Ever wonder how much traffic you could get to a website just from commenting on other people's blogs? I did, and that's why this blog exists. I write responses to posts I find interesting in hopes that if they like what I say they will follow my trail back here... **UPDATE** this strategy worked alright, but now that I have found a tool to help me with my efforts... traffic to this blog has dramatically increased. read more.
I’ve been seeing a lot of articles about wikipedia recently, and I have to say that there are a lot of pissed off people out there with some radical viewpoints.
The first article you should read about this whole ordeal is one written over on SEOmoz called The Dark Side of Wikipedia.
All I can say about that one is, he should rename the post to “The Dark Side of People.”
If ethics are ever a concern to you then you should wander over to The Ethical Blogger. Ran by a group of people, The Ethical Blogger has been labeled as a “blog of note” by Google as a news source. Covering a topic that many bloggers shy away from, I’ve found the discussions to be interesting and thought provoking.
It has the readership (bloggers) and traffic, and covers a topic that any blogger can carry over to their personal blog when there isn’t much to say.
I’ll be adding it to the list of blogs that I regularly read and comment on.
With a title of “Market Like You Date,” it’s hard to not read the entire post. I found this post on Tatman’s blog (yeah funny name), and found it to be pretty applicable to internet marketing.
I just read an article over at Problogger about how someone was able to get 700 visitors to their blog by commenting on others. She wrote valuable contributing comments that added to the discussion, which is what everyone should do.
So here I am thinking what a good example this is of how people should comment and being the commenter I am I scrolled down to write a comment only to find repeat after repeat of the comment I was going to post.
It seems to me that people didn’t really understand the article. See she wrote valuable comments, and comments that are only the regurgitation of everyones comments ahead of you are NOT VALUABLE.
People that write repeat comments are like the people that have to read what you wrote for an answer on a test… and I don’t exactly want to visit those kinds of peoples blogs.
Cheaters.
You can read the full article here to see what I’m talking about.
We’ve heard it time and time again, the biggest baseball player of the year was caught using steroids and everyone immediately labels him as a cheater. Why can’t this sort of thing happen on the internet?
….It can’t happen if people don’t know about it.
Baseball players are regulated, they have to pass tests constantly and have the press to worry about. This kind of thing doesn’t really happen online, there really aren’t any governing forces out there that publicly display who was caught using dirty SEO tricks.
Think of what would happen to dozens of internet marketers reputation if they were caught “cheating” and the findings were made public. It would be enough to ruin their career and make many internet marketers think twice about using blackhat SEO tricks.
Now there are tricks out there that internet marketers like to use that are on the brink of what I would call “cheating,” and one of these is EdwinSoft’s Bookmarking Demon. It is software that automates the bookmarking process by submitting your tags and link to the hundreds of social bookmarking websites.
The creator used article submission software to submit his articles to (yes we all know the answer) THOUSANDS OF DIRECTORIES, so it doesn’t suprise me that he’s trying to do the same to social bookmarking websites… I mean they’ve done the same thing for commenting on blogs, creating blogs, creating doorway pages, search engine submission, directory submission, rss submission, myspace friends… theres a lot that has been automated.
With Social Bookmarking Software on the lose we now get to add to the list of people that use automated software to spam the internet with their crappy websites just so they can get their worthless website to the top of what’s becoming even more worthless search results.
Just like baseball players try to get to the top, so do internet marketers, only thing is internet marketers can get away with using “steroids” without being labeled as a cheater, why? Because if the public doesn’t know then nothing happens, and if no one has any grip on ethics or moral values then it never ends.
This post is for those of you that worry about being seen as a new media douchebag.
Cinnamon Pants, aka Kommon Kraft, made a funny video about New Media Douchebags. While the video is bashing those of us that use new media, I feel that it expresses what many cannot explain when they think of web 2.0. Frankly, with all the new websites sprouting overnight begging to be used, I too find myself frustrated by not being able to keep up with all the new ones out there.
Do we honestly need that many bookmarking services? Facebooked, dug, tagged, favorited, delicioused, sphinned, stumbled, furled, reddited, twittered, farked, slashdotted, blogmarked, spurled, winked, netvouzed, mashed, tailranked, backflipped…. now granted, all of these services have their little twist on bookmarking, but honestly, who could use all of them?
The answer is simply, don’t. Use the service that pleases you and learn how to make it work for you. Instead of overwhelming your Google Reader inbox with blogs you don’t really care about(or whatever RSS reader service you use), subscribe to only the blogs you are interested in and include them in your commenting for traffic strategy. Really become apart of the community website(or blog) that you use, theres no reason to have a facebook and a myspace… in fact there is no reason to have a myspace because it is full of spam.
Stick with your favorite and let people know why it is your favorite, you’ll find people will respect your opinion and won’t look at you as a new media “douchebag.”
For those of you that don’t care what people think then go ahead and use it all, if it works for you then why not. There are valid arguments for both sides, whats yours?
Be sure to read my post about Mashable and let me know what you think. Is it a breeding ground for new media douchebags?
Recently logged into digg and saw this picture floating to the top of the list in the technology section. It is worth a chuckle, trackback, and a comment, but not a digg.
Oh, and notice the “support our advertisers” and “show your love… click here” lines above the google adsense ads on their blog… they are perfect examples of how to lose your google adsense account and never get it back without any questions asked.
