This is a follow-up to my previous post of Do Your Digg It?

A good scenario for any blogger is to have a lot of hits, a number of subscribers, and a huge amount of comments and feedback. To achieve the maximum success in terms of these measurable benefits, it’s worth harnessing the power of Digg to lend weight to your online marketing.

What exactly is Digg?

Digg describes itself as “a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users.” In essence, Digg is an online popularity contest for good web content. If someone likes a news item or article that has been published anywhere online, they can rate it on Digg and share it with other online readers.

The more people that ‘Digg’ an article (rate it positively), the more popular the article gets. This means that hitting the front page of the Digg popularity rankings could potentially bring you and your blog a phenomenal amount of exposure and traffic.

How to use Digg to your blog’s advantage

• Use Digg as an enhanced RSS feed, which keeps you updated every minute about what is going on, online. Find trends, and match them on your own site to increase traffic.
• Get ideas from articles on Digg when it comes to generating your blog articles. You can then share them on other platforms.
• Connect with people through Digg, by identifying networks which share the same interest as you. If people rate your article on Digg, take a moment to find out who they are, check out their site and see if there is anything you can do in return.
• Put some of your more important links on Digg, and add friends so they can make the most of the page as a hub for your business information.
• Advertise your articles, once in a while. If you do this too often, you risk being dismissed as a spammer on the site, but it doesn’t hurt now and then to Digg your own writing.

If used well, Digg can really help you as a blogger both through the site itself, and search engines that pull up highly-ranked Digg articles. By writing a snappy headline, producing high-quality articles and carefully selecting keywords, you can start to make Digg work for you. Ask friends and colleagues to Digg on your behalf, and also make the most of social sites such as Twitter and Plurk to promote your content. When used effectively, the site can bring you more readers, more connections, and higher online visibility.

Further reading: How To Get A Story To The Digg Front Page.

Read the full post: Using Digg To Enhance Your Online Success

Blog Stats
RSS Subscribers
Email Signups
Email Subscribers
# of Comments

Ranks
Google Page Rank
Alexa Rank
Compete Rank
Quantcast Rank

Search Engines
Google Indexed Pages
Yahoo Inlinks
Bing Results

Social Media
Twitter Followers
# of ReTweets
Delicious Bookmarks
StumbleUpon articles
# of posts Dugg (Digg)

Google Analytics
Pageviews
Unique visitors
Pages per visit
Bounce rate
Top content
Top referrers

Plus there are other analytic services out there, like Woopra, PostRank, Clicky and WordPress.com stats. Some services like Klout focus on specific services (in this case Twitter). The list goes on and on.

How often do you check these stats? Daily, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly? It’s not easy to know what to follow, what is important and what to measure and even remember to keep track of it all. So how do you do it? I don’t know is the answer! Some people do it manually by simply remembering, some use spreadsheets, some get reports emailed to them, some have their assistants compile info for them, some have complicated systems involving gathering pieces of information ad-hoc and automatically from various places.

Most of us I guess just check them when we remember and have the time. Do you? What else do you measure? Ad-clicks? New acquaintances? Backlinks?

Read the full post: How Do You Measure Success?

What’s it all about?

Digg is a site that allows people to find and share content from anywhere on the web. It operates without editing, as a truly social site. All the content is placed on there by normal people who simply read something they like, and then ‘Digg’ it to let other people know about it.

Basically, it’s a big online popularity contest for good content. Material is ranked in order of popularity and value, and any site, however small or mighty, can be included in the lists. At a time when we are flooded with web pages from all over the world, it can be incredibly useful to have an index of content which is rated by normal readers with no ulterior motive than to share good stuff with other people.

The ‘America’s Got Talent’ of web content

Just like a reality TV show where people are voted on or off according to the entertainment value of what they do, so Digg allows pages to move up or down the scale depending on how good they are. ‘Good’ content could be funny, informative, useful or just plain silly, but it must have something catchy and relevant about it to hit the top spots.

Once a submission to Digg gets enough ratings from people, it hits the front page of the site where millions of visitors can see it. This is like winning America’s Got Talent and hitting the jackpot of popularity – a great goal for anyone who makes a living through online writing or video.

Digg includes images, music, news, video and articles, so it covers the whole spectrum of available web content in its rankings.

Supported by an online community

Digg also offers a community service, where people can discuss items and share them, passing on other pages of interest. Digg’s philosophy is to promote content in an unbiased way, which means that anyone can get on the front page if their material is interesting. It doesn’t make any difference how big or small your site is – it’s the content, and how people respond to it that counts.

In reality, these days it can be incredibly difficult to get onto the front page due to the power users who dominate the site. I’ve been on the front page twice (not with this site as I deliberately only have Twitter on here for reasons I can talk about another time) and can vouch for the massive increase in traffic, but just getting a small amount of traffic from many articles is often worthwhile.

Adding Digg to your blog

It’s pretty easy to use the Digg plug-in to get it on your Wordpress site, and start to benefit from sharing your content with other people. There is now an updated application that builds on the previous Digg buttons and widgets, making it straightforward for you to engage Digg on your blog. You can also use a plugin like Share This, Sociable or Sexy Bookmarks.

If you have visitors to your site who like what you do, they can ‘Digg’ your content and start you off on the great global popularity contest of social computing – it’s well worth getting this on to your blog, if only to encourage people to share what you do with the rest of the world!

Read the full post: Do you Digg it?

WebMii is related to the previously mentioned Social Mention and Addictomatic, but rather than looking at your brand reputation (though you can do that too), WebMii searches the web for your first name and last name. It’s pretty cool actually, especially if you name is your brand, but of course, unlike your brand, your name is often not unique so you can find out some interesting namesakes!

Gliffy is a cool online diagram drawing tool. I often use PowerPoint or something but it’s actually a very useful tool that you can try for free to draw quick and easy diagrams or flowcharts for your posts that need them. And they look great too.

Another diagram tool is Cacoo, which is similar in principle but also allows online collaboration. You have to sign up to try it, and the graphics are more cartoony than Gliffy but it’s a pretty neat too.

If you have any great blogging tools you use then please let me know, I always like to hear of tools that make your blogging lives easier.

Read the full post: More Easy Blogging Tools For You

1) HTML COLOR CODES

When altering the design of your site or even adding a sidebar widget box, it is very useful to know the hex value of a color for use in CSS or HTML code. This is where HTML color codes comes in, giving you the most web-friendly color codes in which to design your site. You can even buy them on a mousemat or poster for handy references! If you have Firefox you can also use the Colorzilla dropper tool extension to find out your the hex code of colors you like.

2) COLOR COMBINATIONS

When designing a site it’s often hard to know which colors compliment each other, and will look good on your site. Color Combos is a site that has a large selection of palettes and complimentary colors. You can type in your hex code(s) or simply the name of a color and get back a list of palettes that have colors that look good together. You can even test and tweak the combinations to see how they look side-by-side. One thing I don’t like about the site is the number of adverts plastered everywhere.

3) BLOG ICONS

Every blogger needs icons, whether it’s for Twitter or Facebook, or for various projects. There are plenty of icon sites out there but I like some of the icon search sites that are out there. Find Icons and Icon Finder have 287,194 and 158,179 icons respectively. Of course some will be duplicates but the great thing is they are all there at your fingertips to compare side-by-side and download. Icons often come in icon sets, so if you like the style you can usually get similar ones to match.

4) ONLINE REPUTATION

If you run a business you usually like to know what is being said about you. Google Alerts are very useful for that, and you can also set up Twitter searches, but it would be nice to find everything in one place. This is where Social Mention and Addictomatic come in. They search various sites to see if your name is mentioned (be sure to wrap your name or brans in quotes in order to find an exact match, like “blog tech guy”). Social mention actually searches 97 places, like Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, even the BBC. They also provide some metrics, like strength, sentiment, passion and reach, though I need to look up how they’re calculated. Addictomatic comes back with a personalized page made up of widgets from some of the most popular sites showing the results for your search term. You can bookmark this page and check often. Invaluable stuff.

I’ll be covering some more tools in future posts, but have you used these and found them useful? Are there any other tools you find indispensable?

Read the full post: Little Known Blogging Tools That Rock!

• Blog Traffic Fisher is a new free 5 day course to help you get more traffic for your blog quickly. Very good stuff.
• Nathan Hangen has grouped two years of expert posts into a free ebook, you don’t even need to sign up to get it. There is a premium version available for purchase too.
• Income Blogging Guide Blueprint – The course has closed but our free 95 page report is still available, so if you haven’t got a copy it’s free and contains no affiliate links.

Oh and apologies for the brief cut at the end, my camera battery died halfway through the next sentence so I clipped it early.

Read the full post: Three Resources To Get More Traffic To Your Blog

Now this is something I actually don’t do myself on my own blog as I use my thank you page in a variety of different ways, but it’s a pretty neat way of customizing/personalizing your thank you page, or even your confirmation page.

STEP 1:

For Thank You Page: When creating a web form, make sure you check the box that says
“Post CGI Variables to the thank you page?”
This essentially allows the Name and Email information (plus any other custom fields) to be sent to your thank you page.

For Confirmation Page: Go to My Lists > Confirmed Opt-in and under Confirmation Success Page, as well as entering a URL, check the box that says “Pass Subscriber Info?”.

STEP 2:

In the <head> section of your thank you and/or confirmation page, place the following javascript.

var formData = function() {
    var query_string = (location.search) ? ((location.search.indexOf('#') != -1) ? location.search.substring(1, location.search.indexOf('#')) : location.search.substring(1)) : '';
    var elements = [];
    if(query_string) {
       var pairs = query_string.split("&");
       for(i in pairs) {
          var tmp = pairs[i].split("=");
          elements[unescape(tmp[0])] = unescape(tmp[1]);
       }
    }
    return {
        display: function(key) {
            if(elements[key]) {
              document.write(elements[key]);
            } else {
              document.write("");
            }
        }
    }
}();

STEP 3

It’s easy now. When writing your message on the page, put:

<script type="text/javascript">formData.display("name")</script>

where you want the name to appear. Change the word name to from to display the email address. Hopefully it all works!

You can find all the official resources on AWeber, here, here, and here.

Read the full post: How To Add Subscribers Name Or Email To Your Thank You Page

1. First, log into your Facebook account. Once logged in, type in “FBML” to the search box in the upper-right corner.
2. Find the application called “Static FBML”. It should be near the top of the page. Click the “Applications” icon, then click “Add to My Page”, found on the left side.
3. A new window will open containing all of your Facebook pages. Click the “Add to Page” button to the right of the page you wish to have this form added to. Once done, look towards the bottom of the page and click on the “Ads and Pages” icon.
4. Look towards the top and click on the “Pages” link. Scroll down until you find the section that reads “FBML”. Click on the pencil icon in that section and choose “Edit”.
5. Now, log into your AWeber account, and click on the “Web Forms” tab. Create your web form, then click “Get HTML”. A new window will open. Click “Raw HTML Version” in the upper-right hand corner, then copy the HTML for your form to your clipboard.
6. Now, go back to your Facebook account, and paste the HTML of your form in the box. Once done, click “Save Changes”.
7. Now, click on the “Ads and Pages” icon at the bottom again. Then, click “Pages” at the top.
8. Next, click “View Pages”. Near the top of the page, click on the tab with the plus (+) sign, and choose “FBML” from the drop-down menu.

If you prefer video, you can watch it on the AWeber site here:

That reminds me, are you a fan of Blog Tech Guy on Facebook yet?

Read the full post: How To Add An AWeber Form To Your Facebook Page

To be able to have your blog content available for Kindle readers to purchase via the Kindle Store, you need to do a few things.

First sign up at Kindle Publishing, you will have to create a new account even if you already have an Amazon account. You cannot use the same details as your Amazon account.

Then provide the answers to 3 security questions in case you forget your password. Finally for the account setup you will have to enter your bank details and Tax ID. If you’re not in the US you can use the check/cheque option.

Once the account is created you can add your blogs. You enter your feed URL (usually your Feedburner feed), then add the details of your blog. You will need to add two images (the help section can tell you how to do this if you’re not sure), on 800×600 for the screenshot, and a masthead/logo a maximum of 430×50 in size.

Then you’re done! You can generate a Blog Preview to see how it looks on the Kindle and then Publish to the Kindle. This takes 48 – 72 hours then appears in the Kindle Store.

You will get paid 30% of the monthly blog subscription price for every subscriber to your blog, however Amazon determines the price on what it thinks is fair. This is usually $0.99 or $1.99, and you will only get 30% of that.

Learn more about the Kindle here.

Read the full post: How To Publish Your Blog On The Amazon Kindle

These videos answer common questions such as:

- Registering a domain name, getting web hosting and changing nameservers.
- Using FileZilla FTP.
- Installing WordPress manually and automatically.
- How to create new content, add images etc.
- How to manage plugins, themes and widgets.
- How to set up AWeber and Get Response and manage email lists.
- How to use Feedburner.
- And much more!

In fact there are 40 videos that can be downloaded in various formats, Flash, WMV, MP4 (for iPods), and audio MP3 and PDF transcript.

The full list can be found on the sales page. These videos are screen capture, so you can follow along at your own pace. You can download them, listen to the audio version, or read the transcript. Everything about the blog training was created with the absolute beginner in mind, so you’ll never feel like you’re listening to a rambling tech geek – I hope!

They work with WordPress 2.7 and 2.8 and are available here:
http://www.blogtechguy.com/wordpress-blog-video-training/

You can also make money promoting these videos with my affiliate scheme.

Read the full post: Blog Training Videos Now Available!