As we all know, social media has become the latest challenge any successful business has to face, but with experience, you’ll find that it does have its benefits. For example, I truly believe that microblogging has made me a better writer and a better listener.

As a small copywriting agency, we have made our mark. We have a brand, from our excellent service to our creative thinking, which ultimately is passed on to the client.

It is a constant process, though; we have to move, change and adapt to our clients needs. Without the wonderful team I have, I am confident I would not have come to this realization. With that said, here is my opinion on how and what is needed for any business to succeed.

You obviously need a brand. That in itself breaks down to several components: a vision, motivation, then the strategy. In order to come to this realization, you will need to use your vision. Once you have the vision, it can motivate you and your company, becoming the driving force for the next step the strategy. This is where the fun begins; you have to be creative.

Use your creative thinking skills: how you approach the individual project is the vision (in this case it’s how to brand yourself). How do you describe the business, as you want it to be? The answer involves seeing the optimal future for your business, and then describing that vision with your motivation.

Once you have grasped your motivation, then your desire to solve and exploit an opportunity are forthcoming. This, of course, will fall in the right place and is part of the process when “creating” your brand. Lastly the strategy, which we call your expertise: knowledge and understanding (technical, procedural, and intellectual) of what you do.

When you can break it down to easy terms and go as far as writing these components out on a sheet of paper, clarity becomes a beautiful thing.

What is a brand?

If you come from the old school of thinking, a brand takes a lot of money and time to create. With today’s online business, however, it can be attained with the right combination.

Take, for example, using SEO/SEM/SM as part of your online marketing. I would venture to say that anyone with a solid plan could create his or her brand. Branding yourself and standing out from your competitors is one of the easiest, yet most time consuming, exercise I advise my clients to focus on. Keep in mind that a brand is not built through effective communications or appealing logos only – that’s the expensive way; look at all the TV ads, magazines and newspaper fees. No, a brand is built through the total experience that it offers.

You are probably saying (rightly so) that different people have different perceptions of a product or service… so how is that information going to help me? Well, that gives you a nice place to find out about the different points on the loyalty ladder. Not all good strategies rely on super tactics, a huge budget and star power. The basis of a good strategy is to win your audience without having to rely on a tactical brilliance team with bloated salaries that will regurgitate what every social media guru tells them to.

When approached correctly, strategy becomes a long-term response to the changing environment. This involves making a fundamental decision about how to match resources to the ever-changing environment. “Doing the right thing is far more important than doing things right.” Although I can’t remember who said this, it’s oh so true when it comes to branding strategies.

Your online marketing becomes a dialogue. This dialogue is developed over time with specific groups of customers whose needs you understand, and for whom you develop an offer. It has to give and create a different advantage and perception over the offer your competitors give.

A strong brand is valuable because it ultimately changes the behavior of your market. This, as we all know, will lead them to buy more frequently, be willing to pay more and in some cases your clients and users will recommend the brand (you) to friends.

Contrarian Thinking

I always motivate my copywriters by recommending they go against the grain; don’t copy what the competitor is doing. In the marketing world, it’s called contrarian thinking. Granted, contrarian thinking is used more in the financial sector, but it serves as an integral part of the process.

Webster’s dictionary describes “a person who takes a contrary position or attitude; specifically: an investor who buys shares of stock when most others are selling and sells when others are buying.” The way I see it, you have to make your own path. Once you can engage in contrarian thinking it will create the opportunity for brands.

Anyone who knows me is well versed on my approach. I always do the opposite of what I am told as the acceptable way of doing things. Sure, many times I fall flat on my face, but once I dust myself off I realize and am struck by how malleable I have become when it comes to thinking out of the box.

No brand is going to achieve success by copying the rest of the pack. In fact, why would you want to? Yes, it’s lonely, and sometimes you won’t get the results you expect. However, patience is a virtue – even more true when it comes to branding yourself and online marketing.

Author: Gabriella Sannino
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Digital TV, HDTV, Satellite TV

Table of Contents

I. Introduction

II. Search Engines: A Brief History III. Web 2.0: The New Internet

IV. Web 2.0: The Technical Landscape

V. SEO Linking Strategy in Web 2.0

VI. Social Media Optimization: A Piece of the SEO Puzzle

VII. Usability vs. Searchability: The RIA Search Challenge

VIII. Googles Personalized Search: The End of Traditional SEO?

IX. Search Behavior R&D: Customized Engines and Long Tail Keywords

X. Conclusion

References

I. Introduction To those of us whose passion for the growth of the World Wide Web is exceeded only by the marketing possibilities that emerge from that growth, the Internet has become a playground for the imagination. There is a large number of marketers, however, who are fascinated by the Web but approach its marketing capabilities more out of necessity than lifestyle. The Internets capacity has advanced in so many areas in the past few years that marketers playing catch-up are at a significant disadvantage. Marketing directors and account managers with traditional media backgrounds need to expand their breadth of knowledge in order to make informed decisions in todays e-commerce. This article provides clarification surrounding the fairly recent buzzword Web 2.0 and focuses on the evolution and future of the search engine born occupation of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO and its implications are expanding so fast and in so many directions that it has never been more important for C level professionals and traditionally oriented marketers to fully understand the world of Internet search.

II. Search Engines: A Brief History When the first search engines began cataloging the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, obtaining a high rank on search engine results pages (SERP) was not particularly difficult or secretive. It was the webmasters who submitted URLs to the engines and communicated a pages relevancy to a keyword search through keyword meta tags in the HTML code. Early engines, like AltaVista, struggled with providing relevant search results because webmasters, who were paid on a cost-per-impression basis at the time, wrote inaccurate meta tags using high search volume keywords in order to increase visits to their websites.[1]

It was Google who finally answered the call for a more complex ranking algorithm that would greatly improve the relevancy of SERPs. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google, invented the concept of PageRank, an algorithm which helps rank web pages based on the probability that a random person surfing the Internet will find a given page.[2] The PageRank algorithm assigns a numerical value to each web page by analyzing the quantity and quality of the pages that link back to a given page. Known as a backlink, each link represents a vote for the page it links to by the page on which the link appears. The significance of each vote depends on how relevant the page giving the link is to the page receiving the link, as well as the PageRank of the linking page.

Along with the changing search engines continually trying to provide more relevant search results to the user, the entire Web has been evolving to meet the needs of the massive Internet population. In conjunction with the growth of the Internet and the popularity of search, a unique profession known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was born. SEO tactics and skills have evolved alongside the changing Internet, but such changes have never been as significant as the most recent. We have entered into a second phase of the Internet, and as a result SEO is taking on a new face. This second generation of the Internet, often referred to as Web 2.0, has moved away from the old model based on static websites, clicks, and impressions and burst onto a cyber playing field built around communities, participation and open cooperation towards better products and services.[3] An unprecedented level of interaction between consumers, businesses, and interest groups exists in this new Web. Due to the existence of a new social presence, vehicles for driving organic traffic to ones website have expanded far beyond the major search engines. While obtaining high rankings on the major search engines is still an SEOs main objective, the means by which this positioning is achieved requires a much broader capacity for creativity than ever before. Many of these new tactics also provide additional avenues of incoming traffic, which has significantly expanded the big picture view of the SEO professional.

PDF version of SEO White Paper at http://www.bkv.com/search-engine-optimization.jsp

III. Web 2.0: The New Internet

Defining or labeling the new Internet is often met with a considerable amount of critique due to the expansive reach of such a description. There are so many different things that have changed about the Internet in the past several years; a concise definition is difficult to come by. In addition, the term Web 2.0, while perhaps the most accurate term, is typically scoffed at by the skeptical industry veteran who is wary of a vendor or brass employee attempting to sound Internet savvy. The World Wide Web has existed for almost twenty years. What is so significant about the changes in the last few years that distinguish the current Web as an upgrade from its previous omnipotent self? The simple answer to this question is you. Web 2.0 represents the users needs, hopes, and desires finally manifesting into a definable force of voluntary motivation.[4] The blogosphere, social networks, wikis, and other new forms of expression on the Internet have captured the Web population by harnessing their goals, skills, and interests onto a platform of collaborative creation and production. Websites are reflecting an up-to-the-minute common voice rather than a collection of static informational documents. The Web has never before experienced this level of effective interaction between its users, and that reason alone warrants its 2.0 designation.

Ease of self-expression, now apparent on the Internet through the popularity of websites like MySpace and YouTube, is generating massive amounts of original content. Critics of this tremendous increase in creativity and public opinion complain about the dilution of reliable quality content on the Internet. Many social networks, however, naturally weed out undesirable content, and promote popular, well referenced content to the top of searches. In Web 2.0, popular content emerges via a user-generated ranking system that determines the positioning of articles by the number of user votes they receive. This model was made most popular by Digg.com, which joins several community-based popularity websites like Slashdot.com and Reddit.com in providing a user-edited resource for finding news stories, blog entries and other websites. In Web 2.0, up-to-date, reliable content is produced by the editing abilities of the wiki. Wikipedia, the Internets user-written and -edited encyclopedia, boasts an accuracy level not far from the widely accepted Encyclopedia Britannica. In a study that compared forty-two science entries in both resources, Wikipedia had only four inaccuracies per entry compared to Britannicas three.[5]

Social network websites in the new Internet also have a way of allowing like-minded people to find each others favorite content through a system called social bookmarking. Del.icio.us.com is the most popular example of a social bookmarking website. This system of classification, known as folksonomy, involves users assigning labels, or tags, in the form of keywords, to content on the web. Through this collaborative form of tagging, web content becomes grouped by recognizable categories. Continuous tagging and creation of categories by users increases the contents ability to be searched by a wider range of people. This social phenomenon happens because stable patterns emerge in tag proportions [allowing] minority opinions [to] coexist alongside extremely popular ones without disrupting the nearly stable consensus choices made by many users.[6]

IV. Web 2.0: The Technical Landscape

Aside from the collaborative aspect of the new Internet, there is another reason the Web has earned its 2.0 upgrade. The users interaction, not with other users but with the interface of the Net itself, has changed significantly. Technical advancements in web navigation and design, as well as increased penetration of high-speed and broadband connection, make the new Web a foreign landscape compared to its older version. Web applications have continued to improve, providing a profoundly different user experience. The implementation of rich internet applications (RIA) is gaining ground. RIA technologies, such as Flash, Ajax and Java, are leading the Internet in the direction of a Web without web pages. Websites are traditionally made up of networks of static pages linked together by text in the form of the computer language HTML. These pages behave in a synchronous manner. That is, after the user clicks on a link, there is a short period while the server processes the input, in turn triggering the browser to download the requested page. RIAs operate in an asynchronous fashion, allowing response time to be much faster. RIAs increased responsiveness results from the following five factors: [8]

Information can be obtained from a server by anticipating certain user input.

The screen can be refreshed in pieces instead of all at once, eliminating the need for entirely different pages to load when navigating content.

More than one users input can be collected and validated before it is sent to the server.

Some responses to user input can take place without any server communication.

Certain processing that was once handled on the server end can be stored on the user desktop.

Growing implementation of RIA has important implications on search engines and optimizers alike.

V. SEO Linking Strategy in Web 2.0 The Blogosphere & RSS The common SEO adage continues to be valid in the 2.0 world: content is king. It is the content boundaries and means for dispatching content that have truly taken SEO to another level. Since the inception of the blogosphere a term that describes all blogs as a social network of public opinion rumblings of the peoples voice via the Internet have quickly risen to a powerful roar. Beginning in the form of an online diary in the mid 90s, the blog has since developed into a simple vehicle of communication for anyone who desires to send content across the Web. The dissemination of information through blogging has become so mainstream that one can find a blog from an authority source on virtually any topic. The blogosphere, centered on the concept of original content, has provided a link rich venue for the SEO to plan his or her linking strategy surrounding good content.

So what is good content, and what does it have to do with good linking strategy in Web 2.0? In this new era of the Internet, good content is viral. Whether this content is a written article, a homemade video or a podcast, if it grabs, provokes or tickles the user, it will travel, and it will travel fast. From the contents eye-view, the Internet has become much easier to navigate following the advent of Really Simple Syndication (RSS). RSS allows for a program called an aggregator (or feed reader) to notify users of new content added to a website, retrieve that new content, and present it to the user in an easy-to-use interface. RSS and blogging go hand-in-hand because of the constantly updating nature of the blog. As a result of RSS, people are discovering new content on the Internet, passing it along, and linking to it at an unprecedented rate.

Baiting the Link

The SEO practice of producing content in hopes that people will link to it from their own website is known as link baiting. Good link bait has the same qualities as good content. From a well written controversial article to a video clip of a bulldog on a skateboard, website owners will link to any and all content as long as it is interesting and catches peoples attention. There are no boundaries surrounding the types of content one can use to bait a link. In fact, the very name of a new kind of link baiting suggests an indefinable quality. This new link baiting tactic is called widget baiting. Nick Wilson, CEO and senior strategist of the social media market agency Clickinfluence, declared that the holy grail of linkbaiting in 2007 will be the widget.[9]

In reference to computers, a widget is an element of user interface that displays information or provides a specific way for a user to interact with an application. A widget could be a calendar, a stock ticker, a quote of the day, or an icon that collects the most popular YouTube videos. To get an idea of the limitless widget possibilities, check out Yahoo! Widgets (http://widgets.yahoo.com/). In its most basic form, a widget is a downloadable interactive virtual tool made up of simple bits of code that can easily be added to a webpage. When a widget is added to a webpage, if coded correctly, it will act as a crawlable link pointing back to its page of origin. These links can help to boost a site in the search engine rankings, but they also represent great potential for organic traffic.

Creating a popular widget could, in some cases, outweigh traffic from the major search engines. One example of traffic generated by a widget is a blog editor Firefox extension created by the professional blogging company, Performancing, that received close to half a million downloads when it was first released.[10] The brand awareness that widgets can promote has also made advertisers extremely enthusiastic. One would be hard pressed to find a better method of exposure than a logo attached to a button that sits in front of a users eyes daily.

VI. Social Media Optimization: A Piece of the SEO Puzzle

In this new age of the Internet, people have been quick to deviate from the title Search Engine Optimization when describing the organic promotion of a website. In August 2006, Rohit Bhargava, VP of Interactive Marketing for Ogilvy Public Relations, coined the phrase Social Media Optimization (SMO) and defined it as the following:

[The act of implementing] changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.[11] On one hand, Bhargavas point is well taken. If the tasks one is performing to drive traffic to a website are not intended to do so by improving search engine rankings, but rather by building a presence in social networks, than perhaps SEO is not the appropriate definition of their occupation. There is no doubt that SEO has undergone, and will continue to undergo, a certain level of compartmentalization. As different areas of SEO continue to experience the growth of specialized services, such as blogging, widget baiting and social networking, the future SEO will spend a large part of his or her time moderating and collaborating with more outsourcing opportunities that are not, by themselves, SEO related. In the end, however, SEO is a sum of its parts, and from the perspective of a company looking to pay for SEO services, all methods of driving organic traffic will reside under the umbrella of Search Engine Optimization. Notwithstanding the new coinage, SMO is an important component of SEO in Web 2.0. An SEOs intention in a social network is to create the illusion of natural links that occur during the interaction that takes place on networks such as Kaboodle.com, MyBlogLogs.com and Flickr.com. It is these links that search engines value the most because they happen as a result of real interests, not paid or reciprocal contracts. These links often lead to spikes in traffic, which have been criticized for only providing unqualified visitors and using up bandwidth. While these spikes continue to be a topic of debate on SEO forums, traffic after the spike does typically return to a level higher than it was before. The more authentic the illusion of natural interaction created by the SEO, the better the results. SEO in Web 2.0 introduces a new skill set of creativity that was previously not present. The space for this creativity, which ties in with the above link baiting topic of quality content, is especially exciting for the SEO of the future. The possibilities for attracting genuine links and organic traffic are limited only by the SEOs imagination.

To read the last four sections of this white paper — Usability vs. Searchability: The RIA Search Challenge, Googles Personalized Search: The End of Traditional SEO?, Search Behavior R&D: Customized Engines and Long Tail Keywords, and the Conclusion — visit the following URL to download the PDF version of the paper: http://www.bkv.com/search-engine-optimization.jsp

References

[1] Doctorow, Cory, Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia. Version 1.3, 26 August 2001. http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm

[2] Brin, Sergey and Page, Larry, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Proceedings of the seventh international conference on World Wide Web 7, 1998, Pages: 107-117 [3] Tapscott, Don and Williams, Anthony D. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. London: Portfolio, 2006, Page: 19 [4] Tapscott, Don and Williams, Anthony D. Page: 68

[5] Tapscott, Don and Williams, Anthony D. Page: 75

[6] Golder, Scott A. Huberman, Bernardo A. “The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems.” Information Dynamics Lab, HP Labs. Aug. 18, 2005. http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.DL/0508082. Cornell University Library. [8] Loosley, Chris. Rich Internet Applications: Design, Measurement, and Management Challenges. http://www.keynote.com/docs/whitepapers/RichInternet_5.pdf. Keynote Systems, 2006.[9] Wilson, Nick. 2007 Guide to Linkbaiting: The Year of Widgetbait? http://searchengineland.com/070118-074231.php. January 18, 2007. [10] Wilson, Nick. January 18, 2007

[11] Bhargava, Rohit. 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO). Influential Interactive Marketing blog. http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/weblog/2006/08/5_rules_of_soci.html. August 10, 2006.

Author: Will Fleiss
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Programmable Pressure Cooker

There comes a time in every bloggers career they have to make a choice about monetizing their blogs. Monetizing isn’t the right thing for every blogger, surprisingly enough. There are plenty of vanity bloggers or those who blog to support a separate business venture. You can rest assured that when I finally get my novel in print there will be absolutely no ads other than products on the corresponding site/blog.

Just as not every blog is meant for monetizing, not every blog should be monetized in the same way.  Most people recommend starting off with adsense, which for sure is (was) the easiest program to get into.  As I understand it from a great many noobs plenty of sites are getting rejected these days and many more are getting their accounts cut within the first couple of days of going active with Google’s normal no explanation given email.  If this has happened to you, don’t get worried over it since it happens to a lot of bloggers with no rhyme or reason.  Also don’t get bent out of shape over it since there are alternatives to Adsense, which usually work a lot better for most bloggers.

The one thing most bloggers have a hard time with when it comes to adsense is actually getting enough traffic to make any sort of money.  With the maximum allowed banner load you need something in the order of about 1000 page views a day on a low pagerank site to pay out every month.  When you covert this to the traffic the average blogger gets you might get paid once a year by google.  This is the sort of thing that causes most bloggers to give up.  Fear not though, once you discover if adsense is right for your site, and I encourage everyone to try it, you an move on to bigger and better things.

The program i want to tell you about today is one I have been using for about six weeks, Amped Media.  Unlike Adsense. Amped Media is an affiliate marketing program letting you pick and choose whcih ads you want to display based on your blog’s niche.  They have a wide range of programs and once you are accepted into the program you can always shoot a message to your affiliate manager to help you find the right ads.  In affiliate marketing, an Affiliate Manager’s pay is usually based in part on your performance so a good manager will be willing to do whatever it takes to find you ads that make money.

There are a couple of ways to make money with an affiliate program, email, banners, social media and referrals.  It is the referral income which makes most of the big name bloggers, the bulk of their income in truth, and one you shouldn’t necessarily discount from your own repertoire either.  Not only do you have referral income, something that you will never get from Adsense, most affiliate programs pay out at between $25 and $50 monthly.  I know what you are thinking, $25, I still only make a $0.02 a day with adsense.  The difference between adsense and affiliate programs comes back to you choosing your own ads based on the sort of traffic you get.  Take these three ads for example:

This ad for Cool Aid is something you might see on adsense. If you had it on your site and someone clicked on it, you might get a penny or two from adsense no matter what the person did with the page on the other end. As an affiliate ad you aren’t getting paid unless some action is take after the click.  This might seem a bit unfair since you are displaying the ad and getting nothing for doing so.  That assumption is however completely wrong.  The chances are if someone sees the ad and clicks on it they want what is being offered.  If you smartly picked ads readers are likely to click on, then you are going to make a lot more money.  This particular ad takes you to a form and they want you to fill it out, in my experience about 1 in 4 people will fill out a short form on the first page of an ad click.  At most you are going to $0.20 from adsense and more like half that with this sort of ad getting 4 clicks.  With an affiliate like Amped Media it pays out more than a buck and a quarter for every form fill out.  At that rate it is also on the low end of payouts.  If you do the math and I think you will figure it out which is more profitable.

This isn’t the only type of offer available either there are also offer that are sales based and incentive offers.  I will go more into those types of offers in the next affiliate program I review for you.  Stay tuned for next weeks review, MonetizeIt.

I was asked recently how to get a 1000 visitors a day to your blog network.  If you have a network it is quite easy.  The more blogs you have the more content you have, and more content you have the better chance you will get hits from search results.  Here is my quick list of do’s and don’ts.

• Content isn’t enough.  You need content with good keywords and for that material to be indexed.  If you run a wordpress blog the Google XML Sitemap Plugin is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal for getting indexed.  If you want to be properly indexed it is highly important that you use good content specific keywords and tags.  I generate specific keywords with Wordsfinder and use the Calais Tagaroo Plugin to generate Semantic tags, both of which appear as meta keywords to search engines thanks to my theme.
• Write about popular things.  If you follow the first rule of good tagging and and getting regularly indexed, writing about popular topics is going to greatly increase your traffic.  While it goes without saying that writing about football in the off season isn’t going to bring you a lot of traffic for those posts, when I say popular I mean really popular.  The Google Trends page is your friend if you learn to read it correctly.  At any given time these are the 100 most popular search terms on Google and they all have links to recent blog posts through Google Blog links.  Incorporate something from here and your search traffic will go up.  Mention sixty or seventy of them over a couple of relevant posts and you are search gold for as long as the trend continues.
• Write something worth shouting about.  If your posts are pretty good there is always someone willing to submit it to the Social Media outlets.  Promoting yourself is held by some as being tacky and rude, but I don’t think so under some circumstances.  if you aren’t the only one you are promoting.  if you submit, comment, stumble, and rate hundreds of pages a week a little self promotion isn’t a bad thing.  Once a page has been submitted by someone else there is no reason not to jump on the promotion bandwagon.  If you put up a couple of stumble worthy pages a day your traffic can easily exceed a thousand hits a day.
• Comment on popular blogs in your niche.  I can’t begin to tell you how many thousands upon thousands of visitors this can bring to your blog.  This is a long term strategy that has to be cultivated and worked over time.  You need to leave relevant comments on these blogs and do it often.  One good comment will likely get you some traffic, but a hundred comments on a popular blog a year or more is golden.
• Give people a reason to come back.  Unless you are giving your people a reason to come back they likely aren’t going to.  There are lots of good sources of the same information you are providing so you need to give people a reason to return.  I use CommentLuv, KeywordLuv, Nofollow Free, plugins and interact with the people that comment.  Some of my blogs I offer an integrated forum so readers can interact with each other.
• Make it easy for people to come back.  Not only do you need to give people a reason to come back, you need to make it easy for them to return. (I need to do a better job of this on this theme.)  You can do things like put a Del.Icio.us, Technorati,  Yahoo as well as rss feed or many other buttons that make getting back to you easy for people to return.

Practicing these tips will help make your blog popular on Digg

Know Your Digg Goals
If your goal is to make the front page, good luck. More than 50% of the front page is controlled by less 100 people. You need to think smaller from the start and work towards the homepage. Start by thinking about how to get X number of Diggs. Set realistic goals and analyze the results.

Write Digg Descriptions.
Everyone says content is king and that is mostly true. Writing Digg worthy descriptions is very different from just writing good content. People other than your Digg friends have to want to vote for your entry. Make those 350 character work for you.

Make Digg Friends
Without some popular friends on Digg, you simply won’t make it very far. It isn’t simply good enough to shout out a Digg entry because a lot of those get ignored, especially during the busy part of the day. If you have popular Digg friends you can IM asking them to digg you goes a lot further. People look at what other popular people are digging and often times Digg just to be part of the crowd.

Comment on other People’s Diggs
You want to be recognized and people want to to be noticed for their own efforts. The best way to do both is comment on Diggs. The more you comment without being an asshole the more friends you will gain and the more people who will reciprocate your efforts.

Be Patient
Keep working Diggs for several days if you are getting traction. Some Diggs will simply take time to get going. Other Diggs will go nowhere and you should move on, but even then check back occasionally for new comments.

Digg is probably one of the best tools you can use for driving Traffic right to your sight, but it is not for the timid. Getting Diggs is like selling cars. When I started selling cars I was on the used lot and my Sales Team Manager told me something the first day which has held true any time I have sold things. Bill told me, “Brad selling cars is like getting pussy. If you don’t ask them to do it you aren’t getting it.” Getting a Dugg is a lot like getting pussy too.

I have been following a couple of posts elsewhere. There seems to be a lot of bloggers that want the traffic Digg can bring but aren’t willing to ask for it. Instead of getting pussy, most of them are pussies. If you aren’t willing to promote yourselves, then why the fuck should anyone else waste their time promoting your worthless ass? If you want to be popular do your own part in making it happen.

If you are worried about looking like some self promoting ass with no more manners than you have guts, then join a Digg team. Hell if you are willing shout to your entire friends list a dozen times a day for the team I might even let you join mine. It will never matter how good your content is if you are the only one stroking yourself. If you want to be noticed in the ever expanding blogosphere then you need to be proactive and quit waiting to be sexy on Digg.

]]> http://bradtheblogboy.com/social-networking/digg-this/feed/ 1 http://bradtheblogboy.com/traffic-building/links/high-value-links/?source=rss http://bradtheblogboy.com/traffic-building/links/high-value-links/#comments Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:38:28 +0000 Blogboy http://bradtheblogboy.com/?p=70 Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes

I was researching this topic for you when I ran across this excellent article and decided just to give you the whole thing.  it has some stuyff that I am going to go put in practice on my other blogs right now so have a good day.

How to Get Inbound Links from Government and University Sites   by Dr. Deepak Dutta

The inbound link is the holy grail of web traffic. Getting inbound links from government and university sites is a testament to the quality of your site.

You accumulate inbound links not only to increase traffic, but also to establish your site for providing high value to visitors. However, getting inbound links by link exchange or buying text links is not going to get you anywhere. You need to abandon those archaic ideas and jump forward with an inbound link strategy that provides high value authoritative links.

To obtain high value authoritative links, your site must provide high values to its visitors. Original authoritative articles and tools to solve everyday problems are a few ways to provide a lasting value to web surfers. Before you embark on your link-building mission, create something valuable.

Links from the government sites have very high value. If your site enables citizenry to interact directly with the government, it is an excellent candidate for a link back from the government site.

Sites that provide community level services, for example location of Social Security Offices in the USA with interactive maps, will also have high potential for outbound links from government sites.

Other types of sites that do well are sites that provide information about service performance, for example, a nursing home comparison site; sites that cross inter-governmental boundaries; and sites that allow transactions with the government, for example, filing taxes.

If your site is a good fit for outbound links from government sites, start with usa.gov site. It is a central information hub for everything government. On the bottom of the page, you will see About Us and Contact Us links. Read their linking policy by clicking on the About Us before you contact them.

You don’t have to confine yourself to the US government sites only. Explore the possibilities of getting links from foreign government sites also. But keep in mind that your site should provide some values to citizenry of those countries and people wanting to do with them.

For example, most government embassy sites don’t display their embassy addresses in interactive maps. If your site pulls their addresses displayed in simple texts in a web page and place those addresses on Google maps for interactivity, you can contact them to put a link back to your site. Explain to them that your site adds additional value to their visitors by providing richer user experience.

College and university sites provide a good opportunity to develop some authoritative inbound links. The key here is to provide services geared towards students. You may also be able to get links if a faculty member is interested in your contents.

Don’t start spamming university forums, guest books, etc. People may attack your site and bring it down, report to your web host company or domain registrar. You will lose your credibility and reputation. Try to establish relationship by helping others. Let them know that you know your topics and are willing to share with them.

If your site provides some valuable services to students, approach the appropriate university authority for linking. For example, if you have a tool that compares student loans from different sources and suggests the good ones depending on a student’s financial situation, university loan office will be willing to link to your site as a resource.

If you have a blog with original and regularly updated contents that talk about impact of the technology on the society, you may approach a faculty in sociology to link to your site from his or her home page located in the university server.

Government and university sites provide good opportunities for developing inbound links if your website has a match with their requirements. The key to that is quality contents and useful web tools. Once you meet their requirements, it is worth pursuing these entities for spreading your website links to them.

About the Author

Deepak has provided free online marketing tools like free classifieds and free ads sites for more than a decade, followed by article marketing and social media link building tools.

Yeah right, not if you are talking about a blogging god. The one thing Bloggers need to do is realize that they have readers who want to see something new out of them every day. Frankly that is also the quickest way to burn out as a blogger, especially for those of us managing multiple blogs. There are a few tips though that will help reduce the stress.

• Write posts ahead of time either for scheduled publication or keep them around in draft form until they are either finished or you need to pull something out of your ass.
• Make a schedule of posts and keep to it, it is even better if you post it somewhere on your blog so when you get a few nasty emails wondering where your daily blog post is you can point to it. Yes it does happen, in fact that is why I am writing this damned list now. I was tired and needed a day off yesterday and I too it from this blog. One of these days I will manage to take one off from all three at the same time.
• Make a quick post about anything relevant. Don’t make it a crap post, or it isn’t worth your time to even do and you will suffer from it in the long run.
• Make sure you have some great links to provide and tell your readers why they should go read these other people’s blog too.
• Remember even Blogging Gods have bad days and don’t post everyday.

In honor of the suggestion here are my favorite blogging links of the day.

• From Jamie Harrop 20 Ways To Get More Blog Comments. It is a good little list and everyone should be bookmarking it.
• Courtney Tuttle gives us6 Steps To Overcoming A Blog Traffic Slump If you aren’t reading her blog regularly you are missing some really good insight.
• Dosh Dosh:Building a Popular Social Media Profile: Seven Essential Characteristics

We could all stand to do better with this one.

• Darren talks about the new breed of bloggers who are getting into blogging for the express purpose of making money. Making Money as a Side Effect of Blogging (and a New Breed of Blogger) He also gives us a good link over to Seth Godin on how to write like a blogger from a few days ago. Write like a blogger