top of all your search results, you and everyone else would get the information they really wanted. Unfortunately for your search for greater knowledge, depending on a webmaster’s ability to get people to link to him, he’s able to put any site he wants at the top of the search results. To me, it’s spam when you put a link on your site just because you were paid to.

Don’t get me wrong though, I have no problem profiting from people advertising on my website. Google does it with their contextual advertising company, Text-Link-Ads does it, Kontera does it, John Chow Does it, and so do many other websites. I feel so redundant right now I think I should end this post, but I’m ending it knowing you’ll see SEO in a new light. If you see the flaws of your old disgusting SEO habits, then repent, and try social networking. Since only the good stuff really gets popular, it’s not as spammy as Search Engine Optimization.