Buck It All

Digg is a very popular tool for keeping yourself updated on current events, and new web creations. While there are plenty of other Social Bookmarking sites, I would like to focus on this one specifically because it is currently the largest, and most popular.

Some of you may not be familiar with what Digg is, and how it works. I will give you a basic rundown of Digg. Being a basic user of Digg doesn’t require anything from you besides typing in the URL, and clicking a few links. Now, if you want to comment, submit your own stories, have a friends list, view your Digg history, you will need to sign up for a free account. Once you have an account, you can do all the things I listed above. You can submit stories to Digg for other people to read and vote on, post comments on other peoples’ stories to tell them how crappy it was, etc.

Digg can bring you a decent amount of traffic if you get your story on the front page. Yes, traffic will come occasionally from just having a mildly popular story up, but the real hits start rolling in when you make it to the front page. To get on the front page, you need to get votes. The first thing everyone should do when they post a story on digg is tell their friends. Give your friends, enemies, acquaintances a link to the story, and tell them to Digg it. The more Diggs the article has, the more Diggs the article can potentially receive. The more Diggs the story receives, the closer to the front it gets, and the more traffic you can get.

I wouldn’t recommend spending your life on Digg, trying to get people to vote and whatnot, but it is certainly not to be ignored.  I personally do not have any results to show you from Digg, not because I don’t want to use it, but because I can’t. I won’t get into that though!

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The internet is full of good ways to get traffic to your blog without spending any cash. Entrecard is one of the best methods that I have come across. If you have a blog, I would definitely recommend you check out Entrecard.

Entrecard is a great way to bring traffic to your blog. It is basically a virtual business card. You sign up to Entrecard, and set up an image for your card. Then once you have completed the signup and setup you will be able to get the code to put your entrecard on your blog.

After you put the Entrecard on your blog, people will be able to advertise on your blog using their entrecard. They pay you in Entrecredits. The cost for advertising depends on how many people are in line for it on your blog. The first ad costs 2 Entrecredits, the next costs 4, the next 8, and it doubles for each person after that. Some blogs cost over 4,000 Entrecredits because there is such a long line of advertisers. If you stop getting advertisers for a couple days, your line gets shorter, and the cost goes down.

Selling Advertisements on Entrecard isn’t the only way to earn Entrecredits. You can earn Entrecredits by “Dropping” your card on other blogs. Just go to other blogs with the Entrecard widget, and click “Drop”. You will then receive an Entrecredit for the drop, and so will the person you dropped your card for. Chances are that person will drop one in return. Some blogs will have a “U Drop I Follow” image under their widget. This means that if you drop for them, they will return the favor. Most people will drop a card for you whether they have that image or not though.

Getting Entrecredits isn’t all about the exchange though. In fact, Entrecard actually encourages you to sell Entrecredits for real money! So, you can go around earning a bunch of credits, and just sell them. Or, you can buy credits from other people, and use them to advertise your blog on other bigger blogs.

Here are my Entrecard stats so far (after 4 days of membership):

• 50 cards dropped on me
• 134 credits earned via drops
• 84 cards dropped by me
• 64 credits to advertise on my blog
• 4 credits earned via ads
• 6 ads bought from me
• 57 clicks from entrecard.com to Buck it All

Now, I have probably spent 20 minutes total on dropping cards. Thats not bad at all for 57 unique visits to a newbie to Entrecard.

I have dropped around 84 cards in the past 4 days, and I have received quite a few drops on my card as well. Some bloggers really don’t think that Entrecard is worth the work put into it. They don’t feel that the traffic brought from it is significant enough for what you put into it. Well, it takes about 2 seconds to drop a card, so I feel that its worth it. Honestly, I feel that any traffic is worthwhile, especially for a new blog.

I will keep  you updated on my experience with Entrecard.

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The title of this entry says it all. MySpace is packed with people to pitch your site to. Most MySpace accounts appeal to a specific age group. If the content of the MySpace is teen-ish, teens will be interested in it, and will most likely be interested in whatever you tell them is “cool”. MySpaces can also be targetted to niches, for instance, your favorite band might be Green Day, so you create a MySpace all about Green Day, and how you can’t get enough of them. Other people that like Green Day will most likely see your Space, and go to a site that you say is good.

You have a MySpace, but you need friends. Well, I for one do not have time to sit around and add friends left and right all night long. Manually adding friends isn’t worth the trouble. So you should pick up a nifty little program that can do it for you. My personal favorite is called Friend Blaster Pro. It helped me rack up a nice amount of friends on my account in no time at all. You can add as many friends as you want with the pro version, but I would stick to around 200 per day. The trial version of the program is available for free, but it only allows you to add a maximum of 50 friends per day. If you are impatient like me, and want to get friends in a hurry, then the program is definitely worth it’s price ($29.95 for 1 MySpace account, or $59.95 for use on an unlimited number of accounts) If not, the trial version is still worth getting your hands on.

If you already have friends, or bought Friend Blaster Pro, and added friends, then you are ready for the next step. Like I said before, your visitors will most likely go to a site that you recommend, so post a bulletin every once in a while pitching your site. Don’t make it too obvious that it is an advertisement, otherwise it will be ignored. You can also post a comment on your friends’ MySpaces, however thats a risky move, because if it looks too spammy, it could just get deleted by the account holder. Try to keep them as personal as possible, and don’t overuse the same sentence in several different comments on peoples’ spaces. Copy & Paste is helpful, but use it in moderation.

After posting some bulletins, if you have enough people visiting your MySpace, you will start to get a steady flow of traffic from it to your website or blog, however you will need to keep up on it, keep adding friends, and keep posting bulletins or blog entries about your site once a week. MySpace is definitely worth the time you put into it in the long run, so happy MySpacing, and best of luck!

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Yahoo Answers is a great way to get some very high quality traffic. When you go to Yahoo Questions and type in your question in the search bar, you are looking for something very specific. If you are asking, “How do I make a milkshake”, you are likely to click a link in someone’s answer to a blog or website about milkshakes. So, say you have a blog, and it is all about the different kinds of milkshakes, and how to make them. You can go to Yahoo Questions, search for questions like, “How do I make a strawberry milkshake?”, and answer the question. “There are a few different ways to make deliscious strawberry milkshakes! I go into detail about it here at my blog article: Making A Great Strawberry Milkshake”, However “Making A Great Strawberry Milkshake” would be a link to your blog article. Answer as many questions a day as you like, at the very least answer one per day. Once you have a decent amount of answers, and start to get best answers, you will see a nice flow of traffic from yahoo answers. On an old blog of mine, I answered about 6 questions, got one best answer, and got about 2 or 3 visits a month from it.

So try out Yahoo Answers/Questions to get some quality traffic to your website or blog, its worth the time you put into it.

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