Early this week 14th Colony hit the Digg home page and also went popular on del.icio.us. It was an exciting ride and I thought I’d share some of the things I learned.

The article that “made it” is How to Choose a Breakthrough Domain Name. It is the first of a four-part series about selecting the best domain name for your website.

I found out the story had been submitted late Sunday night. Being clever, I voted for it making 14 Diggs total. I didn’t think much of it and went to bed. The next morning I had an email from Mike Levin of hittail congratulating me and suggesting I add a link to his site. (Sorry Mike, couldn’t do it but I’ll give you one here!)

I jumped on Digg and couldn’t believe my eyes - one of my articles had gone popular with more than 400 votes!

After that, I monitored progress using hittail. I discovered the article had been submitted to del.icio.us as well and went popular there too. Someone submitted it to stumbleupon as well. This brought a great deal of traffic in a very short period of time. I was a bit concerned about how my server would hold up but my host is excellent and there wasn’t even the smallest bump in performance - thank you Royalty Hosting!

First Day Stats

Digg: 12,527

Del.ic.ious: 616

Stumbleupon: 87

Other social bookmarking sites: 18

Other Important Sources of Traffic

Most people are aware of the domino effect of a Digg. Once a story goes popular on one social bookmarking site it usually shows up on others. But what I don’t see much discussion about is the RSS aggregators. Because Digg and del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites offer RSS feeds of their popular stories many sites display these feeds leading to even more traffic. I put these in 3 camps: Scrapers, Personal Feed Readers and News Bites.

Scrapers - These sites just push out the feeds from the top social bookmarking sites without offering any unique content. Traffic: 421

Personal Feed Readers - These are accounts like bloglines or personalized portals. Traffic: 161

News Bites - Sites that offer their own content but have feeds on the side. Traffic: 4

Total Day 1 Traffic: 13,800+

Alexa Traffic Data

I titled this post “Minor Digg” because the article was only popular for a day. At some point the commenters realized that I not only recommend GoDaddy but I also have an affiliate link to GoDaddy within the article.

The article is several months old and GoDaddy was involved in a scandal at the end of February.

While I think the recent problem at GoDaddy was an isolated incendent, I should have taken a page from Dale Carnegie’s book and just let it go instead of attempting to defend myself in the comments. The article was not buried but new votes dropped considerably.

Dugg Trends Voting Data

Long-Term Effects

While the traffic dropped considerably for day 2, the total traffic from this experience has topped 16,000 so far. That’s a lot of exposure to people that probably wouldn’t have come across this site any other way. I don’t think that traffic is targeted but I did make a little extra money through Adsense… and yes the GoDaddy affiliate link also worked.

The article also picked up about a dozen new links. And got a mention on Geek News Central - how cool is that? (You can skip ahead to minute 35 to hear it yourself.)

Major Lessons

Be Prepared - You don’t know when something on your site is going to catch attention. As mentioned, this article was several months old. I was surprised to see it do so well so long after it was published.

Play Nice - I shouldn’t have argued with the Digg commenters. While some of them are rude it really is their territory and it is best to respect that.

Be cautious with ads - Although most Diggers don’t care about advertising, the “vocal minority” has a lot of power. I had forgot the affiliate link was there untill they pointed it out. That could have been handled better.

Stay Current - Recommending GoDaddy so soon after their PR mess hurt my results probably more than anything else. I still stand by them as they have worked well for me for almost 10 years. And I can only recall them being helpful when needed. Still, if my objective had been to really milk the exposure I would have changed that part of the article as soon as it was pointed out (and removed the link). Digg is about “news” after all.

Be Grateful - Thanks to everyone that Dugg this article. I had a lot of fun watching this effect in my logs and a bit of extra exposure for a business is always a good thing. I’d especially like to thank the guy that submitted it.

Posted in Reviews, Promotion, Marketing

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This is a paid review. The opinions are still mine.

Text Link Ads, or TLA, is a link brokerage service where you can do two things: buy links or sell space on your site for people to purchase links. A couple of my favorite tools are offered by TLA: their Link Calculator and Blog Juice Calculator. Both of these tools are fun, easy-to-use and offer insight into where your websites stand in potential value and within your industry niche.

The link-selling process is also fast and easy. You enter your information (including how you want to get paid) and the URL of where the link will appear. There are few options after that: how many links do you want to sell, will they be site-wide or single-page, and how many pages they will appear on.

TLA reviews your site for quality so the link-buyers get a good product. You have the right to refuse a link so there is no risk of a direct competitor or an inappropriate site getting a link from you.

Finding links to purchase is done by drilling down through your topic and navigating to the price level you want to pay. You can see previews of the sites though the actual URLs are not used… which seems a bit silly as most of the sites give enough description to figure out their URL quickly. This attempt at protecting the link-sellers is appreciated even if it is weak and could lead to problems.

I noticed that setting up a sales program for a site like mine where ads wouldn’t be on certain pages but would on others is a bit confusing. And I think their home page is pretty lifeless. The sparse, simple layout may just need some color but all the gray is a turn-off for me.

Something else I noticed was an interesting level of saturation. Some categories still have big opportunities, especially for sites that draw big crowds and can demand good prices for their link “real estate”.

TLA has been around for a while and is respected in the industry. Their program is solid, tested and established. They have made the process easy enough that pretty much anyone can use it. And right now they are offering $100 in FREE Links.

Posted in Reviews, Promotion, Industry News, SEO

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Linker’s Union is still in “soft launch” but that hasn’t prevented it from building some good will. The Free Link Giveaway is in effect just in time for Christmas!

I have to say I’m pretty surprised by the results. There were only a couple of rejections and the people that submitted those links saw it coming so it wasn’t a big deal. Most of the sites are well designed and you can tell a lot of care has gone into them. The site owners take their online presence seriously - as they should.

I’ve been fortunate enough to dialogue with some of these site owners, getting a glimpse of what motivates them. The sites range from clothing for dogs to free programming and the site owners are some of the nicest and most grateful people I’ve encountered.

I also learned how important it is to check your email frequently. I forgot to set up the Linker’s Union email in Outlook so there was quite a backlog!
Anyway, I’m going to keep giving away free links and if you want one, just let me know!

Posted in Promotion, Marketing

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Today I was asked to review a site that had recently gone through a complete redesign and as a result, dropped from Google’s rankings. This is an ecommerce site that depends on holiday sales to survive.

Unfortunately, I have been feeling very ill today and I’m not sure I did a very good job explaining what the situation was and what to do about it. I am definitely off my “A-game”.

Since this is Google we’re talking about - the biggest, most important search engine (and seemingly most fickle), I’ll concentrate on the scenario presented but this methodology applies to any site that takes a hit in any of the SEs.

1. Find out what went wrong

In this particular case 301 redirects were used to move the old store to the new one but as I told the client what Google says and what Google does when it comes to 301s is very different. The reality is Google has a difficult time with 301 redirects, much more so than Yahoo or Live (formerly MSN). Expect anywhere from a couple weeks to several months for Google to get strait on this.

In case you are wondering there are other ways to get penalized by the search engines.

2. Make the corrections needed

In this case, the site is delisted except for the home page which Google shows a recent cache for (good news - the site isn’t banned!). Because the new layout is all-new to Google it is important to make sure Google knows where the new content is. A Google Sitemap will help. Also, be sure to include an HTML sitemap. Because of the urgency involved I also recommended creating an RSS feed as described in the Get Indexed Fast article. And to help things along I fell on the old standard of “get more backlinks” to add urgency to Google’s crawling schedule (sites with more links get crawled more often).

3. Do “normal” SEO upkeep - just more urgently

Building links, personal networking, asking questions, etc. The point I was making to the client is that getting back in Google’s good graces is going to take work. And lot’s of it. A solid link-building campaign is essential. I pointed her to the Free Backlinks article and also suggested that this may be a good time to rent or buy links from a broker. What I didn’t mention at the time, but wish I did, was all the great link-building tips SEOmoz has to offer including how to get links from .gov and .edu sites.

4. Forget about it and move on

Once you’ve done all you can to make things right with Google, don’t wait for things to come around. There is more to online promotion and success than just Google!

• I suggested setting up a Squidoo Lens as Squidoo is popular and has been driving a small, but steady amount of traffic to this site since I set up mine. In fact, Squidoo has sent enough traffic that I set up a couple other lenses and have plans to make even more. Squidoo also offers SquidU and other resources to help you out.
• Another suggestion was looking for forums related to the products she sells. This client has a very particular niche so making friends to promote her products shouldn’t be too difficult.
• I mentioned include link-bait but I’m drawing a blank as to what that would look like for her site (I did recommend SEOmoz for this).
• PPC campaigns like Adsense or YPN can work but they have to be managed effectively.
• A PR campaign (the press kind) would be a great idea and can be fairly inexpensive if you can find some good press distribution sites.
• Creating a buzz with ReviewMe would also help and should generate some solid backlinks as well. I have written both a review and a follow up of the ReviewMe service.
• Finally, I recommended setting up a blog to promote. She was two steps ahead of me on this as she has recently launched two blogs! Blogs are important because they just can’t be beat when it comes to communicating with customers and building consistent traffic.

I’m sure there are more tactics that could be used (I’d love to hear some of your favorites!) but for someone that isn’t afraid to put the effort in and doesn’t really have a big budget I though this was the way to go.

One final thought: whatever you do be organized about it. Recognize when something is taking more time than it should and cut it loose in favor of stuff that will be more effective sooner. This is not the time to get caught up in the details - volume counts!

Posted in Promotion, SEO, Marketing

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Jason Litka doesn’t get why blogs are so important but he took a leap of faith and started one yesterday. I don’t know Jason. In fact I found his site through a comment on SEO-Scoop. But I do know what he’s in for.

I have a client that asked me if blogging is really that important when their staff is stretched thin. They want to start some programs on MySpace and similar sites. My answer was to the point: blogging is priority over these other programs.

There is something great about blogging. And it seems no matter how many times I say it people don’t believe me. But here it is again…

When it comes to online promotion, blogging just can’t be beat on a consistent basis.

Yes, I can drive more traffic with social bookmarking but that is a flash in the pan. A quick burst of traffic that dies away. Blogging lasts; it has magnetism. People subscribe to blogs. They bookmark (Ctrl+D) them. They tell their friends about them. And they link to them!

You’d think building a world-class blog takes a lot of time (and it does) but I get more traffic to Scout each day than I get from Google for the whole site. And blogs don’t have a sandbox.

So Jason, good luck to you! People are interested in what you have to say - I know I am. And for anyone still fighting the urge to blog: STOP!!! Blogs are a great way to generate traffic and get your message out.

PS. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use social programs, just that they should compliment your efforts not be their entirety.

Posted in Promotion, Marketing

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