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www.digg.com and blogging. It places an emphasis on science and technology but has recently expanded to included categories such as politics and entertainment. The latest stories and websites are submitted by registered users and editorial control is democratic. This means that news stories and web site links are submitted by users and they are only moved to the front page of Digg based upon a user-controlled ranking system. This is how it works. Users can view all the stories or link that their fellow users submit. If a story gets enough ‘diggs’ it gets promoted to the front page of the Digg website. If it doesn’t get enough ‘diggs’ it remains in the ‘digg all’ area, where it will eventually be removed. A post may also be removed if enough users report a problem with the link. All the content on the Digg website is free. Originally Digg carried fifteen categories in which to submit stories. These were deals, gaming, link, mods, robots, security, technology, design, Apple, Linux, music, hardware, movies, programming, software and science. However, Digg was recently revamped and the previous categories have now been worked into the six new categories, which are: technology, science, world & business, sports, entertainment and gaming – with each category having subcategories. On Digg, users can discover web content from just about anywhere. Whether it’s the biggest names on the web or the most obscure blog from the other side of the world, you will find it on Digg. There are no editors on Digg. The editing is done by all the users together. The users together determine the value of the content that is available. All the content is user driven – from the blog posts to the pod casts. Once you submit your post, it is instantly visible to all Digg users. If your submission is a good one and it gets enough Diggs, it gets promoted to the front page of the This ebook was brought to you by www.webtrafficmachines.com website. There it is available for viewing by millions of users around the world. Since Digg is all about sharing and making discoveries, users can also build conversations around the content that is posted. Digg provides users with tools to comment on and discuss topics they are passionate about. When you go through Digg, you will quickly realize the benefit of working through the lens of other users who have the same interests as you, simply because it acts as a content filter. This ensures that you only get the most interesting, relevant and unique information. Using Digg: Making it Work For You Simply sign up for a Digg account at digg.com and take off from there. Whenever you want to submit an article, video or pod cast, just post it for people to see and it will show up immediately in the section called ‘Upcoming Stories’. Here, other Digg members can see it and ‘digg’ it if they like it. A ‘digg’ is a vote for your post that recommends it to other users. If your submission receives enough diggs, then it gets promoted to the front page of Digg.com. The next step up the ladder of popularity is to make it to the Top 10 list on the homepage. The more people who digg your post, then even more people are likely to click on it. If it’s good for them, it’s good for the next user as well. On the other hand, if a submission is no good and does not receive enough diggs it will remain in the Upcoming Stories’ section and stays there until it gets deleted. So you have to be at the top of your game to make sure that your post does not get deleted. To do this, you must stay active on the website. You must take part in the collaborative editing process that Digg is essentially based upon. You should digg posts that you like because it means that other users will also digg your posts and create better visibility for your post. You can also share your digging history with your friends. You should make an effort to ‘bury’ any bad links, that is, links that have irrelevant information or duplicate entries. This keeps the spam out and ensures that users get only relevant information. This helps you gain credibility and in turn build an invaluable network. You can invite your friends or make new ones on Digg. This lets you view what others are digging and help you find mutually beneficial resources. This ebook was brought to you by www.webtrafficmachines.com You can even share a link with friends who are not on Digg by emailing it to them. Most importantly you must share your opinions and make them heard on Digg. This is only way that you gain credibility for yourself and create more link-backs to your website, thereby generating more traffic. Technorati www.technorati.com and literati. The mainstay of technorati is blogs. Technorati is basically concerned with the world ‘live’ web, as opposed to the World Wide Web. The world ‘live’ web is that part of the World Wide Web which is constantly being updated and is interactive. Technorati searches for and organizes independent, user generated content, whether it is blogs, videos or pictures. This kind of ‘personal’ media is also sometimes referred to as citizen media. Before examining the workings of technorati, let’s take a look at blogs as they are the basis of technorati. A weblog or blog (as it is commonly known) is a kind of daily diary or journal but it is online. Blogs are a very powerful tool of communication. They may be very personal and not actually trying to achieve an audience at all, whilst on the other hand, they could be vying for mass viewing. In any case, blogs are quite influential. They reflect a wide variety of opinions and topics, and they are as varied as the millions who write them and read them. Millions also respond to these blogs and are influenced by them. Within the blogging community, bloggers connect to other bloggers on a regular basis. This means that they are engaged in an interaction that is almost like an open conversation. This is where technorati comes to fore. Technorati tracks blogs and the conversations around them, and it rapidly indexes these links. The world live web is buzzing with activity that many are entirely unaware of. For example, every day over 175,000 new blogs are created. These blogs are updated regularly as well. There are 18 blog updates per second – which means that there are 1.6 million posts being made every day. This could be a gold mine of potential visitors to your website. This ebook was brought to you by www.webtrafficmachines.com Using Technorati: Making It Work For You Technorati’s mainstay is the blogs that people create. You can sign up for a free account and start posting your blog pages to Technorati straight away. You can also create a user profile for yourself, so that others can get to know you and your interests and help you to network better. The site also includes news, and is broken down into these two main categories – news and blogs. There are topical categories as well, and these include business, entertainment, lifestyle, sports, technology and photos. Each topical category has blogs and news items related to it. As a member, you can ‘favorite’ the blog or posting of a fellow user. You could even ‘favorite’ the user. This means that you are giving them a ‘thumbs up’ for all of the posts made by that user. Imagine how many link backs it can create to your website if people favorite your profile or even your posts in the same way. Technorati also makes a distinction between the most ‘favorited’ blogs and the top commented-on blogs. So this brings a greater number of blogs to people’s attention. If, for example, the aim of your blog is to spread information, it may not garner too many comments but it may be a favorite of many users. On the other hand, blogs that are more opinionated and interactive will invite much more commenting. The ‘popular’ page on the website displays the top five blogs, the ones that have been voted as ‘favorite’ by the most people, and it also provides a link to the top one hundred favorite blogs. It also shows the number of people who have voted the particular blog as favorite. The ‘popular’ page also lists the top five blogs that have the most comments made about them and provides a link to the top one hundred most-commented-on blogs. This page shows the number of comments made about a post as well. del.icio.us www.delicious.com collection of people’s favorites. These favorites are yours and those of many others like you. Whenever you find an interesting article, blog, music, recipe, review or just about anything else, then you can simply save it to del.icio.us. This makes your favorites accessible from anywhere, not just your computer. This ebook was brought to you by www.webtrafficmachines.com Furthermore, you can share these favorites with the people around you, whether they are family, friends or coworkers, and you can even build your very own community of like minded individuals on del.icio.us. Del.icio.us also opens up the window to the best content on the web, so that you don’t have to sift through the thousands of search engine results. Everything on del.icio.us is someone’s favorite, and this already acts as a content filter so you know that you are only getting the best resources and most appropriate website shown to you. Users can, as always, browse the numerous tags to search for what they want. Using del.icio.us: Making It Work For You Del.icio.us is basically a social bookmarking website that enables you to save your bookmarks online. You can use it to your advantage to get maximum exposure for your website or blog. It gives you access to the links that other people have tagged as favorites and this provides you with an insight into what kind of content people are looking for and how to position your website in relation to this content. You can assign one word descriptors to your posts; that is, tags. Tagging allows greater flexibility – since you can give a post multiple tags and increase your chances of being viewed. The following are some of the major reasons why people visit del.icio.us and my suggestions for harnessing the power of its extremely large visitor base to increase traffic to your website: • Many people searching social bookmarking websites are looking for information or doing research. If your website is information based, then use the site to pick up tips on what kind of information people need most, so that you can post accordingly. Stay active in the ‘tags’ that directly or indirectly relate to your own website. Only when you post comments actively will people comment on your posts, thereby creating a network of back links and opening up new business avenues. • Many people now do a considerable part of their buying and selling on the internet. For example, people commonly choose presents on the internet and have them delivered. They even have their own wish list posted on the net and share it with others. This can be a gold mine if your online business is product sales based. Trawl the wish list tags to get an idea of what people are This ebook was brought to you by www.webtrafficmachines.com buying. If you find a wish list that’s looking for what you are selling, drop them a message and tell them you can help. If the user finds you and your service helpful, they are likely to recommend your product to others as well. This could open up a treasure trove of visitors and buyers on your website. • Many of us listen to pod casts – whether it is news, music, reviews or entertainment. There is a considerable market for pod casts. If you are in the business of developing pod casts, make sure you check out the mp3 and podcast tags on del.icio.us to see what people are listening to now. • The internet is also fast becoming a popular travel resources center. People are buying bus, rail and air tickets online. They are choosing destinations and hotels online. And when it comes to traveling, word of mouth is a great marketing tool. People are likely to trust information from people who have been to the place, used the same airline etc. If your online business is travel related, it would be a good idea to get yourself acquainted with the travel and other related tags. Become an active member, help people organize the travel and get the benefit of guiding traffic to your travel based website at the same time. • Creating a link log can also help you immensely and is quite simple to do. Make sure you comment on other users’ blogs as well and they will comment on yours, thus creating a network of links that point back to your website. • You can also use del.icio.us as a tremendous networking tool and also for pooling resources and completing projects that need collaborative work. Groups of people can use a shared account. They can use special tags for their own work and share relevant bookmarks that will be useful to the entire group. You can, in fact, basically organize your tags and resources in any way that you want. Stumble Upon www.stumbleupon.com bookmarking websites (actually they are all just a little bit different from each other). It works as a browser plugin to let you ‘stumble upon’ and rate websites, articles, blogs, photos, videos etc. A person using StumbleUpon is known as a ‘stumbler’, and when you come across an interesting web find you just click the Stumble! Button This ebook was brought to you by www.webtrafficmachines.com on your tool bar and add it to your StumbleUpon favorites. All the functions that you would normally use in social bookmarking are made available on your browser with StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is a great way to discover exciting new content on the web in a relatively random fashion, as well as sharing your finds with your friends. When you click the button on your browser, StumbleUpon generates web page matches according to your preferences. The pages displayed are those that have been recommended by your friends or other users of Stumble that have interests similar to you. Using StumbleUpon: Making It Work for You To use StumbleUpon all you need to do is to sign up for a free account and then download the free browser plug in. Once this is installed and activated, then StumbleUpon chooses which new website will be displayed depending on the ratings you assigned to previous pages, or on ratings of websites by your friends and the sometimes perhaps even based upon the ratings of other users on StumbleUpon who have the same interests as you. So, if people in your network give your website thumbs up, more and more people are likely to visit it. The content on StumbleUpon is based on a rating system that allows users to give thumbs up or thumbs down to a website, so it is an entirely recommendation based system that makes extensive use of social networking principles. It also has a one click blogging system, and users can rate a blog with a thumbs up or thumbs down decision. What StumbleUpon actually uses is called collaborative filtering. This is an automated process that makes active use of the opinions of the people using the system. It also takes into account the personal preferences that come about from machine learning. This creates a virtual community of people who are connected to each other, and over time this community should become ever more closely linked because of the new linkages being added every day. The website updates each user’s personal profile, which is a blog style record of the sites that that particular user has rated. Then, StumbleUpon generates peer group networks of users that are connected by similar interests, and it is these social networks that organize the distribution of the content on StumbleUpon. This ebook was brought to you by www.webtrafficmachines.com What happens is that users of StumbleUpon only the get to view the pages that have been recommended by their friends or those who have similar interests. Instead of just giving a site a thumbs up or down, you also have the option of leaving comments on the website, and this will also appear in the user’s profile/blog. This way of discovering content on the web is becoming surprisingly close to automating the word of mouth marketing function. Stumblers have the chance to rate and review the blogs created by their peers, and, as a Stumbler, you could also join certain interest groups as well to further increase the interactivity of your account. These are community forums created to discuss specific topics wherein users post comments in such a way that it becomes more like a discussion board. StumbleUpon claims to have a certain edge over conventional search methods, and some of these could be crucial to increasing your website’s visibility and directing traffic towards it. Using search engines often means that we have to carefully sift through pages and pages of seemingly relevant content, but often these results are nothing more than somewhat irrelevant keyword matches which may be far from what you are looking for. Using StumbleUpon, however, you can be sure that if the content on your website is good, then people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say will see you. Members have also come to trust content on StumbleUpon, since members are taken directly to matches that are sorted according to interests and preferences. They are more likely to visit your site if it is visible on StumbleUpon. Like most other social bookmarking sites, StumbleUpon uses technology that is essentially driven by humans. By using a combination of machine learning and human opinions to yield search results, StumbleUpon delivers content that is highly relevant and appropriate, so that the user gets a high quality website every time they search for something and they come to trust this pattern. This means that when your website shows up on StumbleUpon, it will almost automatically have greater credibility. This ebook was brought to you by www.webtrafficmachines.com StumbleUpon is quite easy to use too, so it could work for you, even if you are just learning the ropes of social bookmarking. Also, if your target audience is not exceptionally good at understanding the workings of the internet and social bookmarking, StumbleUpon is a good place to start. Users can add your website to their favorites with a simple click and they also have the opportunity to pass your link on to others in their online community. They can also give feedback or make comments. This creates an inevitable network of visitors to your website. StumbleUpon lists nearly five hundred topics that users can choose to list as their interests and preferences. This allows you to get your website known in different circles and communities of users. The internet just keeps getting bigger and more complex each day. Information is also constantly changing. StumbleUpon has a dynamic approach keeping fully abreast of all of the freshest sites, blogs and articles on the internet. It filters tons of information on the website to bring content to its visitors. So if you have created a new website, you can promote it and invite feedback and comments on it by using StumbleUpon. Furthermore, the more active you are on StumbleUpon, the more visibility you will gain, because StumbleUpon compiles a list of its most active users, and this gives extra exposure to those who are very active and helpful. It also shows you people on StumbleUpon who are geographically close to you. Fark www.fark.com website. It is a humorous look at pop culture and the news, and is widely read by people as an entertainment site. However, it is one of the most powerful social bookmarking sites around, and has the power to drive massive amounts of traffic to any website. Fark is, in essence, a community based website. Its creator Drew Curtis designed it so that it allows users to comment on a batch of articles and news items that are updated daily. A seven day archive is also available for comment. Links to the articles or news items are submitted by registered Fark members which are then approved (green lit) or disapproved by the site administrators. Whether the links are approved or not, they can still have comment This ebook was brought to you by www.webtrafficmachines.com threads around them. Moderators monitor the discussion boards and any content that violates posting guidelines is removed. Another variation of Fark is Totalfark. This is a premium version of Fark and requires a $5 monthly fee, whereas Fark is totally free. The advantage of Totalfark is that members have an online community and can take part in active and energizing discussions. They can comment on all posted links, not just the green lit ones. In fact, the links submitted by this sub-community are not really meant for being green lit and are displayed on Fark but reserved for comment and discussion by Totalfarkers. However, they may be green lit if they are particularly interesting, funny or embarrassing. This is particularly useful for you if you are looking at Fark from a social bookmarking perspective. If your blog is about any of the categories which Fark discusses, you can promote it heavily by posting links and inviting comment. However, you must be careful. Your link must be good quality because the average Farker is intelligent and discerning. Furthermore, the administrators will soon work out if you are spamming. As mentioned before, there is no substitute for good content to drive traffic to your website, but once you build up credibility for your site, you can be assured that people will visit your website or blog for their daily fix. Using Fark: Making It Work For You You sign up for a free account on Fark and create a profile for yourself which is visible to other users. You can upload a picture and write a short bio about yourself, and you should do so, because this is important when trying to build up a community of like minded people to direct to your website. The Fark categories include Not News, Sports, Business, Geek, Showbiz, Politics, Videos and Voting. So, all of the news and infotainment articles that you could ever hope to read are listed here. Fark describes itself as a new aggregator website and an edited social networking website, which receives about 1800 to 2000 links each day from users. As suggested earlier, if your aim when using social bookmarking is to get people to visit your blog or website, then you should understand that each day, out of the 2000 odd submissions that Fark receives, only about fifty make it to the main page. So there is a high chance that your submission will not make it.
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