Esteban Panzera

Yesterday I was trying to convince someone of creating his/her personal SEO/SMM blog, but couldn’t really convince that person. This is the reason why I decided to create a list of reasons to have a SEO/SMM blog, lets see if now that person reads this list and gets convinced:

1. Socialize: after blogging for some time you inevitably get to know other SEOs/SMMs that also have a blog, this all starts when they leave a comment on your blog on when you leave one on theirs.
2. Personal Branding: if what you write is good content, and people start to love your content and your blog, you might even get to be known in the SEO/SMM world.
3. Share your knowledge: it is nice to write about what you know (or think you know) and share it with lots of persons over the world at the same time.
4. Increase your knowledge: as you would have to write about SEO, you would probably get to read more seo blogs to find inspiration and to see that you are not writing something that was already written.
5. Services: if you offer SEO/SMM services, with your blog you can show more people that you know what you are speaking about and more companies will be happy to hire your services.
6. Money: with a blog you can aswell monetize it by selling advertising, by using Adsense or just by using any affiliate program you find on the web.
7. Get a new Job: if you are looking for a new job, showing your knowledge in your blog will help other companies see that you know your stuff and you would get more chances of getting hired by that company.

Lets hope this 7 reasons get read by that person and encourage him/her to create a SEO/SMM blog.

I was writing new blogs posts for other of my blogs and ran across this problem, I wanted to target both social networks and search engines with that article, but I couldn’t find a catchy title that would also be good for SEO. So I started thinking how can I target both social networks and search engines when writing a title for a blog post, I found out 3 solutions:

1.- SEO Title Wordpress Plugin

One of the solutions is downloading and installing the seo title wordpress plugin, which will let us choose a different title for the document than the title of the article. This way what we would have to do is write a catchy title as the article title and write a keyword reach title for seo on the document title field.
This would really help with seo, but in my opinion won’t be the best one as we will be losing the weight of the heading tag we have on the article title. What we can do to fix this is add another heading tag that will put the document title as text inside a heading tag.

2.- SEO Title + SMM Title

Other solution would be combining both, the seo title and the smm title we have. For example if the smm title is “9 Steps to succeed in the Social Media marketing World” and the seo title (the keywords we want to target) is “Social media marketing success”, we could combine both and end with: “Social Media Marketing success in 9 steps”.
This one would be pretty good as we would be including the keywords in the heading tags and as the title of the document, but im\n my opinion there is a better way.

3.- Combination of 1 and 2

In my opinion the best thing we can do is combine number 1 and 2, what this would mean is using the document title wordpress plugin and combining the seo title with the smm title. What we would have to do is first combine the seo title with the smm title and then as document title write the seo title. This way we would have a really catchy title, with the keywords we want to target between heading tags and an optimal title for seo.

In my opinion Social Media Marketing rules can be summarized into just one sentence: Act in social networks as you would act in life (or as you would like other people to act with you). It is really like that, on social networks you interact with other persons and most people often forget this, social media users like and dislike exactly the same things the people you see on the street like and dislike.
In case you need more detailed rules of how to be successful on social networks, I wrote a list of things you definitely have to remember:

1. Complete your profile: many people don’t even think of this, but by completing everything in your profile, you are showing people that you are a real user and that you actually care about the social network.
2. Be Generous: always think of helping others first, if you help them, they will probably help you later in return for your help, and if they don’t help you, they will probably remember you for another situation.
3. Get involved: everyone must see you are really engaged with the community and that you spend time on it to make it a better place for everone.
4. Don’t expect immediate results: most people starting into social media marketing think they will succeed with their first try, although this is not impossible, don’t expect it to happen, be prepaired to fail as many times as necessary for learning more about how to have success.
5. Remember users are real people: don’t do things real people won’t like, think what would happen if you do that thing you want to do to someone you know, that will give you the answer.
6. Don’t try to sell: never sell anything directly on social networks, what you should do is submit something that will make people go to your site and check what you are selling.
7. Don’t Spam: submitting content that no one likes and that is submitted just because you want to get benefit won’t help you to be successful at social networks.
8. Don’t get enemies: getting anyone to be your enemy on social networks can make your life impossible, imaging someone that convinces 5 friends to bury everything you submit.
9. Analyse the community: check what makes it to the homepage and what doesn’t, try to do some research to see what kind of contents people will like and what they will dislike.
10. Get as many Friends as you can: as in life, getting to know as many persons as possible is something important. Whenever you need some help, you know they are there to help you and that you can count on them.

Celebrities get Interviewed at TV programs > Top users get interviewed at blogs

What celebrities say appears on gossip programs > What Top Users say appears on Internet Marketing blogs

Everyone wants to be the friend of a celebrity > Everyone wants to be the friend of a top user

Celebrities get on Magazine’s frontpages with catchy titles mentioning them > Top users write catchy Titles and make it to the frontpage

People wants celebrities to give them their signature on a sheet of paper > People wants top users to comment what they submitted

Celebrities don’t get out of their houses much > Top users don’t get out of their houses much

Celebrities are generous with charities > Top users are generous with other users

Celebrities make a living of being celebrities > Top users make a living of being top users

Everyone wants to be a celebrity > Everyone wants to be a top user

Colin Cochrane wrote some days ago about what happened to him when he tried to do a search inside his bookmarks at Del.icio.us but using Google, he couldn’t find any results. With some research done by him, he could find out that Del.icio.us was preventing Search Engines to index its pages by using robots.txt; what search engines see when trying to access it, is a 404 error page, what doesn’t let them index the pages.

This decision by Del.icio.us affects everyone in at least 3 different ways:

- Links: links on del.icio.us pages aren’t worth anything for Search Engines as they can’t even see the page. However they still got the value of needing them to be on Del.icio.us’ popular links page.

- Reputation Management: another use marketers gave to del.icio.us was for reputation management on search engines, but they won’t be able to use it any more for that purpose as Del.icio.us won’t even index the pages.

- Search via Google: it won’t be possible to search your bookmarks by using Google, I loved using Google Search for my bookmarks on del.icio.us as it always displayed the most relevant content first (yes, i have too much bookmarks).

Why I think del.icio.us took this decision?

As you might be aware, del.icio.us is owned by Yahoo, so the decisions behind del.icio.us were really taken by Yahoo. But they also blocked the content from Yahoo!’s Slurp bot, in my opinion, the real reason why they are doing this is because Yahoo doesn’t want other search engines to benefit from del.icio.us content, and they blocked themselves as they don’t need a crawler to know all the pages of a site they own.

Why you should submit your own content:

1. Correct Title and Description: if you submit your own content to social networks, you can be sure you will be sure you are submitting it with a catchy title and description. If someone else submits it, he/she could change the title and description and make your content fail.
2. Friends: you probably have some friends on that social network (you should), they would help you by voting on what you submitted. If someone with a new account submits your content, he/she would have no friends and would make your content fail.
3. Success: if your content has success on that social network, you would be one step closer to being a top user. If someone submits your content, that person would be one step closer to being a top user.
4. Responsability: if what you submitted to the social network doesn’t succeed, you would be completely responsible for it and you wouldn’t be able to say it was because of another person. If someone else submits your content and it doesn’t succeed, you could blame that person for that and you wouldn’t ever know what would have happened if it was you who submitted that content.
5. Analysis: if you submit your content and it doesn’t succeed, you could analyse why it didn’t have success and if you find out it was because of your profile, you could change it. If someone else submits your content and it doesn’t have success on social networks, you wouldn’t be able to know why it was.

Why you Shouldn’t submit your own content:

1. Users hate it: most users on social networks hate when you submit your own content to it, as they feel you are just there to promote your website. They want the social network to be a place to exchange great content, not to promote websites.
2. Spammy: you might submit one article from your site, but after you submit a couple of article, it would really look spammy that you are always submitting content from the same site, that would have a negative impact on your name and on your website’s reputation.
3. Not permitted: some social networks (some do permit it), don’t want users to submit their own content to social networks, so by submitting your own content you wouldn’t be following the Terms of Service of that social network.
4. Top User: a top user of that social network might visit your blog, find your content interesting and submit it to social networks, that would bring you great possibilities of succeeding.
5. Better Title: if someone else submits your content, he might come up with a better title you didn’t think of, which could be the reason your content succeeds in social networks.

Everything in life has got its pros and cons, submitting your own content to social networks isn’t an exception to this. So it is your choice.

The idea of writing this came to my mind after telling DaveR why I wasn’t going via Twitter

1. Travel: in case you haven’t read the about me page, let me tell you I live in Argentina (South America) so if I wanted to go to Santa Clara I would have to pay extra U$2000 for the flight ticket.
2. Passport: some years have passed since I last traveled by plane, so my passport expired, I would have to renew it and it takes at least 30 days to do so (SMX West is in 10 days).
3. VISA: to travel to the United States I would have to get a VISA for non immigrants, it would take them more than 10 days to process it and give it to me.
4. Money: in Argentina, U$1 dollar equals AR$3 (argentinian pesos) approximately, what is great if you are coming to Argentina as everything would be cheaper for you, but not noce if I want to go to the US as everything would be 3x more expensive. I would also have to pay the full price for the entry ticket (U$1,595).
5. New: I am pretty new to the Search Engine Marketing world in English, I have been blogging nearly all my life in spanish, so I think that going to a future SMX would be much better than doing it now as I don’t know many people and nobody will probably know who I am.
6. University: it would have started by that moment and I don’t want to lose my first days on it, anyway this is something that wouldn’t matter that much.
7. English: my first language is Spanish, I have been learning English for some years now, but it is far from being perfect, this is something that could cause me losing some things at the SMX. This wouldn’t really matter that much for me, but it is another reason.
8. Permission: I would need my parent’s permission in order to get out of the country as I am not 21 years old yet. This is not a problem but is just an extra step I would have to take in order to go to SMX West.

Not everything is negative, here are some reasons why I would be ne able to go to the SMX:

1. Work: I am not working for anyone, so I wouldn’t have to leave work for some days.
2. I love SMX: I only went to one, SMX Buenos Aires but really loved it.
3. Networking: not knowing anybody would make me know some new people.
4. Learning: you always learn something new, maybe it is just one stupid and small thing, but it is actually something new you didn’t know.
5. Free Wifi: well maybe not really free, but it is wifi after all :P
6. Going to the US: I really love travelling to the US, so by going to SMX West I would also be able to go to some other places on the US.

Being a Social Media Marketer isn’t an easy job, you definitely need some skills that will help you in your daily rutine:

1. Optimistic: thinking that things are going to be great helps to continue working and exploring social media after all the failures.
2. Good written comunication: how do you plan to write an article or a catchy title if you are not a good writer? This is definitely a must for any Social Media Marketer.
3. Initiative: to explore and analyse new social networks and new ways of marketing on them.
4. Creativity: to think the Social Media Campaigns, to think and create the linkbait pieces he will write.
5. Flexibility and Adaptability: to understand the social network and adapt to what the users really want.
6. Sociable: maybe not face to face, but you definitely have to know how to meet people on the internet and keep them as your “friends”.
7. Altruism: you always have to help others without expecting anything in return. This is one of the keys of social media success.
8. Analytical: to analyse social networks and social media campaigns and get the max out of them.
9. Sense of Humour: a humorous linkbait can be really strong, so sense of humour is a quality a SMM should have. If not, look at icanhascheezburger.com, not a social media campaign, but would have been great if it was one.
10. Realistic: you have to know what you can and what you can do, this is necessary for putting yourself realistic goals.

Planning a Social Media Marketing Campaign can be a rough job if you don’t know how to do it properly or can also be a waste of time if not done properly. Following this 9 tips will help you get more organized and will give you more chances of succeeding on social networks.

1. Set Real Goals: the first thing you have to think of when planning a social media marketing campaign is what you want to achieve, they have to be real goals, things you know that you can do. Some common goals are:
   • Increase Site Traffic: as Social Networks are visited daily by millions of users, creating a successful social media marketing campaign will get your website tons of visitors.
   • Increase Brand Awareness: your brand name would get a lot of visibility, consequently its brand presence would get increased a lot.
   • Increase Revenue: from all the people that you will get to visit your site, some will be really interested in what you are selling/offering and will probably buy it.
   • Increase Link Popularity: most social media users have got personal blogs or websites, if they really like what you did in the campaign they might as well link to you.
   • Understand People: this one is not that common, but it is one of the bests in my opinion: understand how people interacts with your products and with your website. This would let you improve everything in your company and your website.
   • New Product Promotion: social media is a great place for announcing when a new product/service launches.
   • Social Media Networking: you might as well get to know people in your niche that are also using social media for their success.
2. Set Targeted people: the question you need to answer here is, who do you want to see your website that will help you accomplish your goal? The answer to this question is the targeted audience.
   For example, if your goal is just to increase the traffic of your site, you wouldn’t have a specific audience, but if your goal is to increase your revenue and you are selling cars, your audience would be the people of 16+ years old. Webmasters would be the suitable audience if you want to increase your link popularity.
3. Research Social Networks: if you know who you want to target, you can now start researching where that people gets together, on what social networks they are. After you find out which social networks are the point of meeting for this audience, you will have the social networks you have to target.
   Once again you will have to do some research on that social networks to see how users there act, what they like, what they dislike, which are the top users, what they did to get there, etc.
4. Define your Strategy: after you know which social network you will have to target, you will be able to define which strategy you will use on your social media marketing campaign; if you will use content, a video, if you will try to make a new viral website, etc. Remember to check your goals and targeted audience for defining this.
5. Get submitted by a Top User: if you have already got an account at that social network and you are a respected user submit the story yourself, if not try to get someone that is a top user at that social network to submit it for you. If you can’t get anyone, you can either register and try to make yourself a top user (requires effort) or you can just register and submit it how you are (if you correctly researched the social network, you would know if you can have success doing this).
6. Find Bloggers in your niche: getting your company in a top blog of your niche, will help you accomplish nearly any goal you previously setted. To make this happen the best thing you can do is research the niche to find the top blogs in it and contact the bloggers just after you launch the social media marketing campaign telling them about it and how their visitors can benefit from it. If your campaign is really good, they might post it to their blogs.
7. Be prepared to Promote through Social Networks: depending on the social media marketing strategy you chose, you might be able to promote your campaign in one social networks by using other social networks. For example Twitter is a great example of this, if your strategy is Digg-based you could post the Digg link into your Twitter account so that all the people that follows you can see it. You obviously have to have prepared the social networks where you will promote your other social network submission before launching it.
8. Be prepared to Monitor Results: you definitely have to measure your results so that you can know if you successfully accomplished your goals. There are some general things you should monitor on any Social MEdia Marketing campaign:
• Analytics: set up any analytics program in your site to measure: unique visitors, page views, time spent on site, depth of visit and conversions.
• Contribution: if the page where people lands has got social elements (people can contribute into it, for example comments), monitor the number of comments you receive, you will then be able to see the unique visitors/comments relation.
• Feed Subscribers: check how many you had before and how many you have after finishing the campaign.
• Other Social Networks: check if your content gets to be successful in other social networks.
• People talking about you: use MonitorThis to check who talks about you and who is helping you spread the word.
9. Check you have everything you need: this might sound stupid, but just before launching your campaign, re-check that you have everything you need for its success and that you are following the 8 tips mentioned before. Remember that if you forget anything and your social media marketing campaign, doesn’t succeed because of that you will have lost lots of hours of work. After all it is better to lose some minutes than lots of hours.

Wouldn’t you love to have the best social media marketers for you to teach you everything they know? Well, unfortunately this is not possible, but I managed to contact some top Social Media Marketers and got them to tell a personal tip for social media success:

Glen Allsopp:

Don’t just focus on general sites, because the best results can come from the niche sites. If I want to promote a story about the environment, I could potentially get more traffic from Digg but I’m less likely to make the homepage. I could however go to the likes of Hugg.com and Care2.com and promote a story there. There’s a lot better chance of ‘going popular’ on these sites and although the traffic will be less than the likes of Digg / Reddit, it’s targeted traffic and surely what your client would prefer.

Neil Patel:

Participate in the community before you try and leverage it. It is one thing to read about a community and how it works, but you need to actually get involved in the community.

Brian Wallace:

The Social Media world is growing at an exponential rate. So if you are new to social media, you might try to jump into too many sites all at once. This is stupid, and you’ll end up doing poorly everywhere. Focus on only a handful of sites and grow to know them intimately. Once you have established yourself somewhere, you may be able to leverage yourself in other social sites. Being a finder and producer of good user generated content is sure to attract attention as well. Above all, be sure to watch out for social media burnout

Shana Albert:

Social Media can be very overwhelming. There are so many Social Media activities to chose from and each are very time consuming, and frankly.. They can be quite addicting (or is that just a problem I have). So, you should be very selective on the activities you spend your time doing. I have a few favorite Social Networking Sites that I spend a lot of time at. I don’t try to be at all of the Social Networking sites.. It is just not possible for me. Plus, if I were a member of every Social Networking site what kind of community member would I be? In order to get anything from a Social Networking Community you need to be giving something to the Community as well. Social Networking is quite a lot like your friends and family in reality. You give and take.. It is a wonderful balance. Give something to your Online Community and you shall receive as well. If you are everywhere all the time… what could you possibly be offering any community?

Cameron Olthuis:

Get involved. In order to be successful with social media you need to become involved in the communities you plan to leverage for marketing. Not only is it important so you understand exactly how these community societies function, but you will also want to be an active member so you’re not perceived as a spammer when you do try to market your products.

Lee Odden

One of the most important things about effectively leveraging social media for marketing purposes is to be patient and to focus on creating value in order to “get” value. In other words, marketers need to understand the notion of “give to get”. Too many search and interactive marketers bust into social networking, media sharing and news communities like bulls in a china shop. Social media communities are not just another place to publish traditional media.

It’s important to become a member of the community, participate and understand both the formal and unwritten rules that guide interactions, information sharing and recommendations. Understanding the community will provide insight into what content types and messaging resonate best and subsequently provide a much greater success rate when a promotion effort is initiated.

Tadeusz Szewczyk

To succeed on social media not just once but over and over, become a really good and respected user first before even starting to submit stuff you want to “sell”.

Tamar Weinberg

Social media is about you *and* me. We, together, form a community. That said, networking is of utmost importance on social sites. To become a successful contributor to any social site, you need to be a team player, too. Don’t be afraid to reach out to anyone, big or small. Making that connection and maintaining that connection is probably the best (and most important) advice I can give; everything else will fall into place from there.

Chris Winfield

Never under estimate the power of simply asking someone nicely for something. This works in life and works with social media marketing. Most people don’t realize how willing people are to help you if you simply reach out to them in a “real” way. This works with bloggers (of all levels), this works with making contacts on social media news sites like digg and this works with your colleagues. The key to this all is being willing to help someone in return or even better – before you ask. So much of what we do depends on relationships and it’s the strength of those relationships that will determine your success…

My tip: I know I am not even near a top SMM, but I decided to add my own personal tip about social media.

Understand the people and how they act before you even try to socialize in a community, also analyse top users to see how they act and what they submit, that is what probably made them be top users. Be prepared to fail at first and many times, remember you can learn from every mistake you make.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this post!

This is part 3 of the Digg Marketing Guide, here we will be learning how to get friends and submit stories.

Creating a new account and submitting a new story is not the best way to make it to the Digg frontpage, a really big percentage of the stories submitted like this don’t ever make it to the homepage. Most people think that donig that is enough if the story is good, but that is not true, the most important thing for Digg Marketing is getting as many people to be your friend as possible, this way when you submit a new story, they will see it at their friends’ activity, giving your story more possibilities of getting Dugg.

How to get Friends?

As I previously mentioned getting friends is the most important thing for Digg Marketing, so the question is how do we get friends?:

1. Digg and Comment: go to the Upcoming news section and start digging and commenting on stories, this will make people see you and if they like what you said they will probably add you as a friend.
   Do this first on the stories you think will get to the frontpage, cause if it really makes it to the frontpage your user will get lots of exposure. Remember to be an active member of the community.
2. Add Friends: when you add a new friend, they will be noticed and if you are an active member of the Digg community they will probably also add you.
3. Submit Great Content: by submitting nice content people will see your username, like you and probably even add you as their friend.

Submitting Stories

Before submitting a new story you have to find one, if you want it to make it to the frontpage it should meet some requirements (follow this requirements when writing a new post for Digg):

• Not short story: check frontpage stories, they are all pretty long right? So don’t start submitting short stories to Digg, they won’t make it to the homepage.
• Interesting: all frontpage stories are pretty interesting things to read, your submission must be interesting.
• Catchy Title: this is definitely a must, check all frontpage stories again, they all have a catchy title. Yours should have one too.

To submit a new story you have to be logged in and click on the SubmitNew button on the top, that will bring a new page where you will have to paste the URL of the story and put if it is a News Article, an Image or a Video. Then a new page will appear where we will have to fill some information:

1. Title: this is the most important part of submitting a new story, this is what will get your story noticed. If it has got a catchy title, people will stop at it and read it carefully, they might even read the description. Most people digg a story because of the title, keep that in your mind when writing it.
   Some tips for when writing a title:
   • Use numbers: this will make your title different than the others, and people also love lists (do it where it is possible).
   • Use superlatives: use superlatives that will make your title look as a must read.
   • Correct Length: don’t make it too long, don’t make it too short.
   • Describe the Content: you have to make it catchy, but people has to know exactly what they would read inside the post by reading the title.
2. Description: it is important, but nobody will read it if your Title is a bad one. Just write it trying to be as descriptive as possible trying at the same time to make the person reading click the link.
   Some tips when writing a description:
   • Not Short: don’t make it short or it will be probably seen as spam.
   • Don’t Paraphrase: don’t just copy the first paragraph of the post, make the description yourself.
   • Why: tell the community why they should read it, what are the benefits.
3. Category: just choose the category that best suits your story, remember that less popular categories require less Diggs to make it to the frontpage.

After completing all the fields mentioned just click on Submit Story. You can then promote it with your friends and even send shouts to them telling them to Digg your story. To do this just click on your own story (the one you just submitted) and click on Share, you will then be able to select the friends you want to shout it to or who you want to email it to.

Extra Important Tips:

• Start by submitting other’s people content, when you see that all the content you submit gets at least 10-15 Diggs, you will be ready to submit your own content.
• Optimize your site for Digg (I will be covering this on the next Digg Marketing chapter).
• Be an active member of the community, I know I have said this many times, but it is the most important and people often forget about this.
• Don’t Spam
• Don’t always submit stories from the same website (especially if it is yours).

This is the second part of the Digg Marketing Guide, here you will learn how to create and configure a Digg account.
On the first part of this Digg Marketing guide you learned all the basics of how Digg works and why you should use Digg and try to make it to the frontpage; in this second part you will be learnging how to create and configure an account correctly.

After entering Digg, click “Join Digg”, you will be shown a form to register yourself. Complete all the fields, remember that your username is the one that will be shown to all users, so choose one that looks and sounds nice, easy to remember.
Now you will be able to login, after logging in click on the “My Profile” option on the top, there you are able to configure your account.

What can we configure on the Profile page?

On the “Profile” tab:

• Favorites: when you are browsing other user stories, you will see that the fourth option you see there says “Favorite?”, if you click it, the link will be saved onto your profile. This would be like bookmarking a Digg submission into your profile.
• Recent Activity: here you will see all the recent Diggs, submissions, comments, favorites, shouts and profile changes you or any of your friends do in a recent period of time.
• Your Incoming Shouts: shouts are like messages (can be made private if wanted) one user can send to another, this is really useful to tell your friends to Digg your stories, you would just have to tell them via Digg.
• About: you will be able to show a message, your IMs, and links of yours to all the people that enter your Digg account.
• Photos: you can also upload photos so that everyone can see them and quickly change them to be your avatar if wanted. To add a photo you have to click on the “Add a Photo” link.
• Friends: all the people that you previously added as friends will be shown here, if you click the “Add Friends” link you will be able to import friends from your contact lists.
• Most Dugg Topics: will show you in which topics you made the most amount of Diggs in the last 30 days.
• Stats: simple statistics with all the actions you took since you registered.

On the “Friends’ Activity” tab:

• All Recent Activity: here you will see all the recent actions taken by any of your friends on Digg, you will also be able to filter the activity by categories by using the drop-down menu near the “All recent activity” title.
• Filter: with it you can show the actions that are into the category you selected:

• All recent Activity: shows all actions
• Diggs: stories dugg
• Diggs in upcoming: stories dugg that were in the upcoming section
• Submissions: stories submitted
• Comments: comments made
• Favorites: stories added to favorites
• Shouts received: incoming shouts to your user
• All shouts sent
• Profile Activity: changes to profiles

On the “History” tab:

• Recent Activity: will show you all the actions you took recently, you can also search for actions that were taken in any specific category.
• Filter: works pretty much the same as the one on “Friends’ Activity” but will just show your actions.

On the “Settings” tab:
On the right you will see all the settings that you are able to configure:

• Privacy: choose what to show and what you don’t want to show from email, personal info, shouts and photos.
• About Me: here you can configure your personal information, including name, email, location, country, postal code, gender, birthdate, about me, links and IMs.
• Email: lets you choose that if certain actions are made you will be sent an email.
• Change Profile Image: this ones is more important than what you think, read how to choose an avatar for more information about it.
• Change Password: able to change your password here.
• Customize Topics: if you don’t want to see all the topics’ submissions you can choose here which you don’t want to see. For example I hate Golf so unchecked it.
• Viewing Preferences: you can choose how you would like your browsing to be, you can configure how comments are ordered, how external page links work, how to see new threads and even enable a filter for profanity.
• Blog Settings: this will let you put Digg submissions in your blog in an easy and quick way, you would have to configure it first and then click on the “Blog This” button on Digg submissions.

Continue reading the third part of the digg marketing guide: Getting friends and submitting stories.

This is the first post of the Social Media Marketing Guide I will be writing, the idea will be to cover all social networks and all ways to market at them. Today I will be starting with the Digg Marketing Guide.
Before starting to work on marketing your website on Digg, you need tu fully understand what it is, how it works and all its ins and outs.

What is Digg?

Digg is a website where anyone can share anything they found on the world wide web (most people that participate in it are technology-related ones), doesn’t matter what it is, there is a category that fits whatever you want to submit. There isn’t any special person that has the job of creating content for Digg, all its users are responsible of doing it by submitting something to it. I say something as you can submit articles, images or videos to it.

The main section of Digg is named News and you will find two different places on it: Popular, which is the frontpage of each category, and Upcoming, where your just submitted stories will start.
The community also decides which submissions make it to the homepage by digging them (like voting), the ones that make it to the homepage are the ones that receive certain quantity of Diggs within a specific timeframe. If your submission doesn’t get enough Diggs, it will just sit on the Upcoming page and will slowly disappear from users’ hands.
Users are also able tu Bury a submission, what would count as a negative vote for that submission.

How Digg Works?

I already explained this, but I made this graphic to make it easier for you to understand:

What makes a submission get to the Frontpage?

I already said that you need a certain number of Diggs to get to the frontpage, but getting to it really depends on many factors that affect the Diggs you get:

• How quickly you get those Diggs, the quickest the better.
• The category you submitted your story to, less popular categories require less Diggs.
• How many buries your submission received, if it received too many it will probably never make it to the frontpage.
• The people that Digg your story, if the ones that Digg your story are always the same people you would need more Diggs to make it to the frontpage.

What is so good about making it to the Digg Frontpage?

Digg is visited daily by thousands and thousands of persons, if you get to the frontpage you will get thousands of visitors (10k-100k visits aprox) depending on how interested are visitors on your article. The action of getting thousands of visitors from Digg frontpage is commonly called Digg Effect.
This visitors won’t probably click your ads and won’t mean a great amount of conversions, but they will:

• Increase your Brand Awareness
• Will bring more links: people will see your article and if they really like it they might link to it from their own website.
• Bring some new customers: although I said conversion rates for Digg users are low, you might get some sales from it.
• Help on other social networks: getting to the frontpage of Digg will probably help your success on other social networks.

What is so bad about the Digg Effect?

• Kill your server: if you are hosted in a shared hosting without many resources, so many visits within a so short timeframe will probably kill your server.
• Extra Bandwith: you will spend a nice amount of bandwith, might mean extra money for some that don’t have much.
• Low Conversions: Digg users don’t tend to click on ads or buy things from your site.
• Fidelity: most Digg users won’t come ever to your site again and won’t even subscribe to your RSS feed.

Continue reading the second part of the Digg Marketing guide: Creating and configuring an account

Have you ever wondered why everyone has got nice, shiny avatars on social networks? It is for a reason, some may have it just because they love it, but the reality is that avatars can help catching the attention of people, what would make them read your title and possibly vote it.
Avatars also become really important on one point as they are like someone’s logo, they help recognising who that person is; and if you like that person you would probably stop whenever you see his/her logo on the screen to read what he/she sent.
If you have the community’s default avatar everyone would think you are just someone else, so choosing an avatar is something that should be taken seriously and should take some time to get the right avatar, here are my tips for choosing one:

1. Website Colours: before starting to look for an avatar check the social network your avatar will be used at, check the dimension the avatar will have, the background colour, the uses of colours in the social network and everything you can see that may make your avatar suck. Remember to pick your avatar according to this.
2. Other people’s avatars: examine the avatars other poeple is using on the social network you are targeting, for example on Digg it is not common seeing personal picture avatars while you do see lots of them on Sphinn.
3. Look for something shiny: If your avatar is shiny it will definitely grab everyone’s attention, people won’t just pass near your logo without noticing. They will see something different on the page and that is what will call their attention.
4. Look for something colourful: try to find an avatar that has got really strong colours on it, it would be better if it is all full of colours (I mean no white background). Also remember that you will be remembered as that colour, so don’t pick pink if you are a boy ;).
5. Personal Photo: it is up to you to put your personal photo as avatar, but my suggestion is that unless the photo is shiny and colourful and you are giving the look you want people to have of you (professional maybe), don’t use a picture of you. In my case I don’t use a picture of me as I actually look as being 14-15 years old (I have 18 :P).
   This can be great as you can be recognised whenever you are meeting someone you met via social media.
6. Size: nearly all social networks will automatically resize your avatar to a default size, so try to pick a big sized avatar so that when it is resized it doesn’t lose quality. If you pick a small one it would be stretched and would look pixelated.
7. Related: if you can find an avatar that is related to your username it would be great as people it would be easier for everyone to remember your username. For example it could be some letters such as the initials of your name.
8. Logo: if your company’s logo meets all the above mentioned requirements you could even use it and help your company’s branding while using social networks. It is important that you take complete attention of tip #2 before using this one.
9. Don’t ever copy: this is by far the most important, don’t ever use an avatar someone is already using as this will make people hate you for copying, making you fail at social media marketing. There are lots of avatars out there, just pick one no one is using (or make one)!
10. Don’t change it: well maybe this one is not a tip for choosing an avatar, but it is a really important one. Don’t change your avatar everyday, as I previously mentioned, avatars help recognising people and if you keep changing them it would be as starting over your reputation on that social network (could be something good if you made mistakes).

It has probably happened to every blogger that sometimes you can’t come up with blog post ideas, it usually happens when you are stressed. When this happens you sometimes start looking for inspiration somewhere, but I wanted to make this easier for everyone so I created a list of 21 Blog post headlines you can write on your own Internet Marketing blog.
If you do please comment on this post telling me where you posted it so that I can link you from this post.

1. 11 Undiscovered Social Media Marketing Blogs: You would have to make a small list of 11 new blogs about social media marketing and why each of them is worth a read.
2. 7 things to do (and 7 not to) when doing SMM: self-explanatory, just point out 7 things to do and 7 not to when doing Social Media Marketing (if possible, explain in detail).
3. 21 reasons why Mixx is better than Digg: everyone loves reasons posts, just find 21 reasons why you can claim Mixx is better than Digg (shouldn’t be hard).
4. 10 Social Media Marketing Myths: every internet marketing technique has got its own myths, social media marketing surely has its owns.
5. 9 things I learned from SMM: easy, from your own experience 9 things you learned from SMM, it could also be 9 Tips.
6. Sphinn Community Analisis: I was going to do this one but I will let it to someone else, you would just have to make a full analisis of Sphinn, there are many things you can get stats from.
7. 10 Negative Aspects of the StumbleUpon Effect: it does have some negative aspects, couldn’t count 10, but with some time for thinking you should reach this number.
8. 10 Tips to getting to the Mixx Frontpage: there are tips for succeeding on each social network, Mixx has surely got its owns.
9. The top 10 SEOs of all time: this one should be nice, you would have to research a bit and present a list of the 10 best SEOs ever.
10. 7 Advantages of being a Woman when doing SMM: it surely has its advantages, great post for a chick.
11. Top 10 Greatest articles on SEO ever: list with links to SEO articles and your opinion on them and why you think they are so great.
12. Top 10 Anti-SEO websites: I think this one is really nice, you surely have seen “10 worst-designed websites”, this one would be the same but showing 10 sites that suck at SEO.
13. 7 Steps to Reputation Management: you would just have to give some basic information about reputation management.
14. 10 Tools for getting the most out of your SMM Campaigns: don’t really know which tools I would puton this one, but I think doing a post like this would be a great idea.
15. 10 Ideas to get Natural Links with our desired Anchor Text: shouldn’t be hard, just some ideas that would help achieving this task.
16. Reputation Management Bible: a post where you would cover absolutely everything about reputation management.
17. 10 Firefox Plugins to make SMM success easier: just search for those plugins (there are plenty) and post them on a list explaining what each of them does.
18. How to plan a Social Media Campagin: just explain what you do to plan one for your clients, would really love to see someone posting this.
19. Encouraging social media news votes through your site: there are some ways of increasing the number of votes your receive on social media news sites through changes to your website, explain which.
20. 10 Things I would like Google to change: list with ideas for Google, if you are lucky you may see some changes implemented on Google :P
21. 10 SEO Tools that should exist: which would you like to see? There are many I have thought of, think of 10.

If you are looking to become a pro social media marketer or you are already one wanting to know more about it, I have compiled a list of 23 blogs that talk about social media marketing and are great places to learn. Of course mine is a must read too! (:P)

1. ViperChill
2. CopyBlogger
3. Techipedia
4. Social Media Optimization
5. NowSourcing
6. Soshable
7. 10e20
8. SocialDesire
9. Collective Thoughts
10. ToprankBlog
11. WignutSEO
12. 97thFloor
13. SearchEnginePeople
14. BlogStorm
15. DoshDosh
16. IgniteSocialMedia
17. SearchEngineLand
18. CornwallSEO
19. SocialMediaTrader
20. SocialNewsWatch
21. SearchEngineGuide
22. Muhammad Saleem
23. ProNetAdvertising

This blog post was inspired by the “25 websites every seo should know” post by SEO Unique

Getting links is a must if you want to do SEO for your site, there are many techniques you can use to get those links you need, one of them is submitting your site to social news sites or putting them in your member’s page at social networks. That is why i compiled this list of social networks where you can either submit your site or add it as a link in your member page; they are all do-follow links that Google will count:

1. Del.icio.us
2. Digg:
3. PlugIM
4. A1 Webmarks
5. Simpy
6. Bibsonomy
7. Faves
8. MemFrag
9. NewsWeight
10. WireFan
11. Reddit
12. SpotBack
13. Listible
14. BmAccess
15. MyLinkVault
16. SearchLes
17. MyVMarks
18. Kinja
19. CoRank
20. Zlitt
21. NowPublic
22. Memestreams
23. ShoutWire
24. Kaboodle
25. MyPickList
26. Squidoo
27. InternetMosaic
28. LinkInn
29. Socialogs
30. Folkd
31. Grupl
32. DotNetKicks
33. Multiply
34. Slashdot
35. Twitter
36. RawSugar
37. Meneame
38. Mister Wong
39. Linkagogo
40. JumpTags
41. Connectedy
42. TeDigo
43. Syncone
44. Yattle

If you find more social networks (I am sure there are many more and I will continue updating this list) where you can get do-follow links, just point it out as a comment and I will add it to the list.