Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog » Social Media Optimisation

Twitter me Timbers: 5 Ways to Profit from Twitter

Stuart — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 12:38:21 +0000

If you’re on there, add me here

Follow thousands of people

Pretty straight forward, just follow as many people as you can. If you’re interesting enough a certain percentage will follow you back, I’ve noticed a 10% ratio here, a bit higher if you’re a ‘beautiful woman’ *coughs*

Tweet famous people

There’s a lot of famous people on twitter now with A LOT of followers. If you can somehow get them to tweet back at you then you’ve got a lot of potential traffic hitting your twitter profile. Creativity is the key here.

Get something viral happening that’s re-tweetable

If you can create something that’s easily re-tweetable but makes you cash then you’re onto a winner. The sitelink fail was a small example of something. I had less that 20 followers when I tweeted it, imagine if I had thousands?

Use the Twitter API to create an app (i.e. twittercounter)

I saw an interesting stat that mentioned twitter gets roughly 10x more traffic via their API than the actual web service. There’s a huge market out there for interesting apps & a huge market to profit from it. This is probably the most lucrative point out of the 5. For example, no-one is really doing twitter backgrounds well yet?

Use twitter for new product/website launches

With plenty of followers you can really give a new website/idea a very nice initial boost or get the blogosphere talking. A trend I’ve noticed is that twitter users love useful apps, oh & twitter related apps

Links are masked anyways

All affiliate links get masked through tinyurl anyways, not entirely sure if twitter plans to address this. Hell if they were really smart they could replace all affiliate codes with their own. Did I just come up with the first real revenue idea for Twitter?

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Ultimate Dofollow Social & Link Building List

Stuart — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 06:17:23 +0000

Welcome to the one stop shop for link builders looking to utilise social networks & other forms of dofollow link building techniques. I aim to keep this list as an up do date resource that grows over time, so please don’t hesitate to let me know if:

There’s sites/resources I’m missing
One of the sites I have listed goes nofollow

Current Total: 95 Sites

Social Submission & Voting Sites

These sites are the bread & butter of social bookmarking. The idea is to submit your site/posts & let the community vote. Not only do you get the initial link from the social site, really sticky content has the ability to go viral & generate a much larger range of links from relevant blogs / forums & websites. Remember, submit your best content.

Social Bookmarking Management Sites

These sites allow you to keep a record of your favourite sites & organise them accordingly. Similar to how Bookmarks work in your browser, except you can now access them from anywhere at any time. Use these to bookmark the pages you want to increase rankings too.

Social Search Sites

Social Question & Review Sites

Social Content / Article Hosting Sites

These sites allow you to host articles. Use them to leverage links to your own network of sites, some sites allow unlimited links in the articles, some are limited to 2 or 3.

Social Image Sites

Social Networking Sites

Blog Hosting Networks

Create blogs around specific topics & use them to link to your network of sites.

Forums

Connotea

Wiki

CSS Galleries

Do you have a beautifully designed CSS site? Then there’s hundreds of dofollow links out there for the taking. Submit it to the sites below.

Social Bookmark Submission Software & Websites

If you’re looking to automate any of your submissions there are a few options:

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Link Building Guide Part 2 – Social Profile Bumping

Stuart — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 01:28:11 +0000

Yesterday’s technique was just the beginning, once this tutorial is over you should have all the link building information you need to really make your sites kick some Google ass. The reason I mentioned using yahoo for link building first is that it forces you to think outside the box & it also means you’re not using the same technique or looking at the same backlink profile as everyone else.

This technique is an old favourite of mine. Don’t be fooled though, you need to put some dedication & keep solid records of everything here. Otherwise you’ll end up getting lost.

Technique 2 – Social Profile Bumping

To do this properly you’ll either need a copy of Excel or Notepad. Or whatever notekeeping program you like to use. I can’t stress enough how important it is to keep a record of what we’re doing here.

Most Social Sites, Forums & Bookmarking Websites give you a public profile. In your profile it’ll either list your Homepage or a list of your recently bookmarked sites. The aim of this technique is to build up 100+ profiles & interlink them with one another, thus creating a network of 100 sites that we can easily utilise to link to our Affiliate Websites which whatever Anchor Text we like.

Eventually this will build up the backlink for each individual profile & give them decent authority & link influence. Given that these profiles can have upwards of 100 links pointing to each (including internal links too) they can pass a good bit of weight in the engines. Interlinking the profiles will also help each stick better in the search engines, which, in turn will keep your backlinks pumping, instead of the page going supplemental or not even getting indexed in the first place.

Once you have this network built up you can now use each profile to help rank new projects or throw some solid links at existing sites. Pretty simple really.

To those of you that are worried about quality over quantity imo & Matt Cutts recently said it himself:

A Link is a Link, no matter where it comes from.

So, let’s get some links?

Laying out your Excel Spreadsheet

You need to make a record of the profile page for each network that you sign up to. It’s worth doing this in something like Excel. I have tabs for each type of linking network I’m highlighting in these guides. You’d put these under the “Social Bookmarking” Tab.

Below I’ve highlighted a few examples of the pages we’ll be bookmarking.

Digg: digg.com/users/username
Flickr flickr.com/photos/username
Myspace: myspace.com/username
Sphinn: sphinn.com/user/view/profile/username

These are the URL’s you want to be keeping track of, because these are the URL’s you’re going to be bookmarking/building links to. You can include these all in a single column.

Other variables you may want to consider keeping a record of:

Keeping track of the usernames & passwords for each of the sites (I often sign up to all the sites with the same login & password details to avoid this, but you can mix it up if you want).
Keeping track of whether the page is indexed in Google.
Which sites/pages you’ve submitted to each site & anchor text you’ve used.

List of 20 Sites to get Started

Below is a list of 20 sites that you can use to start creating your network. They’re all dofollow & I’ve highlighed which pages you should be bookmarking once you’ve created a profile.

Any Vbulletin Forum: forumname.com/member.php?u=userid
Technorati.com: technorati.com/people/technorati/username
Searchles.com: searchles.com/people/show/username
Digg.com: digg.com/users/username
Backflip.com: backflip.com/members/username/
Bibsonomy.org: bibsonomy.org/user/username
Faves.com: faves.com/users/username
Wink.com: wink.com/p/username
Simpy.com: simpy.com/user/username/links
Markaboo.com: .markaboo.com/people/username
Rawsugar.com: rawsugar.com/user_account/user_profile?username=username
ma.gnolia.com: ma.gnolia.com/people/username
Furl.net: furl.net/member/username
Propeller.com: propeller.com/member/username/
Indianpad.com: indianpad.com/user/username/bookmarks
Care2.com: care2.com/news/member/userid
Plugim.com: plugim.com/user/username/history/
Blogmarks.net: blogmarks.net/user/username
Spotback.com: spotback.com/users/leosatter
Socialogs.com: socialogs.com/profile.php?id=userid&cmd=submitted

A few important things to remember is that you can get banned from these networks for spamming, so be careful what types of sites you link to & which pages.

You can check to see if the page is in the main index of Google by pasting the URL (without the http://) into the search box i.e. www.propeller.com/member/username/

You can check to see how many inbound links the profile page has with the SEO for Firefox Tool I spoke about in my last post that technique always helps me find new Social Sites to add to my list as well.

Always try to mix up your Anchor Text & which pages you’re linking to on your sites. Don’t just point all your links at the homepage, it’s unnatural. Also don’t point 100 links to your sites at once.

Remember that once you’ve created all your accounts you need to start bookmarking them or submitting them. This can mean that you’re submitting 50+ profiles at a time into each website (which can get quite boring). From personal experience I try not to submit too many at once otherwise you risk detection.

Happy bumping!

This post is part of the One Way Link Building 2008 Series.

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Digg Gaming: How to Spot it

Stuart — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 00:55:45 +0000

It was always inevitable that people would try to game Digg by copying original articles & trying to pass them off as their own & also engineering articles towards the Digg userbase in order to increase popularity & incoming links to their website.

This article will give a few examples of Digg Gaming in action & how to spot it.

The first article worth reading is over at SEOmoz, called the anatomy of a Super Digg. In the article daniel explains exactly how he gamed Digg users with an article written purely to grab their interest.

The article was called 8 Diseases That Give You Superhuman Powers

If you visit the url that the original article was hosted on you’ll notice a few things that are strange:

The article is hosted on the domain www.autoadviceoffl.com which if you visit it, it’s is a car dealership in Florida:

Why on earth someone who owned a car dealership would write an article like this & publish it on their own site? Yeah well, we all know why.

The story received over 4000 Diggs & the article itself gained about 920 backlinks almost doubling the total backlink count of the main domain. In the SEO world, this would have a substantial effect on the overall rankings of the domain. Regardless of whether the article was on topic or not. Some SEO’s will also use a 301 permanent redirect on the page to redirect it to one of their own sites, hence passing all the link popularity across (once the traffic has died down).

Now have a look at the article itself

The article is now clearly plastered with SEO’d links leading to other articles & sites about Limousines (trying to pass the link juice to help them rank).

Also have a look at the user profile of the submitter. You’ll notice that it took over 20 tries of submitting articles before one finally got popular. Talk about persistance?

Looking at the popular stories from the past 7 days, I noticed a similar story:

Geeky Wedding Cakes : This story is hosted on a Limousine website, which isn’t linked anywhere from the main domain. The site is also heavily SEO’d which leads me to believe this is someone trying to game Digg (quite successfully).

Things that these stories all have in common

They are all hosted on a commerical domain.
The Sites have been heavily SEO’d (I don’t expect you to be able to recognise this), but look for SEO’d title tags like Rent Cars in Florida or Hire Limousine for Prom.
The article had been submitted 2-3 times before & had been unsuccessful. The author merely changed the URL & submitted again.
The articles are not linked from anywhere else on the domain, they are standalone. So how would someone else other than the author be able to find them to submit them?
The articles are all written to entice & capture the attention of the Digg culture by focusing on topics that are popular often (i.e. Lists, Pictures, Apple, Science).

Now of course there’s ways around this detection technique, I’ll cover that in a later post

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Increase Views & Ratings on Youtube Videos

Stuart — Wed, 30 May 2007 03:07:13 +0000

For those of you that have embraced the Youtube phenomenon & are struggling to get views on your videos here is a few quick techniques that you can utilise to really boost your exposure:

Video Title: The video title (aside from the thumbnail) is one of the most important things you’ll be using to grab the attention of the viewers. Make it catchy, don’t give too much away so that people will click through on the video to watch it.

Sex: Unfortunately, we all know sex sells. So do breasts. If you go to the Youtube Most Viewed you’ll see that most of the videos here have scantily clad women in them. If you have a few beautiful women at your disposal to help with videos then this is probably your best bet :p

Take the Piss: A good old english saying. A good way to get views is to make a mockery or do another version of an already popular video. Doing video replies also achieves this well. The more fans you can get to subscribe to your profile the better.

Choosing the right Frame Thumbnail: The thumbnail is the part of the video that most people pay attention to. This is what they see whenever your video is displayed in the Youtube listings. Quite often when you submit a video, the thumbnail that Youtube chooses is completely unrelated to the part of the video that you want to emphasise. Here’s a few optimisation tips.

Graywolf did a great videocast on Optimising your video thumbnails for more views:

Here’s another (albeit a funnier take) on the same concept:

Here’s a link to a Squidoo Page that shows you how to choose the right frame

Categories: The category that you submit your video to is important. Make sure it’s related to the subject matter of the video for maximum exposure & ratings. Don’t go submitting a comedy video into the Music section. But you probably knew that anyway…right?

Leveraging Social Networking: Social networks eat up good videos. If you build up power user accounts on digg or have a lot of friends on Stumbleupon then this can really get the ball rolling for your videos. Front page of Digg Videos section should net you up to 10,000 views. A successful video on Stumbleupon could lead anywhere up to 100,000+ views over a few weeks.

Embrace the Youtube Network: Just like above Youtube is a network of people. Network with them! Make friends, comment on their videos, rate their videos, tell them you’ve rated their videos & get them to do the same for you. Make communities & groups that you leverage traffic, views & ratings off.

So is Youtube a huge popularity. Of course it is. Isn’t Blogging? Aren’t most things to do with the internet? Problem is, how many of these people are actually monetising these efforts?

More to come

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Digg’s HD-DVD Revolt, the best Linkbait Ever?

Stuart — Thu, 03 May 2007 12:00:35 +0000

So I’m sure most of you already know that Digg’s users all went nuts yesterday posting the infamous HD-DVD Decryption code.

Ignoring the legalities of it all one can’t begin to believe the amount of links the whole escapade has generated for Digg.

Lets have a look for example at Kevin’s blog post here (this was only posted yesterday):

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=link:http://blog.digg.com/?p=74%20-site:blog.digg.com

It already has over 335 (Update: The post now has 23,000 links) links showing in Yahoo alone (within 24 hours) from some huge sites such as:

Techcrunch
Slashdot
Boingboing
Reddit
Techmeme
Forbes
CNet

The list goes on & on.

Whilst the whole escapade may end up costing Digg by losing a valued sponsor & some legal action; at least they can laugh evilly at the sheer number of links they’ve generated. That is unless……they get shut down.

MuhahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA

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15 Ways to become a Digg Power user in only 48 hours

Stuart — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 02:52:50 +0000

Well, I never really was a big fan of Digg…..Until yesterday when I finally cracked how to get consistent diggs to the front page.

I spent a lot of time analysing what works on Digg & what doesn’t. However what a lot of people fail to notice is that 99% of the stories that are submitted rarely make it beyond 1 digg (from the user themselves).

The reason for this is the mentality of the submitter. They think that creating an account then submitting their stories is enough for the story to hit the front page. However, it’s just not that simple.

Here’s an account of how exactly I created a profile & became a power user that had 4 stories front paged with no help from any IM friends, within 48 hours of creating the Digg Account:

Create a Digg Account
Choose a memorable name & a good picture (picture is vitally important, notice how the top user supernova17 has a bright image ). Make the name memorable. Bear in mind you’re not trying to deceive here but merely some extra persuasion which will help with initial diggs.
Start by digging stories from users in the “upcoming section” make sure & leave a nice comment on each.
Add friends & digg their stories regularly. Adding friends is key to making this work.
Check for people that have added you as a friend using the “See who befriended you” tab.
Start submitting stories from places like reddit & stumbleupon to get an idea of how many initial diggs you are going to get. If you’re getting less that 10 diggs from friends then you need to do more digging & building.
Try to comment first on stories you think will hit the front page, this increases your exposure & increases your chances of acquiring friends.
You’ll instantly get a feel for what’s working & what’s not working. Now it’s time to tweak things.
Don’t submit into the general category. Things scroll off too quickly & don’t linger enough to get that initial “boost.”
I added anyone that dugg my stories as a friend. If they check their “befriended” tab they’ll probably add me too. This works well with newer users who have less friends. Make them feel wanted :p
Create a huge list of resources to scour for stories. 50-100 is good, tech blogs, apple news all that sort of stuff you want right in your feed reader.
I Created google alerts so that I’m getting info on hot topics right to your email inbox.
Don’t post your own stories until you’re sure you can get that initial 10-20 diggs to get your story noticed. If you’re posting your own stories you need to make sure they’re professional, not spammy otherwise you’ll get buried & the blog will get banned.
I now have a Digg account that will automatically get 15-30 Digg’s from my friends as soon as I submit a story, depending on what the story is about. For example they’ll probably not digg SEO or Affiliate Marketing related stories.
Have fun digging, remember it’s a game. It’s not difficult. You just need to network & build relationships then you’ll be rewarded

Welcome to everyone that’s come here from Digg! I’m surprised that you’ve not nuked my server….yet. Please feel free to have a look around, here’s a few other posts that I recommend:

Also, don’t be afraid to drop me a line using the contact tab or leave a comment if you have any questions (or suggestions) about this article

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Lonely? In need of some Link Love? Let’s get Creative!

Stuart — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 10:01:57 +0000

Lets face it, every blogger out there. Regardless of whether you’re creating a blog to sell a product or talk about your favourite past-time, needs a little link love. It’s what makes the world go round. There are quite possibly hundreds of ways to gather links to your sites that will in the overall scheme of things help you rank well. Some people, however, are a lot more creative than others when it comes to this, so lets have a look at some of the ways you can get creative with linkbait!

Digg

Digg by far, if done right can be one of the biggest generators of passive inbound links to your site. Why? Well, when a story gets big people will blog about it, it’ll get syndicated on other sites & other social media avenues. The average front page story generates around 300+ inbound links depending on the associated topic. Check out this post on Seomoz that can give you great outline of what it means to hit the front page on Digg.

Here is another site that has played the Digg game quite well. It’s a basically an affiliate site for College Degree programs cleverly disguised as a College Information site. They’re had 2 or 3 stories hit the front page on digg. For their efforts the site has close to 12,700 links back to it. Ouch, that’s not bad for an affiliate website….

Being Controversial in Blog Posts

Whilst many bloggers refuse to be outspoken it’s actually quite a good linkbait. Take for example the whole Dave Pasternack SEO Contest, he made a controversial post about SEO being easy & probably increased the number of inbound links to his site threefold. What’s difficult about this tactic is being controversial without damaging your reputation or rubbing someone else up the wrong way.

Making a Funny Post about Leading Bloggers in your Niche

One of the posts that stood out for me in this category was SEO Lookalikes, not only did it make me spit my tea all over my keyboard but it’s incredibly good link material. It’s the kind of post that people link to without really thinking about it. If you have the time to think out of the box & come up with an idea like this you really deserve the links that come associated with it

Run a Contest on your Blog

Doing something on your blog like offering Blog Reviews is a great way to generate buzz & inbound links. This includes a number of varying options:

Offering a linkback when someone does a review of your blog
Run a competition & give away something unique, to enter someone has to link back to your blog with specific anchor text
Run an SEO Contest to get people to rank for you brand, to enter they need to link back to your site

Create Linkable Content

Certain types of content are more linkable than others. You need to try & find the sweet spot for your own blog & the niche you’re in. People like to link naturally to blog posts that provide unique valuable information or posts that condense a lot of information into one big post. I for one generally fall into a category where I write blog posts on a whim about topics that spring to mind & sometimes don’t have as much time as I’d like to really post as indepth about a topic. If you can really take the time to structure a post out & make it so good they’d be silly not to link to it you’re onto a winner

Be the First to Post News Items

This is where Google Alerts, Email Subscriptions & Feed Readers really come into a place of their own. If you can be the first to blog or post about a particular topic then it’s easily to instantly become the authority post on that piece of news. You’ll naturally attract a lot of inbound links & trackbacks very quickly. This is one of the main reasons why blogs such as Engadget & Techcrunch do so well. It is actually a fine art to find out this information, although I’ll give you one tip: Subscribe to Press Releases or add them to your RSS Reader.

Comparing Services or Blogs against one another

Like my Mybloglog vs Bumpzee post (which was somewhat biased towards Bumpzee I might add) comparing services or blogs like this can instantly create linkable content. I find that being objectionable about a service (which also falls into being controversial) also helps create more linkable content, because people start questioning the article on their own blogs. Especially if you point out a flaw in the system or point out something that other people have overlooked.

A good example of comparsion that is good linkbait was the Blogger Face Off, basically pitting SEO & Affiliate Marketing Bloggers against each other using raw numbers as ammo! Another great idea that is great linking material.

Interviewing Leading Personalities in your Niche

Being the first to interview a leading personality within your Blogging Space can create a huge number of links. For example Shoemoney was the first & only person to ever interview Quadzilla on his Net Income radio show. This can be a difficult one to achieve as not many high profile bloggers are willing to do interviews for anyone. One point on this, if you are planning on interviewing someone just send them a list of questions you want them to answer. Don’t ask if you can interview them, 9/10 they won’t answer.

Create a List of useful plugins or services for people to refer to

This was one of the things that first caused me to stumble across Stuntdubl’s blog. He’d created a huge list of resources for SEO’s. Ranging from Keyword Research Tools to CSS Tools etc. I checked Yahoo & this page has 197 external links alone, not to mention the individual links to each resource list. Not to mention ranking on page two of google for Internet Marketing Tools.

Offer Step by Step guides on how to achieve something

Like my post about Affiliate Sales on Blogger you can easily attract a lot of attention on a particular subject. You need to be sure to show people how to do something but also leave a certain amount of work up to their imagination. Don’t give away all your secrets, I like to try & give some posts an air of secrecy so that people ask questions & take the techniques to another level. People are then likely to blog about their success or failure on their own blog.

So in summary there are heaps of unique ideas that you can use to give your site that much needed traffic boost. However you need to make sure that you’re converting these once off visitors into regular readers.

I’d also love to hear about other unique & new ways you guys have managed to attract links naturally.

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Bumpzee vs Mybloglog….Fight!

Stuart — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 23:08:49 +0000

I’m the first to admit that whenever Mybloglog came on the scene I was quick to jump on & rave that it was the best thing since sliced bread. Fast forward a few months & things couldn’t be more different. Which is……very unexpected.

Bumpzee has come into the scene & could just possibly (for my niche) sweep me off my feet!

Firstly what went wrong for me with Mybloglog?

I started getting too much unsoliciated Spam.
Too many people were gaming the system.
The servers were are slow.
The widget was slowing down my blog.
The readers coming over from Mybloglog weren’t targeted enough.
There was no integration of blog content into Mybloglog.

That’s actually a lot of negative points. I guess the morale of this story is that you don’t realise what you hate about something until a better service comes along. For me Bumpzee is just that.

What do I like about Bumpzee?

The Digg like widget that I can add to each post. In fact I’ve even gotten rid of the Digg Widget now.
The fact that it’s actually a community dedicated to Affiliate Marketing! Who would ever have thought
Seperating the communities to make readship & participation more targeted which is an AWESOME idea.
If your blog is about affiliate marketing they will automatically include all of your posts into the voting.
It’s a great place to network & find blogs related to your niche. Without having to trawl through the spam & unrelated content.
You can install a sidebar widget that not only allows people to “bump” stories from your blog whilst on your blog but it’ll show who recently from Bumpzee has been visting the blog. I’ve decided not to install this feature for now due to the Link Popularity leak back to Bumpzee. Perhaps if I could make the links nofollow then I’d add it in.

Hrm, 6 negative points about Mybloglog. 6 Positive points about Bumpzee.

I’ve not quite figured out yet how the Ranking system works for “Bumping Stories” to number one. Nor do I have any proof of what sort of traffic you’ll get for hitting number one. But to give you an idea, for getting on the front page with a story I was getting around an extra 50 uniques to the Earners Blog. Not a huge amount, but I’d rather have targeted traffic that may sign up to my RSS Feed than untargeted traffic from Digg that’ll just crash my server & look pretty in the logs

So the fight between Bumpzee & Mybloglog is on! It’ll be interesting to see how Bumpzee evolves & what extra communities they’ll be bringing in over the coming months. It’d also be good to see some of the blog readers here get on there & get more good Affiliate Marketing content on there. It’d also be great to network with you guys, so drop a note on the Earners Blog section in Bumpzee & say hi. I’ll do the same for you.

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Digg Survival Guide: How to Avoid getting Buried

Stuart — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 02:46:10 +0000

Submitting stories to Digg & seeing them hit the front page is something that many webmasters love to see. Especially when someone else has submitted the story for you. If a story is well received then it can give you good motivation to write more often about a particular topic or perhaps if a story isn’t well received then you may drop that topic alltogether.

What can be frustrating however, is seeing a story get bumped to the front page then seemingly disappear into the depths of the Diggosphere never to be seen again. This has plagued many digg wannabes for months.

To put it simple, Diggers have the ability to bury your story if they believe it to be:

A Duplicate
Spam
Off Topic
Innacurate
Just Plain Lame

So how can you make sure that your story doesn’t get buried?

Well if someone else is submitting your story I guess there’s generally nothing you can do about it. However here are a few general rules that I like to go by:

SEO/Affiliate Marketing Stories: The Digg community loathes SEO blogs. Think of what Kryptonite does to Superman. These are a big nono & will most likely get nailed right away. The occassional few make it to the top but never really last the distance. Notable sites that were banned for submitting too many SEO Related stories were John Chow & Digitalpoint who have since been unbanned. If you want to submit these types of stories I strongly suggest that you get onto Bumpzee it rocks!

Ads on Website: Diggers hate advertising on websites. If your site is plastered with Adsense or possibly even has one tiny adsense ad on it, it will give them more reason to bury the story. They don’t want to see people “making money” from Digg.

Write about Ubuntu, Linux, Mac, Steve Jobs, Kevin Rose or a Top 50/100 list: I don’t know if it’s because they have a severe case of ADD or “Birds of a feather flock together” but these topics always seem to make it to the front page, even if they’ve been recycled 100 times over. If you look at the Top 10 in “Category” you’ll always notice a few of these stories. Take right now for example:

Yeah so at any given time about 4 of the top stories relate to this criteria you can be almost certain of not getting buried writing about them.

Making sure your server can handle a Digg: If your server goes down & can’t handle the traffic then chances are people will bury the story faster than you can curse blindly at your webhost. If you’re actively planning to do well on Digg at least be prepared for it. For example, I am not prepared because I never expect to get anywhere on digg with this blog. However if I had a blog about linux then I’d make sure I was.

Don’t be an Asshole in the Comments: Quite often if you submit a story & get some negative feedback Webmasters will do on the defensive & try to protect themselves or the article in the comments. If you attack the community your story will get buried. So try to take a step back & let them comment. I find the hot topics that are controversial do well as you get many more people actively participating in the commenting.

Paying for Diggs: If your story is so rubbish that you need to pay for diggs then you shouldn’t be upset that once it hits the front page the Digg Community will bury it faster than a Dog with a bone. They’ve been using the system long enough to know when someone is trying to game them or not & I guess thats part of the beauty of the Digg system. The downside is that the whole system is pinholed inside “specific topics that work (mac, digg, mac, mac)” rather than just the good cool stories making it to the front page. Although I’ve been seeing a lot more cool stuff hitting the front page recently.

Promoting a Product or Service: Digg is not the Yellow Pages. It’s not the place to go to promote your new Car Washing business website. Only products or services that strike a common interest with the people that use Digg will get voted. I guess even if they do bury the story it’s still good for a backlink :p

Don’t post your own stories: If you repeatedly post every blog post you make to Digg you’ll more than likely get banned. I post my own stories now & again to see how they’re received but I don’t take the piss. Users will notice this too, they’ll also look in your history to see what you’ve been digging & submitting to get an idea of you’re genuine or not.

That about wraps up this part of the Survival Guide. More to come

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Trick to Increase your Technorati Rank

Stuart — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 11:26:42 +0000

Yesterday my Technorati rank was around 40,000, today it’s hovering at about 4,100. So how did I manage to increase 35,000 positions in just one day?

Simple really. Potentially you have way more links out there than technorati gives you credit for. This probably goes for a lot of the guys that are in the top 100 aswell.

I used Xenu to fully spider & grab all the URL’s from sites I knew had a Sitewide link to Earners Blog. I loaded all the URL’s into a text file & got rid of any externals. I then loaded the full list into the pinging tool that comes with Blogger Generator, fire the technorati ping server into it:

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

Then just let it run on the entire list.

This technique increased my link count from 888 to 3,100 within the space of around 60 minutes.

Why’s this important?

Well, whilst having a high technorati rank isn’t overly important, it can help increase your value in Textlinkads & Reviewme. But for people who are struggling to just hit the top 100 in technorati this technique has the ability to really give them the needed boost to get right up there & compete with the “top blogs” out there.

Another simple yet effective technique brought to you by Earners Blog

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Using Mybloglog & Technorati to Increase Blog Readership

Stuart — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 00:58:44 +0000

Firstly I’d like to apologise of the lack of posting over the past few days! I’ve been away on a much deserved break up to Queensland in Australia & I decided to leave all electronic equipment behind. Ahhhh, stress free to say the least.

Well, I’m back! Refreshed & ready to go for some new posts & new ideas to help keep you guys (my readers) one step ahead of all your counterparts (my non readers :p).

I’d also quickly like to congratulate Eli over at Bluehatseo on his first full year with the blog. Congrats & keep up the good work buddy!

Right, now down to business! I’m sure some of you have noticed that I’m using Mybloglog on the right hand side of the blog just where the categories are.

It looks a little something like this:

It was recently acquired by Yahoo & has soared in popularity over the past few months. A lot of the big bloggers are now using it on their sites. This means you have a lot of potential to have your profile & blog seen just by visiting other blogs momentarily. In fact, you don’t even have to read the blog. Just stop by then leave, as long as you’re logged into Mybloglog it’s fine.

I could create a huge list of bloggers using Mybloglog but it’s probably best that you sit down & gather about 100-150 blogs that are Popular & related to your niche. Visit them daily, hell set up a script to automatically visit them for you if you wish.

In doing this everyday you’re opening your own blog up to their visitors. If they cick on your profile pic they’re taken to your page within Mybloglog where they can leave a comment, add you as a friend or even visit your own network of sites. This is AWESOME for networking with other bloggers.

Now this is where it gets fun. I set up a profile for one of my other blogs & set my profile picture to a beautiful female. I visited as many blogs as I could within my niche that had Mybloglog on them. I also set up a profile in Technorati with the same picture of the beautiful girl.

It seems that when guys see a lovely girl has been visiting & reading their blog it sets off a chain reaction that sparks their curiosity. Just within 7 days of doing this my feed subscribers have doubled & I’ve been getting loads of wierd & but also friendly comments on the profile.

Here’s a perfect example of a profile that’s embraced the technique

Another good trick is to admire other bloggers within Mybloglog. When they log into their account they’ll see that they have a “female admirer” & delve a little deeper to see who she is

Now this technique, whilst it can be somewhat deceptive it’s tapping into the fact that most males are inquisitive & horny creatures. For example if you guys thought I was a pretty girl you’d probably be totally ASTOUNDED at the content I was writing & maybe I’d have thousands of subscribers. But, because you know I’m a guy & there’s much more competition not as many people care :p

This technique also works well on technorati. What I like to do is create a profile for the blog with the same picture. Maybe try & blog about some of the “Top 10″ things that are in the most talked about list (and related to the topic of my site, most times they’re not related), sit back & watch the suckers come flying in.

*insert evil laugh here*

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Do You Squidoo?

Stuart — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 04:28:36 +0000

I don’t know about you guys but I’ve found Squidoo to be incredibly useful for a number of things over the past 6 months.

Affiliate Marketing
Getting New Sites Indexed
Ranking

Squidoo is a Web 2.0 type social community. You can create a “Lens” & basically fill it with stuff. Links, Photos, Amazon Feeds etc etc

The site seems to get a lot of authority & trust from Google, so much so that you’ll quite often see Squidoo pages ranking for competitive terms. This can make Squidoo a potential Gold Mine for Affiliate Product Reviews & even promoting your own Website.

To give you a bit of an example I’ve created a lens on Squidoo for Earners Blog.

Check out the Page On Squidoo

Creating this lens allows me to do a number of interesting things:

Add my RSS Feed as static HTML Links
Include Links to anywhere I want with the Anchor Text I want
Do a blurb or Review about the site & include Hyperlinks in there too

I’ve just linked back to the lens from this post which will help it get indexed, pretty quickly I reckon. So It will be very interesting to see how it ranks on Google & whether it brings in any Traffic. Aside from that, I can create as MANY lenses as I want. So for example I may create a lens reviewing a particular affiliate product or use another lens to link to various sections of my other sites.

This is a goldmine for people, here’s an example of a Squidoo page ranking for a popular Affiliate Product (Affiliate Project X):

That particular page has about 31 Backlinks, mostly from social bookmarking sites (which are easy to get & something I’ll be touching on later this week). With a bit more work, this page could be ranking much higher

If you’ve found this post useful I urge you to rate my lens using the ratings at the top & also join the group I’ve created for Earners. We can then help each other by rating lenses & increase the exposure for our sites or blogs

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Free Page Rank 4+ Myspace Profiles

Stuart — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 06:10:43 +0000

I read Eli’s Blog today & it reminded me of something interesting that I was doing a while back to help give my new sites a serps & indexing boost.

Myspace

This still works, in fact I haven’t tried it in a while. Reason being is that Google’s results only show up to 1000 for a particular query so I had completely saturated all the results :p

Anyway it’s quite simple really. This is an easy way for you to get expired Myspace Accounts that have a decent Page Rank then re-register them & put whatever links you want on the page I’ve managed to get anything up to a PR6 doing this, although mostly PR4′s.

Firstly I’ll run you through the idea. It’s always good to see exactly what goes through someones mind when they come up with an idea like this.

I was browsing through Google one afternoon & came across a Myspace Profile, I clicked on the URL & I got this interesting message:

This user has either cancelled their membership, or their account has been deleted.

However, looking at my handy Firefox Pagerank plugin I was amazed to see that the page had a Page Rank of 4! Nice.

So, being naturally curious I decided to try & re-register the username that was in the url (http://www.myspace.com/username/). These are the only types of URL’s this works with. If the URL contains strings or just numbers it won’t work.

Just register using your normal details, then when it asks you to choose a username use the username in the URL.

I now had myself a shiny Page Rank 4 Myspace account. However, I decided to take it to another level & do it…….on a mass scale.

To do that I simply just used the following operator in google:

Click Here

This shows you the entire list of all expired Myspace accounts up to 1000 (since google’s results don’t go past that). So according to Google there’s around 21,000 expired accounts up for grabs.

I now copied the url’s in mass from every page into excel & got rid of all the crap ones. So I’m looking for urls that look like:

http://www.myspace.com/someidiotsnamehere/

Once I’ve finished that I’ll probably have a list of about 600-700 or so. Now comes the fun part. Checking the pagerank of each URL. To do that I use a tool called Parameter, that’ll check the Page Rank of URL’s in bulk. Once that’s done I’ll have a list of all the URL’s that are PR4+.

Now you just need to go & register them.

Bear in mind that I registered them all about 2 months ago, so I would like to think the serps have updated a bit since then.

Happy hunting

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