Web Promotion Service

Ideas have a complex, little-known dynamics. As humans do, they are born, grow, reproduce and die. In the struggle to survive they fiercely fight other ideas. Being slim, original, useful and fertile are good attributes for them, while complexity, similarity to others and poor expression are forces that keep ideas in the obscurity.

We idea-marketers are in charge of dressing-up ideas and send them thru the appropriate channels into the battlefield. Digg.com is one of the preferred channels, because of the wide exposure for winners. In addition to sending my fighters to Digg, I optimize them for Google and Yahoo. In the Web business that activity is known as SEO, search engine optimizing. To advance the comparison, getting a good position in the search engines is like a long tournament between 2 knights, where horse, armour and other weaponry play a heavy role. Digg is  more like box: only pure idea strength leads to victory, in no more than one hour.

Speed is critical in our times. Today, the 100 Year War would be a 100 Minute War.  A Digg posting titled “Let’s Declare War on Britain (or France, or Iran)”, will soon get a couple of diggs with several buries, and that would be the end of it. A huge bullet saving.

It happens that many ideas in Real Life, as in Digg, are faced more often with indifference than with opposition. If my boxer is good but unknown, he will probably never reach Madison Square Garden. On the other hand, a John Doe pushed by Don King will get immediate exposure.

Digg has the “celebrity effect” built into his algorithm, privileging the known, successful coaches. Once you are famous, you blow your nose and you are in the news. If you are a Top Digger, your crap will always be noticed. It is a combination of good diggs and buries, good submissions and good friends, what gets Digg fame. As any politician knows, if you vote for the proper guys, and against the bad ones, and you have many powerful friends, you get to the top. Again, life follows Digg…

Do box promoters ever fix matches? Do actresses ever sleep with a producer to get a role? Quite likely.

Do Web Promotion agencies ever force a Digg story to the top, using Black Hat techniques? Also true.

Black Hat, in SEO terms, means doing what the search engines, or Digg, do not want you to do…

In both lives, virtual and real, those with a decent budget and a good manager have an edge against the immense competition.

I wrote an article about the winners of the Innovation contest in Argentina, with images and a brief description of each invention.

http://www.domaingrower.com/innovar-contest.htm

Since it was full with the photos I preferred to publish it as a separate page, with tables, in this website.

I also submitted the article to Digg.com, to see if an original article with quality contents (not mine) could climb to a decent ranking in Digg.

The poor results confirm that you need a little “push” from paid voters in order to get decent exposure in such a croweded unspecific social network.

Do you know how to Digg this article? It is easy enough: Go to Digg.com, get an account (only need is email) and vote for it. This is the URL:

Digg here

The number of Diggs in the first 24 hours is critical for the article positioning in Digg. The most voted articles go to the top, and eventually make it to the front page, gaining lots of visibility.

However, Digg.com and the other sites using a similar engine, are very hard to tame. Most of the incoming thousand articles per hour get no diggs, and are quickly sent to nowhere land and forgotten.

The article needs to be very attractive and well written to achieve some readership.

The positive aspects is that it is FAST. You can climb from non-existance to fame in 10 minutes. And popular, because there are millions of readers that come every day to the site to check the news.

I have tried in this blog several strategies to seduce the Diggers. Or the Top Diggers, those users with good in-site reputation (sometimes called Karma), and heavy voting power. The Digg-like News Aggregators are non-democratic: some users have valuable votes, while most of them have negligible voting power.

This article uses bets, a popular way to draw public. Second only to naked girls, which was the subject of my previous post in DomainGrower.com…

So, you need to bet on How Many Diggs will This Article have 72 hours from now, this is, Saturday December 1st, at 2 PM London time.

Your votes should be Comments to this article.

You are not allowed to artificially inflate Diggs.

The winner will get 3 Digg accounts, at least 1 year old, and 10 Diggs to his/her own story.

I want to be able to test every social network for its promoting power for my stories. Some of them are going to be more receptive than others, depending on its size, difficulty, subject and to the importance they give to old, reliable accounts.

Social networks give a value to each user, sometimes called ‘karma’, and that value is useful for promotion of stories, either the own user stories or stories from ‘friends’ and strangers.

I am sticking to 2 accounts per network because it is well known that they detect some features that could point to spam, namely IP. Of course, IP can be defeated by using a navigation proxy, but that needs information, expertise and a potentially self-destructive desire to spam the sites. The second account is used if the first one loses value, or to start polemic discussions that are often followed with more attention.

I read about a “snowball” effect while promoting stories in the Digg-like sites, started from a minor network, where it should be easier to get noticed, and bringing users/friends/voters to the other sites. It would be useful if the home of your stories included the links pointing to the other social networks where the visitor can vote you. For that, I included a couple of plugins in my Wordpress blog.

Stories are improved by user feedback and testing as they pass thru networks.

I am starting to test the power of this promotion technique, not too fast because I need my accounts to be mature enough. An account is mature when it had some time and healthy activity in the networks. As in real life networks, you cannot arrive, post your story and expect everyone admire you.

It is also good if your stories refer to the same subject, and if you develop virtual ‘friends’ that show their trust in you. It is important to complete a profile and include a photo.

This is the partial list of the networks where I am now. If this story gets enough Diggs, Propellers, Reddits, and so on, I plan to add the age, votes and karma of all the accounts, to help value them.  (more…)

I have been studying the way to communicate my good bizz ideas across the Web, and maybe find a buyer, a partner, an investor or other kind of supporter.
I have some expertise in SEO, so I can rank my sites quite well in Google and Yahoo. However, there are social networks that are faster and probably more targeted… So, I am experimenting with Digg, Meneame and many others. It is not easy to get a news promoted by those sites, unless you have a lot of time to spend increasing your karma. This is done by reading many news every day and voting the best ones.

The links that I obtain by publishing in those sites are very helpful for my medium-term efforts of ranking into Google. So, both strategies are concurrent.

The social networks are the biggest thing in the Web these days. The large amount of garbage that the web accumulates every day needed a cleanup mechanism, and Digg and the others succeeded at selecting the good and burying the bad.

People who are opinion leaders in Real or Virtual life share some positive qualities: smell for value and potential, balance, information, focus and native leadership.

Then, if the Digg model model works for news, it should also work for political views and business ideas. If many qualified voters digg up a political idea, the idea is closer to be imposed by the upcoming politicians. Moreover, if you are a Top-100 Digg.com User, you probably have a smell for good news and ideas, and you can BE a good politician. After all, your views are followed by a large community.

Thus, I implemented 2 social networks using a Digg-like system called Pligg: one is http://business-ideas.com.ar . Its focus is on business ideas that can be pushed up if they are good, or buried if they are bad or merely shy. The other is oriented to political ideas, for now in my home country: http://ideaspoliticas.com.ar. I seeded some ideas of my own, and I expect the public and the Top Diggers will tell me if they are good or not. Of course, both systems are open to anyone’s ideas or proposals.

What comes first? A story being Top 100 because Top 100 Diggers liked it? Or a Digger reaching the Top 100 because he diggs Top 100 stories? Both seem to be true. As in real life, once trend-setters start setting trends, they continue doing so for whatever the do. In business, that is the Midas touch. It also applies to the stock exchange and real estate markets. If Donald Trump or Bill Gates buy, you better buy. If they sell, do as they do. Or you will be stuck with unvaluable land or an Apple II relic.

Now, if you are a Top Digger, you will recognize your own status as Idea Judge, and my recognition to your recognition, and you will Digg Up this story!

The aging ‘bblog’ platform is being decommissioned. It is not being supported since 2005, and we need to change. Wordpress has more friendly URLs, more security, no use of global variables, more plugins and so on.

We intend to write in here short abstracts of the better postings in the old system, to avoid losing the old addresses. Eventually we will announce a permanent redirect in our .htaccesss file, which is the better form to explain the changes to the search engines, without losing ranking.