Blog Ryan

I’ve noticed an abnormally large number of celebs moonlighting as Google employees recently…maybe it’s the stock options! Tell me which ones you like and offer any additional matches:

 Chris Hall, CTO, IABC

Matt Cutts, Google

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Social networking sites are huge. We’ve all heard it.  It has been pounded into our heads at every recent industry conference and Pubcon Vegas was no different.  Digg is consistently mentioned as one of the most important social networking sites out there.  So as I decided to get more involved in the blogosphere I figured I better learn to Digg as well.  So I’ve compiled a list of the top 10 things I’ve learned about Digg:

1. Don’t try and game the system. The community is very self policing and you won’t survive long-term using these tactics.

2. Looking to land on the homepage?  If you want to get a story to the homepage you need at least 30 diggs in the first 24 hours of submitting a story. 

3. Massive Link Power. If you care about backlinks Digg can greatly help your cause.  If you get a story to the homepage that has quality unique content you can get as many as 1,000 backlinks as other sites link to yours and the blogosphere discusses your content.

4. Build a network of friends.  Other friends will help you to promote stories that are important to your shared interests.

5. Don’t vote as a block.  This could be viewed as gaming the system and could result in your vote being diluted or you being banned from Digg.

6. Use descriptive titles.  You have to give users a reason to click the story.  A good headline goes a long way to get your content to rise to the top.

7. Personal perspective.  Add some personal perspective to the story you are digging.  Share an opinion. Be controversial.

8. Use the characters you are given. Huh? You only get 75 characters for the title, but you get 350 for the description. Use them. You don’t need all of them, but use more than a one liner.  Regular Digg users will often pass right over too short of descriptions believing them to be spam.

9. Make sure you have a good host. You can literally get thousands of visitors in minutes if you get a popular article make it to the homepage.  If you don’t have adequate bandwidth or have to make too many calls to your database, lookout you may be in for problems.

10. Learn what rises to the top. The most popular homepage items are lists, how-to-guides, stories on high profile companies (particularly tech companies), and breaking news.

Here are some good resources if you want to learn more about Digg:

• Digg Coverage at Tech Crunch
• Digg FAQ
• Wikipedia
• Technorati
• Old Wired Article discussing the startup phase of Digg
• Beginner’s Guide to Digg
• What’s One Digg Worth?
• Everthing You Always Wanted to Know About Digg
• Getting a story to the frontpage of Digg
• DiggBait 101: 8 Ways to Help You Get to Digg’s Front Page
• Digg Cheat Sheet: What is Digg?

Up next (or up soon might be more accurate)

What I’ve learned about Technorati and Del.ico.us

Wow! What an adventure. I just got settled after a two week trip where I combined Pubcon Las Vegas with a trip to visit my folks for Thanksgiving. Deciding to combine a family vacation with a business trip definitely complicates things, but it was a great trip.

We packed all five of my little family into the pickup truck along and pointed the truck south for a long drive. We crossed over the Canadian Rockies through Jasper and Banff in the middle of a pretty significant snowstorm with little incident. Thank goodness for DVD players in vehicles or the kids would have went crazy. We crawled along at about 25 miles an hour for about a 4 hour stretch of that drive. I dropped my wife and kids off at my parents, hitched a ride with Williams and headed for Vegas.

The conference was great, I’ll follow up on some of my personal favorites here shortly. I enjoyed a great stay at the Treasure Island where the rooms exceeded my expectations. It was no Wynn Las Vegas, but really–what is.

The next week I enjoyed a great Thanksgiving dinner with my family, caught up with some old friends and all in all had a great trip.

My wife owns a home decorating store so she shopped like crazy for some new merchandise. So much that we rented a U-Haul trailer and packed it as full as we could and turned around to come home. Having already tried the Canadian Rockies and found them difficult to pass at this time of year, we decided to go up through Seattle and come home a different route. A flat tire on the U-Haul, an extra ten hours on the road than usual and tired kids and more ice and snow packed roads I pulled into the house at about 10:00 last night. We unloaded the truck and trailer and got back to freezing Canadian temperatures (-29C or -20F). The water pipes were frozen and our other car won’t start. I got the last of the pipes unthawed at about 6:30 this morning.

Now its back to work. Tons to implement from Pubcon (my favorite conference in this industry) and even more to follow up on to research.

Last week I was in New York for Adtech and right now I’m in my hotel room in Las Vegas (Treasure Island) after the second day of Pubcon. I haven’t been able to enjoy New York or Las Vegas as one might usually do because i’ve been “under the weather” since the start of Adtech and still haven’t been able to shake whatever bug I have. Nonetheless, the conferences are suceeding like always in giving me so many new ideas that my head spins and I don’t know where to begin. One of the companies who seems to be getting a lot of pub at both these conferences is pay per post (Pay Per Post). I think the idea behind it is spectacular and will definitely be “buying some links” from these guys in the near future. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s session titled Forums and Communties / Building and Optimization. Ryan McCoy and I began a NBA Basketball forum (NBA Basketball Forum) several years ago and have kept it going as a hobby site while doing our real internet marketing jobs on the side. The site has now grown to over 10,000 registered members and approx. 40,000 page views per day. However, even with the nice organic traffic and loyal return users we have had a very difficult time monetizing the site relative to it’s strong traffic. We are anxiously making plans to turn the site completely web 2.0 with all sorts of great new tools to keep it fresh and up to date and see if we can finally justify all the time we’ve put into it.

We’ve kicked the idea around (writing a blog) for over two years now. He (Ryan Williams) first suggested it, and I (Ryan McCoy) thought it would be a great idea. The problem is work has kept us so busy that we haven’t hardly had time to do anything else..that and we tried it once and couldn’t get the previous blog to archive posts correctly and we got frustrated and scrapped the idea. We’ve tested out Word Press and it has worked great, so I think we are finally ready to go. So…we’ve decided things are never going to slow down and that it is time to just join the rest of the blogosphere in commenting on things that are important or interesting to us. This blog is more of a personal blog, and we’ll launch a business blog focused on affiliate marketing in the coming weeks where we’ll share some of our experiences and advice, interview top affiliates about various topics and chat up some of the top affiliate program managers. So without further delay here is blogryan.com