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Tools To Help Build a Powerful Digg Profile

Do you wish you had the ability to get articles up to the first page of Digg? Yeah, so does everyone else, but it takes a lot of work. If you want to gain some rep on Digg, I suggest you start with this article Louie Baur: How to Be a Power Digger. If you don’t know Louie Baur, you will soon. His stuff is all over Digg.

Once you’ve started building up that powerful profile, here are three tools you can use to help you manage and build your Digg user empire.

Check Friends is a simple little tool that allows you to enter up to 10 different “friends” and will then check to see if they’ve Dugg any of your stories. It will go back up to 50 submits, so if they aren’t Digging your stuff, you might want to let them go.

DiggStatistics.com is similar to Check Friends in that it’ll check to see who’s Digging your stuff, but it provides many more statistics.

If you submit your username, it’ll spit out a report showing your last 10 submissions, the friends who have Dugg your stories and how many stories they’ve dugg as well. Then it will go deeper into those friends and show exactly what stories they’ve dugg.

If you have any followers that are Digging your stories, but are not mutual friends, it’ll list them too. Lastly, the report shows who and how many deadbeat friends you have that haven’t dugg any of your last 10 submissions. These may be the ones to cut loose.

If you’re the type of Digg user who likes to submit a ton of stories throughout the day, there’s not better tool to use than the BiggBoard, which allows you to enter your username and watch which of your stories have hit the front page and when, which stories have been buried, and which submissions are upcoming. The upcoming list shows you how much time is left to get that story popular too, so you have a good idea if you should be pushing the story out to some more friends.

I think these tools can be a great help to building a strong profile over at Digg, but if you abuse them, you can expect to log in to a banned profile the next day.

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The Facts About Social Media

Social media is huge and there are tons of reasons why you should be utilizing it for your own business.

Social media is used by so many people around the world, you’d have to be crazy not to start using it to bring in more customers.

WAIT!

Before you jump right into posting your useless crap on sites like YouTube and Facebook, think about WHY people use social media. It’s because people want to communicate with each other. They don’t want you posting useless information about your company and then leaving to do the same thing on some other site.

You need to speak with your customers. Listen to their needs and interests and interact with them on the same level.

Without interaction, you FAIL.

Think about that before creating a zillion social media profiles and then never using any of them again. Look into the sites that best suit your business and where you have an audience. Start there and build up a community. Then you’ll understand social media.

I came across this awesome slideshow that you should definitely check out. It will help explain everything a little better and give you the why’s and the how’s of getting into social media.

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

View more documents from Marta Kagan.
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Is Squidoo Still a Valuable Marketing Tool? I Think So.

Laptop with Squidoo on Screen
Squidoo was a really great tool for bringing in traffic not so long ago, until Google started penalizing anything that came from the site, due to so many spammers taking advantage of it, but it’s been a while, so I’ve decided to take another look at it.

It looks like Squidoo has taken the steps necessary to get rid of most of the people spamming their system and have made their content much more relevant. This, it seems has gotten rid of the penalties that they have incurred before. An example would be a search for “Michelangelo’s David.” A Squidoo page, or “Lens” as they call it, about the famous statue ranks on the first page of MSN, Yahoo, and Google. There’s a reason for this though. That page actually contains a lot of good information that can be very helpful to anybody interested in that particular topic.

After doing some research into many of the top “Lenses” on Squidoo, I’ve gathered some of the things that you should think about if you want to create a lens that will rank well. Here are some ideas for stories:

– Funny Stuff
– Tutorials / Lessons (ex. how to make fairy wings, parrot taming, make money by …, basic HTML for noobs, etc.)
– Ideas (holiday themes, different types of cakes, 20 best alcoholic drinks for Christmas)
– Informational (Japanese tattoos, bird rescue, Multiple Sclerosis, the 80’s)
– Reviews (ex. tech, software, toys, services)
– “Top 10” Style Lists (ex. top animated movies of 2007, 12 Christmas ideas, top 10 toys for kids)

Now, after you’ve decided on a topic for your “lens,” you need to think about everything that you can put on there to make people want to rate it, comment, email it, etc. There should be a wide variety of information available and here are some ideas that you can think about when creating content for your “lenses.”

YouTube Videos
Photographs
Books
Online Tools
News
History
Music
Poems
Criticisms

Keep in mind that this can be a very time consuming process, but can also provide some good links in to your site. You’ll probably want to try not to look like a spammer and refrain from coming across too “salesy” for the most part, but maybe after the lens has ranked well, you can go back and sneak in a few relevant links to your site here and there. Hey, you deserve something for the time spent on creating all of that good content, right?

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Flock: The Social Web Browser in Review

Anyone who uses the internet knows that social media is growing exponentially and can also be vital in bringing in new traffic to your website. Not to mention a great way to network. So anyway, Flock is a new social web browser and can be used as a regular browser if you want, but to get the most out of it, you need to use it for what it was created for. To connect everything you do in the world of social media.

Flock

Once you download the browser to your computer and open it up, you’ll be brought to a page called “My World.” Here you have a collection of all of your favorite sites, which already includes Myspace, Flickr, YouTube, and several more. Then there is a section for your feeds. This area is also pre-filled with several RSS feeds, mostly news related. The third section on this page is for your favorite media sites.

Flock Extensions

You can also add extensions. Most Firefox extensions seem to already work in Flock, but of course some don’t…yet. Just download your favorite extension and see if works. People are already creating Flock specific extensions, so you can be sure that your favorites will be included at some point.

Flock

One of the coolest features of Flock, is the ability to right click on a web page and select “Blog This” in the menu. A little editor will pop up that will give you the ability to type something up real quick, add tags, and preview your post. All you have to do is hit “Publish” and you can select from a drop down list of hosting services, which include sites such as Blogger, LiveJournal, and WordPress. When you are done, it will add your post directly to your blog and will take you to your site to preview it.

There is just so much stuff in this browser it can be a little daunting at first, but once you start poking around and checking things out, you can see just how useful this browser can be. Keep in mind that it is still in the very early stages of development, but I seriously recommend trying it out now and watching it grow more and more useful.