DIGG THIS PLEASE I’m Begging You

Over the last month or so, I have noticed a sharp increase in what has become known as DIGG BEGGING. These are people who post their links on Twitter, forums and wherever else asking sometimes begging people to Digg their article. The question I ask is, WHY? I understand the importance of the Digg front page which sends a torrent of traffic your way if your lucky but why resort to begging or using Digg exchanges? For us common users, Digg used to be a place which was ruled my the majority, also known as the wisdom of crowds. It seems as if the Digg system has finally broke down to the point where there is more trash within the Digg system than there are nuggets of gold.

If your page or content is front page worthiness, I’m sure it would reach the front page without the need of begging or purchasing Diggs. As DigitalSpammer suggests, please make this stop.

DIGG THIS PLEASE I’m Begging You

If your page or content is front page worthiness, I’m sure it would reach the front page without the need of begging or purchasing Diggs. As DigitalSpammer suggests, please make this stop.

Icon Based Social Bookmarking Plugin

Aaron over at Milienzo.com has published his first ever WordPress Plugin entitled ‘I Love Social Bookmarking‘. I love social bookmarking gives your readers a chance to submit your site/articles to various social bookmarking services via a tidy drop-down list.

Screenshot of the plugin in action:

Version 0.1b is a pre-release trial version released to eliminate bugs and identify popular feature requests before a general public release. If you’d like to help me test this version please install it and let me know of any problems you encounter or additional features you’d like to see included.

Personally, I enjoy using the ShareThis plugin as it provides many more options than Milienzo’s plugin, including the option of emailing the post. However, this is his first ever plugin so it will be interesting to see where he takes this. Milienzio, my advice is to look at what ShareThis has to offer and see if you can improve upon that.

EdTags Targeted Education Information

EdTags looks like it could be a valuable resource for students and educators alike. Edtags is a social bookmarking site where users tag anything having to do with education whether it’s a podcast, essay, or web related news. Here is a video I found highlighting the various aspects of this new service. Their website is http://www.edtags.org but I have had trouble connecting to the site.

The Truth Behind The Digg Effect

Chris Brogan, a social media maven, has published an article on his blog that goes into detail about his experience with the so called “Digg Effect“. Chris provides a visualization which shows the surge in traffic he received when he reached the Digg front page. What happened as a result? According to Chris, NOTHING. His RSS subscriber base didn’t increase, nor did the initial traffic to his site which is the basis for this post. Bloggers and site owners alike believe that getting on the front page of Digg is like striking gold, unfortunately this is not the case.

I’m not saying that being on the front page of Digg is a bad thing, but there is something you have to realize. The type of traffic that Digg sends is the “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow” type of traffic. And while were talking about this sort of traffic, the same thing can be said for Stumbleupon, Sphinn, and Propeller. I’ve read so many blog entries that covered their own surge of traffic and the similarities between all of them are the same. No one sticks around, no one subscribes to the RSS feed, and the site that was once popular ends up returning to the shadows of the web.

A blogger or site owner should be looking to grow their reader base and that won’t happen by getting on the front page of Digg or any other major social bookmarking site. There is the argument where if you appear on these sites multiple times, there is a more likely chance of gaining quality traffic. I wouldn’t consider the digg effect to be called quality traffic, but I do think that by receiving this fly by night traffic, your building brand awareness. Your brand being your site and it’s a golden rule that REPITITIVENESS works.

The gist of what I am trying to say is to not rely on Digg, Stumbleupon or any other website to provide you with traffic. Instead, write good quality content. Good quality content does the job of so many other facets of blogging. Good quality content creates links, conversations, interactivity, spawns relationships, builds your brand and does so many other positive things for you, that if I were to write a book on SEO, it would contain one page. That one page would simply say, WRITE QUALITY CONTENT.

Tell me what you think in regards to this issue. I’d be very interested in your opinion.

BTW. Hello to all of you STUMBLING across this post. Are you here to prove me wrong?

Use 15 Bookmarking Services With 1

Consolidation of web services is the next big thing on the web and OnlyWire is on the bandwagon providing a service that allows one bookmarklet to take the place of 19 others.

Online bookmarking really took off once del.icio.us hit the web. del.icio.us offers a way for users to store all of their bookmarks in one place on line, sharing of bookmarks with friends, and also allowed a way for users to check out what their friends were bookmarking. Since the launch of del.icio.us there have been a countless number of other bookmarking sites to hit the scene such as Blue Dot, Furl, Diigo, Spurl ect. You may have developed a favorite amongst all of these different offerings, but what if you could use nineteen different bookmarking services through only one? That is precisely what OnlyWire allows you to do.

Synopses:

OnlyWire provides users with a bookmarklet which is tied into nineteen different bookmarking services. Once you add something to OnlyWire, that bookmark is then added to each one of the other nineteen bookmarking services you actively have an account on. Note what I just said. You must have an active account on one or more of the nineteen bookmarking services that OnlyWire is tied into if you want your bookmarks to be published on those sites.

Why Bother:

You may be wondering why anyone would ever have nineteen separate accounts on nineteen separate bookmarking sites? Having an account on each of those services and then using OnlyWire to publish to all of them at once allows podcasters, bloggers and content producers to easily expose their content to a wider audience. I’m not saying that you should be exclusively using this service to only bookmark your content because that is a form of abuse, but there is nothing wrong with occasionally tagging your own content every once and awhile. This will generate an increase in traffic on your end and having your content on those nineteen services provides at least nineteen more back links to whatever site it is your promoting.

Creating An Account:

Creating an account is pretty simple. Provide a username, password, type in the associated CAPTCHA image text and off you go. One thing worth noting is that OnlyWire will automatically bookmark OnlyWire.com and the OnlyWire Sponsor site on each of the bookmarking services you are participating with. The good news is that OnlyWire will only bookmark the Sponsor link once.

The Boring Part:

Once your account is created, it will automatically be logged into OnlyWire.com. Near the top of the SERVICES page, you will see an area designated for BOOKMARK TOOLS: These tools are the actual OnlyWire bookmarklets you will need to use to publish items to your account. Unlike Blue Dot, OnlyWire allows you to bookmark pages that contain Frames and ones that don’t. Most sites however, are generally void of frames so you’ll most likely only use the Save Page (NO FRAMES) bookmarklet. On a funny note, OnlyWire uses the acronym (STD) to describe the bookmarklet that saves pages with no frames. The bookmarklet is safe to use, so don’t worry about catching anything!

Also on the SERVICES page their will be two columns of text boxes, one for usernames and the other for passwords. Each set of boxes is for a particular bookmarking site. Be sure to fill out the appropriate details for each service your apart of or the OnlyWire bookmarklet will be unable to post to those sites. This would be a good opportunity for you to create accounts on each site you don’t already have one with by clicking on the link to the left of the text boxes. I managed to create accounts on all but five of the services listed. Those sites I couldn’t register with were apparently having some account registration issues that prevented me from getting an account. If this happens to you, just skip them.

Using The BookMarklet:

Using the bookmarklet couldn’t be any easier. Once you come across a piece of content on the web you would like to bookmark, simply click the Bookmarklet button in your browser. Usually the title and the website link will appear automatically. Always add tags to your items. These tags play an important role as they allow members of each bookmarking site to find your content. Think of tags as keywords and keyword phrases that users would type into a search box to find your content. You can choose whether to keep your tags private or not, but if you want to shoot yourself in the foot be sure to mark them as private. You don’t have to, but it is generally a good idea to put in a snippet about the particular item you are bookmarking. Those who find your content will be grateful for the short description.

Final Thoughts:

OnlyWire is a great service as it allows users to consolidate at least 19 bookmarklets into one. Not only does this save time and energy but it could potentially help you clean up your browser window by allowing you to get rid of the individual bookmarklets you may have from different bookmarking services. As I registered an account to all of those services I didn’t have an account on, I noticed that each one came with it’s own browser plugin/bookmarklet which would of made my FireFox browser a mess.

Using OnlyWire in the proper way should really benefit web masters as it allows them to really push their content to a wider audience. As noted previously, if you use OnlyWire to only bookmark content on your own site, you are generally abusing the service which puts your account at risk of being suspended or banned. Bookmark your own content sparingly. Also try to play an active role in these social bookmarking communities by adding users as friends, sharing bookmarks, bookmarking the same things your friends are bookmarking ect. After all, it wouldn’t be Web 2.0 without having a good bit of social interaction within a community.

Learn More:

If you would like to learn more about OnlyWire, I suggest downloading and taking a listen to Pete Balasch’s episode 15 of the Internet Marketing And SEO Tips Podcast. This episode covers OnlyWire and why web masters should seriously consider jumping on board and using the service.

If you prefer one bookmarking service over another, please tell us why in the commenting section.