Breaking the Digg Code
The guys from Invesp.com just released a special report titled “Breaking the Digg Code.” It is a small PDF with 21 pages, but packed with information about how to get your stories popular on Digg. In fact the tagline is: a step by step instruction to getting on the first page of Digg in four weeks or less.
I scanned through the report and the information seems to be solid. They have a nice step by step approach that you can follow easily. In order to get it you will need to subscribe to their blog either via RSS or email.
On a side note, remember that I don’t think you should try to game Digg or any other social bookmarking site. The problem is that sometimes even unique and quality content will get lost among the huge number of submissions that these sites get daily, so understanding how the system works can improve your chances or getting the deserved exposure.
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Open Discussion: What Do You Think of Internet Marketers? (aka the long sales page gurus)
First of all, notice that there are several types of Internet marketers, the questions I raise in this post regard specifically the ones that use long sales pages and several other questionable tactics to sell their products and services.
Brian Clark from Copyblogger is certainly an Internet marketer. He recently launched a program called Teaching Sells, where he managed to create an initial buzz around it, had affiliates on board and so on. Yet his tactics were down to earth, and I am pretty sure that no one had anything negative to say about his program.
The same cannot be said about people that resort to the long sales pages, though. If you navigate around the web you will notice that there is a great deal of controversy around these practices.
What do I think?
So what do I think about them? Firstly I know that for sure there are honest people selling legitimate products with long sales pages and hype marketing, but even in those cases I don’t like their approach.
It appears to me that these guys are just trying too hard. They use several persuasive (and sometimes even deceptive) techniques to sell, and I don’t like that.
For instance, they try to create a feeling of scarcity by saying that they product will stop selling after 24 hours, or that only x number will be available. Secondly, they also load their sales offering with thousands of dollars in bonuses. The product itself often costs less than $100, but if you buy you will get over $10,000 in bonuses. It makes me scratch my head.
Sometimes there are even pictures around with the guy using his laptop from a Caribbean beach, or images of the cars and houses that he bought making money with the secrets that he is about to reveal to you….
An example
There is a recent example that illustrates the case. Joel Comm is a very famous Internet marketer (apparently also a millionaire and New York Times best selling author). Recently he launched his AdSense Secrets book on the market for just $9.95. The book used to sell for $97 a couple of years ago, so you can imagine the amount of buzz that it raised.
A couple of days after the initial buzz, however, some people started to discover that once you bought the book you became automatically subscribed to a course with a monthly subscription of $30. That is, supposing you didn’t do anything about it, after 30 days you would be billed for another $30, and so forth every other month.
Truth be told, Joel did mention that on the sales page. The problem is that the sales page was HUGE, and out of 6500 words (I went there to count) only a single sentence was mentioning the subscription. Needless to say that dozens of people bought the ebook without realizing they were getting automatically subscribed to the monthly deal.
The deal was so big that many bloggers started calling him out, and he posted a public apology, saying that the problem was on his shopping cart….
Integrity in the first place
I am pretty sure that those Internet marketers are nice guys, the only problem with them is that sometimes they put their desire to make money above their principles and above integrity.
It is about the path you decide to follow. Personally I prefer to make a fraction of what they make, but to keep my principles and the respect from other people.
Returning to Joel Comm. The guy is a marketing genius, that is for sure. I really think he is much smarter than most of us (including myself), and he is light years ahead of most people in terms of Internet experience. Yet if you head to his blog you will notice that he has 2,300 RSS subscribers. Why is that? A guy with his brain and experience should have 50,000 RSS subscribers. I might be wrong, but I think it has something to do with the path he decided to follow.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not trying to preach anyone, and I also did several mistakes in the past and probably will still do them in the future. Regardless of that, I do try to put integrity above everything else on my life.
What do you think?
Those are my opinions, and I know they might not be correct. What do you think about marketers that use long sales page and other persuasive marketing techniques? Would you be willing to use them to make more money in the long run?
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Website Traffic Series Part 4: Faking A Website Sale
In the previous parts of this series we talked about generating traffic to your website with CSS galleries, Blog Carnivals and by leaving comments on other blogs. Those were all basic techniques, so lets talk about something less trivial today: faking a blog sale.
Before going further, though, keep in mind that I consider this technique to be unethical. I try to keep a 100% transparency approach on all my projects and endeavors, therefore I would never fake something to generate traffic, and I don’t recommend other people to do so either.
But if we are going to talk about all the traffic generation tricks and techniques (that is the plan with this series) we need to cover the “black hat” methods as well, if nothing else for the sake of discussion and to keep people aware of what might be going around the web.
The concept: The idea is pretty simple, you make it appear that you are selling your blog, and try to generate as much buzz as possible around it. The traffic might come from several sources.
If you list your blog sale on big online forums or marketplaces (some free and some paid) you will inevitable receive visits from the curious folks and potential buyers. Sometimes thousands of them.
If your blog is somewhat popular and has a loyal following you might also receive traffic from the readers that will write about the sale on their blogs or websites.
After a couple of weeks you just mention that the reserve price was not met, and you call the sale off.
Does it work?: Overall no, it does not work. First and foremost because the traffic that you will receive will not be targeted. People will visit your website because they are planning to buy, or because they are just curious to see what is going on. Sure some people might like the content and come back in the future, but I would say that they represent 10% of the total traffic.
I happened to list some of my blogs for sale in the past, but because I really intended to sell them. If I remember well I received around 2,000 visitors from the marketplaces (Sitepoint), but the sale listing had no impact on my traffic levels or RSS subscribers on the following weeks.
There is also a negative effective connected with this practice. Some of your loyal readers might feel deceived. If they stop trusting you they might also stop visiting your website.
How to get started: Just don’t get started! As you can see the couple thousand visitors that you might end up receiving using this strategy are not worth the damage that you will do to your credibility.
Over to the readers: Those are my opinions are least. Do you think that it is OK to fake a blog sale? What about the kind of traffic that you would get using this method?
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Website Traffic Series Part 3: Leave Comments on Other Blogs
On the first part of this series we talked about how you can generate traffic to your website by getting it featured on Web Design and CSS galleries. On the second part we talked about Blog Carnivals. Today we will cover another basic yet effective strategy: leaving comments on other blogs.
The concept: Blogs are conversations. Most of them, in fact, allow any user to post a comment at the end of every article. Usually you just need to write down your name and email (kept private) and publish your comment.
Most blogging platforms also allow you to insert your website URL, which will then be used to hyperlink your name to your website.
Should people get curious, angry, excited or feel any other emotion while reading your comment, there is a good chance that they will click on the name to see what kind of website you have on the other side. If the blog wherer you left a comment is a popular one, you could end up receiving hundreds of visitors from a single comment.
Does it work?: Yes, provided you follow certain guidelines. First of all do not spam as many blogs as possible with as many comments as possible. People will recognize a self-promotional comment miles away, and usually they will just delete it (apart from the fact that it is pretty lame to leave comments just for the sake of traffic).
So first of all make sure that you are adding value to the conversation with your comment. That should be something easy and natural if you comment on blogs that are related to your niche. You should have endless things to talk about the topics you like after all, right?
Secondly, there are certain types of comments that will attract more attention: the first comment, funny comments, thought provoking comments and controversial comments are just a few examples.
Finally, pay attention to the size of the blog where you will be engaging in the conversation, and on how active the community over there is.
How to get started: Just create a selection of blogs that are relevant to your niche and engage on the discussion there. Ideally you should subscribe to their RSS feed so that you can keep updated and follow up with comments as soon as an interesting post is published.
If you don’t know many blogs on your niche just head to Google and start searching, it shouldn’t be difficult to find heaps of them.
Over to the readers: Have you used the strategy of leaving comments on other blogs to generate traffic? How did it work?
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Website Traffic Series Part 2: Blog Carnivals
On the first part of this series we covered how you can generate traffic to your website via Web Design and CSS galleries. On the this second part I want to cover one of the most basic traffic generation methods for bloggers: Blog Carnivals. (By the way, this will be a long series. The basic stuff is coming first, but soon we’ll have more salty techniques, so stay tuned!)
Concept: A Blog Carnival is basically an event where bloggers that cover a particular topic will get together and post a collection of their articles. Usually you have one hosting blog and the participants. The participants send the links to their articles and posts, and the hosting blog will then publish all the links in a single post.
There are all sorts of carnivals around the web: weekly, monthly, with fixed host, with variable host, standalone editions and so on.
Does it work?: Yes. If you manage to participate in a Blog Carnival, at the very minimum you will gain a couple of backlinks and some incoming visitors. Obviously the overall result will depend on the quality and size of the carnival in question.
When I was promoting my first blog a couple of years ago I used to participate in many blog carnivals, and some of them would bring as much as 500 visitors and dozens of backlinks.
Here is a quote from Steve Pavlina who also used them:
In my early traffic-building days, I’d do carnivals submissions once a week, and it helped a great deal in going from nothing to about 50,000 visitors per month
Over the time this practice lost some popularity, but you can still find valuable blog carnivals around the Internet, or even try to create your own.
How to get started: The easiest way to get started is to visit http://blogcarnival.com/bc/ and to browse around for carnivals that are aligned with your niche. Check the ones that have a “Next edition” coming out soon, and submit your best articles.
There are also many self-hosted carnivals around the web, where a blog owner will just publish a post asking for its readers to contribute with articles around a given topic, so keep an eye open for those as well.
Finally, depending on the size of your readership, you could also try to start your own carnival. You could host the first edition on your blog and then get other bloggers to host the subsequent editions.
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