Has anybody else noticed the proliferation of YouTube spam? I realized the other day that I get at least one message from YouTube a day. Most of these are from people I don’t know asking me to subscribe to or view somebody’s videos. I believe it has now reached MySpace levels.

While it does show how far YouTube has come, I wonder how well it is working. But as with all spam, you have to think that it does work, or people would not put so much time and energy into it.

Friday night, I submitted my first blog post to Digg. The next day it made it to the popular page and then proceeded to rack up over 2700 diggs in one day. As I write this, the post has over 3000 diggs and almost 300 comments and counting. It got as high as the number 3 technology story of the day. It is still on the Top in 24 Hours page. The post itself has 67 comments right now. So basically in this blog post I am going to tell you how I did it. It has everything to do with what you write about and knowing Diggers likes and dislikes.

Your Writing is Crucial

Now when I started writing it, it was not my goal to make the Digg home page. I never really even expected that to happen. However, once I began organizing the ideas in my post, I realized it was perfect diggbait.

To really get people to respond, you need to write about something controversial, and the more controversial it is, the better. Knowing what diggers like and dislike really helps you here. Among their likes are Google, Apple, Steve Jobs, Firefox, Linux, etc. Among their dislikes are Microsoft, Bill Gates, Internet Explorer, SEO, President Bush, “The Man,” big corporations in general, other than Apple and Google, etc. They also love conspiracy or the appearance of a conspiracy. That’s how I figured out that my topic was perfect for Digg.

Once you have your topic, write a title that makes a bold statement and back it up with the article itself. Remember that it’s the title that gets people to read the article, so be creative here. The information in the post itself should be factual, but you shouldn’t be afraid to suggest things that may or may not be true. Posing a question is a good way to appear controversial while not saying anything definitively, and it gets people to participate in the discussion and add their own ideas. It doesn’t have to be very long either, just long enough to back up your claim and get people interested.

In the digg submission itself, I made the title even more controversial. The title in your submission can be different from the article itself, but it still needs to relate to the article. They will not allow you to deliberatley try to trick people though, and if you do, you could possibly have your account banned. My point is I made the title on Digg more controversial than the title on the actual blog post, and it paid off big time.

The day of the week may also have something to with the success of your Digg. I submitted mine on a Friday night. On Saturday, it got 2700 diggs. I don’t know for sure, but submitting it on Saturday may have had something to do with it since it was a weekend and most people are not working.

The Newly Popluar Page

Once your submission is done, it goes to the upcoming stories page. From here you really only need about 30 or 40 diggs to make it to the newly popular page which is on the home page. That is what you have to do to really get it to take off. If it is good enough, it can really skyrocket, like mine did.

I really don’t know the secret to getting to the newly popular page though. I am fairly new to Digg, so here is what I did. I started searching for people that had submitted articles that were similar to or had covered topics in the past related to mine. I began adding those users as friends. I don’t know if that’s what did the trick or not, but adding someone as a friend lets them see your diggs. If they have similar interests, they are very likely to digg your story as well.

I think the crucial thing though was being the first one to the table with my story. No one else had pointed out what I was going to, and that seems to be the clincher to me. You need to search Digg before you post to be sure. Digg also alerts you when you submit stories that may be similar. They also won’t let you post something that has already been posted. If someone else has written about your story, you need to be substantially different to stand out. Usually that just requires a little thinking and is not too difficult if you try.

Digging Your Own Stuff

Remember that it does not hurt to digg your own stuff as long as you are digging other people’s stuff as well.

The Effects and Benefits of Digg

As to what the benefits to being on Digg are, I’m not sure there is a definitive answer to that. A big benefit is traffic, but sometimes your site can crash under the weight. Mine stayed up, fortunately. Also, the traffic is only temporary. But, you can see other benefits, such as an increase in the number of links to your site. This will increase the authority of your domain and could potentially drive future visitors through resulting search engine traffic.

In addition, you may see an increase in your site readership. Most diggers will just go to your site to read the post and then leave, but if someone really likes your site, they may become a regular reader. So you could notice an increase in repeat visitors, but nothing like the original traffic spike you will receive.

In conclusion, I think to do what I did, you need to be controversial, you need to cater to the digg community and you need to be first. If you do that, you may just have what it takes to be a Digg superstar. Really though, I did not find it that hard, and it may not even be that beneficial in the long run. I have to admit, it sure was fun though!

There are all kinds of ways to allow your users to submit your site to Digg. Digg itself even has a section with tools that allow you to do that. One of the ways is adding a “Digg This” button to your site.

Adding the Digg This button is pretty straight foward. All you have to do is add this piece of code into the page you want to get dugg.

<script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

For blog users, this can be tricky. The reason is that you want the post to be dugg, but not usually the main url, so that people can go directly to the post itself. Every blog software displays the most recent posts on the front page. If you have this button on your blog post and it gets dugg, it will display how many diggs the post has. But when you look at the home page, it will show 0. This is because nobody has dugg the homepage, they dugg the blog post.

Digg itself provides a way to fix this problem. All you have to do is add an extra line of javascript with the URL of the dugg post in it, like this.

<script type="text/javascript">
digg_url = 'WEBSITE_URL';
</script>
<script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

When you do this on your blog, the home page will show the correct number of diggs on your post, and it will display correctly on the actual blog post as well.

However, you may have a problem adding this code to your post in wordpress, as I did. I added the code to the post editor in wordpress, but it kept automatically escaping the single quotes in the javascript by inserting a backslash in front of them. This causes the javascript not to work once it is posted.

To correct this, I added double quotes instead of single quotes. This fixed the problem, and it now displays as it is supposed to.

On a side note, I would only add the “Digg This” button to your post after it has recieved more than a few diggs. It looks stupid if it only has one digg, and you were the one that dugg it.

It turns out I was quoted for an article that ran in the Knoxville News-Sentinel on August 31, 2006. One of the main functions of my job as an SEO deals with getting web sites listed in Google. A writer with the Sentinel called our offices a few weeks back and asked if someone could talk to him for a story he was writing on Google.

Google released a tool in May 2006 called Google Trends. The writer, Andrew Eder, was writing a story on Google Trends and how to determine what Knoxvillians were searching for using the tool. He called because he wanted to know what I thought about the service.

My quote ended up as a “call out” on the back page of the section C, the business section, which I thought was pretty cool. The only thing is that he paraphrased what I said, and I felt I didn’t quite come off looking like the expert I was portrayed as. Here is the quote.

“As a marketer, I would look at that and build out my marketing calendar based on that information,” Kemp said.

Impressive, huh? My point was that Google Trends could be useful to marketers because it can show seasonal patterns in searches. Marketers could use this data to determine when to begin marketing for seasonal events.

It can also show what cities outside Knoxville are searching for Knoxville related terms. If I were in tourism, I would try to make use of that information to see what areas outside Tennessee to market to.

All in all, I felt lucky to be quoted in the paper, and to get exposure for myself and Mediapulse. Hopefully, I was impressive enough that they will call back when they need a quote on the next story.

Click here to read the story, “Seek and Knox shall find.”

Help People Subscribe to Your Content in the Google Help pages tells you how to promote your feed by placing an “Add to Google” button to your website.

The page contains a simple form. All you have to do is put your feed url in the form, and it gives you the code to use which includes a cool Google button. Try it today! I recommend this as it makes it easy for your readers to quickly add your feed right to their Google homepage or Google Reader.

For those of you out there who don’t know what tagging is, you are not alone. I myself have seen it, but still do not quite understand what it is.

Technorati is a blogging site that supports blog tagging. Using Technorati Tags explains what tagging is and how to create tags.

According to their page, “a tag is basically a category name that is used to help organize items found on the web, such as blog posts, photos, etc.” Some blogging software supports tags already. If your blog software supports categories and RSS/Atom feeds, publish your feeds and categories will be read as tags.

If your blog software doesn’t support categories, all you have to do is tag your post by including a link in the body of your post. Here is an example:

<a rel="tag" href="http://technorati.com/tag/[tagname]“>[tagname]</a>

The [tagname] can be anything. You do not need to include the brackets, just the descriptive keyword for your post. Just make sure to include rel=”tag” inside the anchor tag.

You can link to any web page that ends in a tag. This means that the last word in the url is the tag or category name. For example, these tag links would also be included:

<a rel="tag" href="http://apple.com/ipod">iPod</a>
<a rel="tag" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity">Gravity</a>
<a rel="tag" href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/chihuahua">Chihuahua</a>

To include your tag in Technorati, make sure to ping them. You can ping them manually here or set up your blog software for automatic pinging.

To see some examples of site that use tagging, follow these links: Flickr, Buzznet, del.icio.us and Furl.

For those of you out there wanting to learn more about RSS, Yahoo! has a really great RSS resource guide on their site called Yahoo! Publisher’s Guide to RSS. The guide offers info on RSS tips for success, how to submit an RSS feed to Yahoo! and promoting your feed on Yahoo! This is the best RSS resource I have found so far.

If you are wanting to drive traffic to your blog, Submit Your Feed to the Yahoo! RSS Browse-by-Topic Directory, for inclusion in the browseable Yahoo! RSS Directory. You can also Submit Your Feed to Yahoo!’s RSS Database.

TopRank Monster RSS and Blog Directory List is a list of RSS and blog directories that you can submit your blog or RSS feed to. I was looking for places to submit blogs and RSS feeds and came across it in my bookmarks. I looked it over, and it appears to be a great list. I haven’t found anything like it yet. I am recommending this list from TopRank and linking to it from this blog and my blogroll!

I happened to visit dmoz.org tonight and noticed the header. It is now sporting an AOL Search Partnership logo.

I really don’t know what this means. It wasn’t there earlier this week. Anybody else heard of this?

If you are using the Firefox browser and you visited Yahoo! today, you may have seen a new banner pop up on your screen informing you how to change the search box from the default of Google to Yahoo!. I just saw it for the first time a few minutes ago. If you are not familiar with the browser, Firefox has a built in search box in the top right corner from where users can search the web. The default search engine is Google. Apparently, Yahoo is using browser detecting to serve up the popup to Firefox users. In fact, I just ran a check, and it did not happen with Internet Explorer. Here is the text of the banner:

Search with Yahoo! right from your browser.

1. Look for the search box in the upper right corner of your browser.
2. Click on the small triangle in the search box.
3. Choose Yahoo!. You’re done!

There is even a “don’t show this again” checkbox for users to turn it off if they don’t want to see it again. I think this is pretty creative thinking on Yahoo!’s part. Google has been sort of the adopted standard in search, especially with the technologically inclined. Yahoo! is trying to grab some market share here by showing users that they have a choice. My guess is most Firefox users are probably aware that they can change it however and choose to keep it Google. Kudos to Yahoo! though for being proactive.