TimScullin.com » Social Bookmarking

How to Tweet For Diggs

Tim Scullin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:16:02 +0000

Most users even if they are on digg will tweet their new posts and use a regular URL shortener. As a result their followers who click the link will be redirected to the page and if they like what they see, I mean really like, then they may consider submitting the page to digg. Smart users will make this process easier for the reader by adding a digg this badge at the bottom of the post. But there’s a better way.

The Digg Bar

If you’ve used digg you will be familiar with the digg bar. It appears at the top of any page you click through to from Digg.com and scrolls with the page. The great thing about the bar is that users can instantly vote for your page without needing to find a digg badge or copying the URL.

Digg users are familiar with the bar and new users will notice the bar and may even consider joining digg. This is good for you because now more of your followers will be on digg and you will get more diggs the next time you tweet a link.

Shortening With Digg

Using the digg shortener is easy. Simply add the Digg Bar Bookmarklet and you will be able to shorten with digg. Once you have shortened it you can click the twitter icon in the digg bar and submit to twitter. From here you can either tweet the link or copy it and schedule a tweet for later.

When your followers click your link they will now see the digg bar placed prominently at the top of your page.

Other Social Sites

There are many other social bookmarking sites and this trick works on them all. The best option is to choose a site that your posts will get popular on and that your followers are using. No point posting digg links to a bunch of reddit users.

If your chosen site doesn’t have a URL shortener just use another service and shrink the link to your page on that site. Also remember that if the other site doesn’t have a bar, the reader will need to click again to get to your site (may not be a big deal, but you might find you’re getting less click-throughs to your actual page).

Use Twitter To Jump Start Your Traffic In 5 Easy Steps

Tim Scullin — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:13:37 +0000

A lot of people are asking the question how to get more traffic to your blog. And a lot of people are giving the same answers, “build up all traffic streams” “target keywords” “comment on blogs” etc. This works well for the established blogger but it’s a long and painful road for the new guy. Good thing the game is changing. There are now easier ways to compete with the big players.

The Shortcut

Normally traffic is built up by compounding returns. Each traffic source adds on the previous. Once you target enough keywords and have enough backlinks your site will build up significant traffic. The only problem is it all takes work, and the more competitive your topic the harder it is to get traffic. This means that for weeks or even months you may not get beyond 30 hits a day. I have one site that is nearly 2 months old and is only getting 10-20 visitors a day outside of Twitter. Including Twitter it gets around 400 a day.

How Does It Work

Social sites give the small guy a mouth. No longer does it depend on your SEO experience or your established domain names, now you can get quality traffic just by producing quality content. With social sites once you write a quality post (with a catchy title, see How To Write Article Titles For Traffic) you will naturally generate traffic even if it’s your first post ever.

There are many social sites you can use to build social traffic but I’m going to focus on Twitter.

How To Leverage Twitter

Using Twitter to get jump start your traffic still requires a little bit of effort but you will see quick results even if you are in a competitive industry. Here’s how:

1) Set up a Twitter account (best if the name is related to your blog).

2) Add followers who are interested in your niche.

Either find them through search.twitter.com or follow those who follow of other tweeters in your niche. Read 3 Ways To Get Target Followers (For Free) or use Twitter Snipe to do it automatically.

3) Add followers who are on other social sites (digg, stumble upon, reddit etc). Find them with search.twitter.com.

4) Tweet about your new posts.

5) After a few days tweet to remind people and ask them to retweet and submit to social sites.

You will get visitors to your site straight away (the more targeted Twitter followers the better). The traffic from the following retweets/bookmarks is also very powerful. For example I made the Digg front page a few weeks ago and had nearly 2000 views in about 15 minutes (resulting in server crash.. make sure your hosting is prepared). For more on social bookmarking see Social Bookmarking 101 and Getting Popular on Social Bookmarking Sites.

Long Term

By following this strategy and building your Twitter following you will see a constant growth in your traffic. As a bonus you will be improving your search engine ranking as your site naturally builds up backlinks. Remember to target keywords along the way as eventually you’ll have substantial search engine traffic to support your social traffic.

All the best!

5 Things You Should Know About Making The Digg Front Page

Tim Scullin — Mon, 25 May 2009 15:48:31 +0000

So a few weeks ago I wrote a few posts on Social Bookmarking 101 – Where To Start and Getting Popular on Social Bookmarking Sites 101. You may be interested in checking them out because it works. Last week I had a post go to the front page of Digg by following those tips. I didn’t use any pre-existing lists I just started from scratch so you can do it too.

Here are 5 points you may want to know before doing it yourself:

Hosting

The post was only on the front page for less than 30 minutes as far as I can tell. Here’s what a majority of viewers saw when they clicked the Digg link to my site:

In the space of those 30 minutes google analytics tells me that the site had nearly 2,000 views. I am unsure of the number who couldn’t get through because of hosting problems. After researching others is seems that you can expect between 5000 and 150,000 visitors depending on how long it stays on the front page and whether it makes the top 10 stories of the day (always displayed on the right hand side of the page).

If you don’t have the hosting to support making it to the digg front page you will miss out on a lot of traffic and it will very quickly get your page buried (as mine experienced). Even if you get buried you will still get an influx from many different sources on the web.

Quality

There are ways to get more exposure to your page by working with your friends to help get the diggs up. And while I recommend this to get the initial momentum, if you aren’t submitting quality work it won’t take long to get a bad reputation. Also make sure you do a good job of spell checking and editing your post before it gets submitted.

Putting time into creating a masterpiece for submission can be a great idea when aiming to get traffic from digg. Once you establish yourself as a producer of great content the digg the community will happily embrace your future work and you will find it easier (so they say) to get to the front page.

Links

Once a page gets popular on digg not only will it generate significant traffic to your site but it also gets the attention of other resources on the web. As a direct result you will see an influx in traffic from other social bookmarking sites. The following day I had about 400 visitors from Reddit (from the same buried article).

As linkbait it’s great. I did a google search to see how many times my post had turned up. After just one day there were 118 backlinks recognised by google. Great stuff for a buried post.

Adsense

As a rule the more experienced an internet user is the more banner blindness they have. Generally I have been getting a CTR on my adsense of about 1-2% but for the digg traffic I had a CTR of just 0.27%. So if you are trying to get a build adsense revenues by getting digg traffic don’t bother. Either think of a smarter way to monetize traffic or start working on a longer term strategy.

RSS Subscriptions

Of the 2000 visitors there were only 25 new subscribers. So most of the traffic was fleeting. An interesting post to check out is probloggers How to Build a ‘Digg Culture’ on your Blog which covers a few ideas of how to benefit from digg traffic. He also talks about the bump his subscriptions get from digg traffic.

Although most of the digg traffic is short lived, there are many benefits from getting to the front page. Keep working to get there and you will eventually reap the rewards.

How To Write Headlines For Google Vs Twitter Vs Digg

Tim Scullin — Wed, 13 May 2009 15:15:00 +0000

There are so many channels to market your blog these days. Initially if you weren’t successful on the search engines you weren’t successful at all. Now you can get thousands of visitors from social networking sites and have a hugely successful site, while getting relatively few visitors from google. Needless to say the more you target the better. Here is an overview of the ways to target each one and a few ideas how to combine all three.

How To Write Headlines For Google

I recommend you have a read of How To Dial In Your Keywords before you write your next Google headline. The first 5 or so words are the most important in a Google headline. So make sure your headline features the keywords near the start.

Although having the right keywords will get you in front of potential visitors you still need to get them to click! Have alook at How To Write Article Titles For Traffic for tips on writing catchy headlines.

When targeting Google remember you can also add a description (Use the All In One SEO plugin to write a custom description. The default is the first 160 characters of your post). The description should include the keywords and also make the reader even more interested. Leading text and dramatic claims (if you can back them up) are good in the description.

How To Write Headlines For Digg

Headlines for digg are all about reader appeal. Having a great headline will draw in more readers and thus more diggs and thus more readers. Its a great cycle but it all starts with the headline. Digg also has descriptions like google. Keep the description relevant, short and sweet.

Digg and other social bookmarking sites have a search function that gets used by some users. So although keywords are fairly insigniciant compared to Google, I would reccomend you still drop in the kewyord somewhere.

How To Write Headlines From Twitter

Twitter headlines work on the same laws of appeal as any other headline. Keywords are not a big player in twitter as the chance of someone stumbling across your page in twitter search is VERY slim! So forget the keywords for now and just focus on what will get peoples atttention. If you are stuggling at finding inspiration for great headlines check out How To Write Article Titles For Traffic or google it, there is tons of great advice and examples to help you.

Remember when you are writing for twitter that there is no supporting description text so the headline should give a good indication of what the page is about.

Another thing to remember when writing titles for twitter is the 140 Character Limit. You need to work out how long your titles can be. I do it like this, I know the longest URL will be 30 charaters, and my tweet title looke like post-nam | Blog-title. So I add | Timscullin.com 17 characters. 140-17-30 = 93 characters max title length. If I go over this I run the chance of retweeters accidently cutting the link URL short.

Combine All Three

First try and come up with a catchy headline that ties in the keywords. Often this gets really tricky, so if yor stuck try this. Add your keywords followed by a dash then the headline. For example “Writing Post Headlines – 20 Tips For Killer Titles” or “Training German Shepherds – 5 Essential Training Tools”.

Remember to have enough information for it to work without a desciption, tie in the keywords and keep it under your twitter character limit.

I have also seen another post where they suggest you target the social media channels first, then once the traffic drops off after a few weeks change your titles to more google friendly ones. I think this is a good option if you have the time. Check out Winning The Web for more on what they call the “One Two Punch”.

What are your thoughts?

Are You Posting At The Best Time Of Day?

Tim Scullin — Sat, 09 May 2009 15:56:15 +0000

Why Post Time Is Important

A lot of your regular readers will subscribe to your site and get a notice when you publish a new post. So what is the best time to interrupt them with that message. If I get an email while I am busy and it isn’t urgent it can just be totally ignored! For this reason I prefer to publish my posts early in the morning so my readers will see it when they check their emails in the morning. Also Timing makes a difference on whether a post goes viral or not. Although this may only be a small influence it is still an influence and getting it right doesn’t take much more effort.

Here are three things to consider when deciding on your publish time:

Time Zones

When deciding on the right time to publish a post it is important to figure out you main readerships time zones(s) and then work from there. For example my main readership is currently 19 hours behind me. So a Monday morning for me is actually midday Sunday for them. See how that would make a difference?

Main Readership Time

Once you have the timezones sussed out, what time of day are your main readers checking your blog? Keep an eye on analytics for a few days and see when most people are visiting your site. I find that most of my readers have checked it in the morning and then the traffic seems to drop for the rest of the day. I assume this is because the RSS and Email subscriptions are sent out early in the morning.

Social Bookmarking

The thing with social bookmarking is that your site will have a higher chance of getting to the front page if it gets voted up quickly. But often you need to get some momentum before your page will really take off. So once you have you bunch of friends who will vote for your page (see Getting Popular on Social Bookmarking Sites). Then find out what times are the busiest on social bookmarking pages then work out how long it takes your friends to get some votes on your stuff. For example if it takes your friends 3 hours and the social bookmarking site is busiest at 2pm (most are the busiest after lunch to mid afternoon) then you should ask your friends to promote at 11am. So your page needs to be published by 11am to get the best chance on social bookmarking.

What do you do?

We would all love to hear what you do, so take the polls and leave a comment.

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How To Add The Top Social Bookmarking Badges To Your Blog

Tim Scullin — Tue, 05 May 2009 15:17:32 +0000

You have no doubt seen them before, but here is a colation of the top social bookmarking sites badge codes so you can pick what you like and add it to your page.

Simply add the code to the html of any post to place it in just that post, or to include it in every post add the code to the single.php file. Go to WordPress Admin>Appearance>Editor>single.php and find the following line in the single.php file and add your badge’s code right below that, then save and your done.

‘
Pages: ‘, ‘after’ => ‘
’, ‘next_or_number’ => ‘number’)); ?>

This may seem a little challenging at first but editing the php document is not as difficult as you think. If you are really worried, copy and paste the original document into a text file before you start, that way you can restore it if you make some changes you shouldn’t.

How To Add The Digg Badge To Your Site

The Digg badge has a visual counter that shows the number of diggs, and whether the viewer has already dugg the page or not. The first digger can submit the page to dig by clicking on the button. For more digg badge options check out the Digg Badge Page or to add the badge to the left simply paste the code below into your posts.

How To Add The Buzz Up Button To Your Site

The Buzz Up button also has a visual counter that shows the number of buzzes, and whether the viewer has already buzzed the page or not. For more buzz button options check out the Yahoo! Buzz Button Page or to add the button to the left simply paste the code below into your posts.

How To Add A Stumble Upon Button To Your Site

The Stumble button simple submits a site to Stumble Upon and give you inditication to the number of stumbles. For more Stumble Upon button optionscheck out the Stumble Upon Button Page or to add the button to the left simply paste the code below into your posts.

&title=”>

How To Add A Reddit Badge To Your Site

The Reddit badge also has a visual counter that shows the number of votes. Users can vote for or against a post.For more buzz button options check out the Reddit Button Page or to add the button to the left simply paste the code below into your posts.

How To Add A Tehcnorati Badge To Your Site

Technorati is a bit different to the rest as you just submit your whole blog to Technorati. Instead you can have a blog authority Badge. For more widget options check out theTechnorati Widget Page or to add the badge to the left simply paste the code below into your posts.

{URL}?sub=tr_authority_t_ns” class=”tr_authority_t_js” style=”color:#4261DF”>View blog authority

How To Add A Delicious Button To Your Site

The delicious button simply adds the URL to the users bookmarks however there is no simple badge that tracks the number of bookmarks a page has received. To see the button options check out Delicious Button Page or to add the badge to the left simply paste the code below into your posts.

’)+’&title=’+encodeURIComponent(‘’),’delicious’, ‘toolbar=no,width=550,height=550′); return false;”> Bookmark this on Delicious

How To Add A Sphinn Badge To Your Site

As always I have included sphinn as a bonus. I like sphinn because they have a lot of blog and SEO related content and I recommend you join up because you WILL find useful posts to help you out in your blogging.

The Sphinn badge has a visual counter that shows the number of sphinns. Id the page has not been submitted it shows a “Sphinn It!” imege like the one to the left. For more sphinn badge options check out the Sphinn Badge Page or to add the badge to the left simply paste the code below into your posts.

Make sure you read Getting Popular on Social Bookmarking Sites 101 and decide which social bookmarking sites you are going to target before you get your badges.

Getting Popular on Social Bookmarking Sites 101

Tim Scullin — Sun, 03 May 2009 15:06:27 +0000

If you aren’t familiar with social bookmarking then make sure you check out Social Bookmarking 101 for an overview to get you started.

Social Bookmarking pulls strongly on the power of social proof (the idea that if everyone else likes it then it must be good, or at least worth checking out). The key is learning how to get your posts popular and not just become another great unread article.

Sign Up

Ok first thing is first, you should sign up to some social networking sites.

While signing up to the biggest is generally the best idea you should also know that smaller sites have less competition. Also each site has different types of readers and therefor different subjects get popular on each one. So have a look at what is getting popular on each site and decide if you will fit into the mix.

Here are the top 6:

Also check out Sphinn for online marketing and blogging tips.

Get Some Friends

To make sure your site wont go unnoticed you need to get some friends who can support your articles when they are first released. Once you get your first few bookmarks it will start to get its own momentum as the social proof starts to kick in. I suggest that you work your existing networks to find people who are willing to support your stuff and in return you can support theirs. So find those who are using social bookmarking sites and team up.

How Many Friends Do You Need?

The more the merrier, a few clicks may be enough to get the ball rolling for your post, but the faster a post gets bookmarked the more likely it will be to make the front page. Also Digg (and maybe others) place more weight on ‘diggs’ from people you aren’t ‘friends’ with so don’t add each other as friends on the social bookmarking site as well.

Once you have some supporters then just message or email them about your new post and ask them to give it some votes. It may take a while to build up enough friends but once you crack it, you’ll be glad you put the effort in.

Join Me

If you run a blog and are looking for some friends, I’m on almost all of the bookmarking sites and would be more than happy to send some votes your way if you can return the favor. If this sounds like you then add me @teeskie on twitter then send me a DM and we can link up.

All the best with your Social Bookmarking!

Social Bookmarking 101 – Where To Start

Tim Scullin — Sat, 02 May 2009 15:06:51 +0000

If you haven’t heard of it yet social bookmarking is like your browser bookmarks but your keep them online. People can easily see what others have bookmarked and discover popular new content. Social bookmarking sites are a massive potential traffic source and every blogger should be using them.

I stumbled across a video that sums up social bookmarking pretty well and I thought I would include it as an introduction for those who have never used social bookmarking before:

Social Bookmarking For Bloggers

As a blogger our uses of social bookmarking sites are slightly different to the regular user. This is an explanation of social bookmarking sites for bloggers and the unique benefits they provide.

Research and Ideas

Social bookmarking helps us keep on top of what people are reading. Keeping an eye on popular content within your niche is one of the best ways to keep up with the latest trends and stay interesting/relevant to your readers. Simply join some of the popular Social Bookmarking sites, search for your niche and have a look at what other people are saying/bookmarking.

Also if you are writing a post on a certain topic it can be a good idea to see what other people are finding interesting on that topic and tailor your post effectively. For example if there is a popular article on the “Changes In Adsense Rules” a good idea would be to tailor you next adsense post around these changes, “How To Capitalise” etc.

Fresh Content to Share

I like to tweet about interesting things within the blogging and online marketing niche. I generally have aabout a 50/50 split with these tweets and my own blog posts. To make sure all of the content I tweet about is quality I check out the social bookmarking sites and find relevant stuff that other people have bookmarked too. When I find interesting stuff I bookmark it, add it to my scheduled tweets and I’m on my way.

Get Traffic

Social bookmarking sites can be a powerful place to build up traffic flow. When you get into the popular sections of any social bookmarking site you are going to generate significant traffic as more and more users see that other people like your post and decide to check it out themselves. The increased exposure also creates backlinks for your site as readers link back to your blog in their own posts.

Stay tuned for the post due to be released tomorrow: Getting Popular on Social Bookmarking Sites.

TimScullin.com » Social Bookmarking

How to Tweet For Diggs

The Digg Bar

Shortening With Digg

Other Social Sites

Related Posts

Use Twitter To Jump Start Your Traffic In 5 Easy Steps

The Shortcut

How Does It Work

How To Leverage Twitter

Long Term

Related Posts

5 Things You Should Know About Making The Digg Front Page

Hosting

Quality

Links

Adsense

Related Posts

How To Write Headlines For Google Vs Twitter Vs Digg

How To Write Headlines For Google

How To Write Headlines For Digg

How To Write Headlines From Twitter

Combine All Three

Related Posts

Are You Posting At The Best Time Of Day?

Why Post Time Is Important

Time Zones

Main Readership Time

Social Bookmarking

What do you do?

Related Posts

How To Add The Top Social Bookmarking Badges To Your Blog

How To Add The Digg Badge To Your Site

How To Add The Buzz Up Button To Your Site

How To Add A Stumble Upon Button To Your Site

How To Add A Reddit Badge To Your Site

How To Add A Tehcnorati Badge To Your Site

How To Add A Delicious Button To Your Site

How To Add A Sphinn Badge To Your Site

Related Posts

Getting Popular on Social Bookmarking Sites 101

Sign Up

Get Some Friends

How Many Friends Do You Need?

Join Me

Related Posts

Social Bookmarking 101 – Where To Start

Social Bookmarking For Bloggers

Research and Ideas

Fresh Content to Share

Get Traffic

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