Welcome to

If you have been paying attention, I’m sure you have heard of Digg and the other social bookmarking sites.  Digg is social bookmarking with user-voted editorial control.  Websites or blog postings are submitted by Digg members and, if popular, voted onto the front page by other members.  Most Digg members are technology savy and indeed the most popular posts are about technology.

Digg receives an enormous amount of traffic, reportedly up to 10 million a month,  and consequently any item listed on the front page will receive thousands of new visitors over a very short period.

Bloggers report receiving eight to ten thousand visitors in one day after being listed on the front page.

Traffic is good, right?  We all want every blog post on the front page, right?

The Digg Effect isn’t always popular with bloggers.  Most of the traffic occurs during the first hour after hitting the front page. Smaller sites can be overwhelmed and in some cases are shut down due to server overload or bandwidth restrictions.  Most of us are hosted on shared servers and an overloaded server is bad news for every site on that server, not just yours.

According to Tech Recipes

Digg users do not click ads… Digg traffic does not generate new users, comments, or posts… Every site on the front page gets flamed in the comments. If you read digg, you need a thick skin.

Many bloggers report that the additional bandwidth costs exceed any addition ad revenue and almost all report zero or very little increase in subscribed visitors or affiliate income following being Dugg.

Perhaps the major benefit from a front page listing is the secondary Digg effect described on hrmpf.com

The Secondary Digg effect is where stories from Digg are subsequently picked up by other websites- There has been about 800 unique visitors over four days that can be attributed to stories on other sites which have probably posted stories after reading about my site on Digg.

My experiences were in line with this. I’ve had two post that proved popular on Digg, one was on the bottom of the front page for a couple of hours and the other reached the middle of  the second page.  This did not generate sufficient traffic to cause server problems.  The front page post delivered about 1800 visitors from Digg itself and another 200 from other social bookmarking sites where people copied over the Digg mention. It did not generate any discernable revenue.  The biggest advantage was that some other bloggers were watching Digg for site to link and I received 15 or so invaluable links from other blogs and sites in my niche.

Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully - another good article from Copyblogger.  In fact you should read everything on this site.

Blogging: How I write a series 

How to Write a Better Weblog - an old article from 2002 but timeless advice

In one of my early posts, I said I would show the website Awstats report from this blog to show any progress with this site. Here’s the first week: 

I’ve cut off the dates previous to 21st October since the blog wasn’t started until 22nd.  The first column is the number of visits, the second the number of page views, the third the number of hits and the fourth the bandwidth.  As you can see I had only 1200 visitors over the week or an average of 170 a day.  The good news is that the traffic has been building steadily.

These are pretty much as expected with a brand new blog since I wanted to build up some content before doing any serious promotion.  I haven’t started any sort of linking or indeed any other marketing yet.  I’ve done a little testing the waters dabling but nothing that has delivered any serious traffic. No traffic from search engines yet but the spiders have been visiting:

I intend using only “white hat” promotion techniques for the blog so you won’t see any instant results.  I could have comment or link spammed and probably had 1,000 plus a day but I’m looking to keep this blog long-term.

I shall continue to build content over the next week and start serious promotion the week after.

An interesting Blog Worth application over at  pingoat.com tries to determine the value of your blog based on the inbound links and Technorati rating.  

This blog is worth a little over $10, which is pretty sad. 

My excuse is that it has only been online for a week.

What is yours worth?

If you’ve been reading any of the SEO forums lately you will have seen the buzz about Google using Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to analyze the topic of a page and it’s relevancy to a specific search term. 

LSI uses groupings of words to a term, rather than a one-to-one relationship.  Big G is apparently no longer concerned with keyword density (was it ever?) but with the relationship of information on your page and of the pages linking to you.  The LSI algorithm of course has no idea what the words mean or how they are related, but it identifies patterns in an uncannily human way.

This Latent Semantic Analysis method means that pages that have numerous words in common are considered to be related and correspondingly, pages with no, or few words, in common are unrelated.  The consequence of this is that, most likely, links from non-related pages are ignored or devalued. This ties in very well with the fact that link farms and unrelated links have no effect on SERPs.  Links from related “trusted” sites are the only ones to have any real effect.
 
I touched on the use of related keywords briefly in How to get the first 10,000 visitors to your blog:

For instance, if your blog is about stamp collecting, mention the phrase “stamp collecting” as well as related keywords such as penny black, postal history, stamp catalogs and stamp album.  Don’t make the mistake of just repeating “stamp collecting” over and over.

So, what does this mean for bloggers?

Firstly, it’s one more reason to not worry about trying to manipulate the search engines in an attempt to gain higher rankings from on-page keywords.  Write your posts naturally and focus on providing quality information for your audience and your pages will be naturally relevant. 

Unrelated link exchanges are a waste of time, don’t bother with link farms and those exchanges where your link appears at the bottom of some unrelated page.  Avoid linking to unrelated sites as well since linking to dodgy neighborhoods will undoubtedly lower your SE rankings.  Relevant links do have value, so go ahead and exchange links with related sites on related pages. 

How do you know if a link is worthwhile?  Follow my plan.  I never exchange links just for the sake of a link.  I forget all about search engines and link popularity.  If you think it will bring targeted visitors to your blog, then do it, otherwise pass.

I’m often asked if any of the blogging eBooks are worth buying.  There’s really no easy answer because it depends on your level of experience and technical abilities.  If you are technically savvy and have been been around on the internet for a while, know some basic SEO, know how to use social bookmarking and how to get relevant links then you can probably manage just fine on your own.  Read the forums, browse sites like this for advice and you will have a successful blog.

On the other hand if you are just starting out, these eBooks can save you an enormous amount of time and frustration.  Unfortunately, some of the eBooks are downright bad and will tempt you into the dark side with extravagant claims and promises.  Some are out of date and practically useless. Are there any real secrets in these books?  No, not really.  Some have great advice and tips you won’t see anywhere else.  Even as an experienced blogger, I’ve picked up lots of ideas.

These three are the best of the bunch that I’ve read.  If you know of more, please let me know.

The Blogging Cash Machine
Money for Blogging
Real Blog Videos (for complete beginners)

All of these come with a money-back guarantee, so it’s no risk if you aren’t sure.