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Doshy Link Attack! Digg, Personal Branding, Link Building, AdWords and Blog Contests

It’s time for another edition of Doshy Link Attack! Here are some interesting articles that I’ve come across in the last two weeks.

The topics covered in these posts include ways to find get more Digg friends, personal branding strategies, lucrative blog contests as well a how-to on creating an advertising campaign for your website.

I haven’t really found any excellent articles on affiliate marketing, website monetization or making money online in the past two weeks so I’ve not included any in these specific fields.

The ones I’ve listed below emphasize more on site-building, social media and the art of driving more valuable traffic to your website.

Andy Beard has an in depth guide which teaches you How To Find The Digg Friends You Never Knew You Had. His article has some tips on how to find fellow bloggers on Digg and reciprocate by adding friends who added you as well.

I should stress this is more of a social bloggers guide than for someone who spends most of their time on social networks, or the popular A list blogs, and it is only something that has become really possible over the last 6 months with the gain in popularity of blog social networking tools such as MyBlogLog, Blogcatalog and Bumpzee.

It’s always fun to connect with fellow bloggers on a social network though I think it’ll be more beneficial to have active Digg users as friends if your aim is solely to build up a strong Digg profile and get your submitted articles to the frontpage.

Too many bloggers are casual or laidback Digg users and a large number of them seldom check their ‘Friends‘ section to see the latest submitted articles. I wouldn’t count on getting too many assistance votes from them unless you put up a Digg button on your blog post.

Neil Patel has started a new blog called QuickSprout, which offers some intriguing posts on branding yourself for success in any niche or industry. A good read, seeing that it comes from someone who is fast becoming very well-known within the search marketing industry. Check out Neil’s article on how to brand yourself through blogs.

If you think about all the people that have high paying jobs, you’ll notice that some are talented and some are not. Regardless of how good they are, they are all perceived as “rock stars� and sometimes looked up to like celebrities.

So what is this rock star formula anyhow? Six months ago I couldn’t have helped with an answer, but now I think I’ve got it. If you want to become a “rock star� in your industry, you have come to the right place.

EMom Wendy Piersall has a nice short post on how to plan a successful advertising campaign for your blog. In her article, Wendy offers some tips on defining your target market and brainstorming for ad ideas.

Ways to boost your site traffic numbers include using social networking, social bookmarking sites, contests, SEO and viral marketing campaigns. Advertising gets less attention because there is usually a smaller ROI (Return on Investment). But even the smallest of websites can find ways to advertise effectively and on a super-tiny budget.

I’ve never done any serious advertising for Dosh Dosh and I may do so in the near future, especially after I seem to have won some Payperpost advertiser credit from a recent popularity contest at Everybody Go To (Thanks, Ali J!).

A little late but there’s a juicy social voting websites vs. directories argument over at Cornwall SEO. I agree with Lyndon that social voting websites do get you far more links/traffic and directory submission is really, really boring.

Also include is a brief list of social media sites which can send some traffic to your website. Do scroll down to read Bill Slawski’s comment (#24) because he brings out some good points as well.

I have always hated directory marketing. Schlepping around soulless, low PR directories. Hoping that the links would give your little green bar a tug. Have you ever used a directory to find something, I haven’t, I’m more likely to open my window and look for smoke signals telling me to head them off at the pass.

Divya Uttam has launched Blogging to Fame 2007 Awards, a blog contest, which offers cash prizes from 5 to 25K for 9 lucky winning blogs. It’s a little like the Blogger’s Choice Awards except that there’s a bigger bounty and the winners partially depend on editorial decisions instead of vote count.

If I understand the FAQ correctly, you can only nominate your own blogs and no other blogs. If you feel like voting, here’s the link to Dosh Dosh’s blog profile.

Richard Ball has a rather informative post about Adwords and writes about the Top 5 Ways Ignorant Advertisers Lose Money to Google via AdWords.

I came across Richard’s blog through the Problogger writing project and I think his post is particularly useful if you often use Adwords for affiliate marketing or as a method to promote your websites.

I honestly think Google is profiting from the ignorance of its advertisers, who supply approximately 99% of Google’s revenues. By using Google AdWords without understanding how the underlying AdWords system works, many advertisers are transferring wealth to Google at a phenomenal rate.

Keith Dsouza from Techie Buzz has just released the Better Comments Manager plugin, which allows you to reply to comments from within the Wordpress admin panel, without visiting the original post on the blog itself.

You also have the option of viewing all comments based on any specific post. Just did a quick test and it works exactly as it promises. Very nifty and useful plugin.

After the move to Wordpress I had started getting quite a few comments and to reply to them I had to always visit the post and reply from the comments form…Then it came across to me that why not have a plugin where I could simply reply to the post from within the comment managing screen, that’s when the idea for Better Comments Manager came to my mind.

John Austin has recently set up SiteNeighbors, a website which places blogs in neighbourhoods based on visitor similarity. It’s not really like a social network but more of a visual, interactive directory along with blog-friendly widgets. The website is still rather new but check it out if you find the concept interesting.

A key distinction of our approach is that every blog has a neighborhood and no neighborhood is better than any other neighborhood. This enables visitors to the neighborhoods to find other similar blogs that they might enjoy, even if those blogs are not very popular (based on link counting).

V7N’s John Scott has a nice collection of 10 link building tips, which are particularly useful since Google seems to be turning the heat up on paid links. I especially like his suggestions on buying non-keyword links and image links instead of just renting the usual text links from various websites.

As Google’s algorithm advanced, search engine optimization professionals who were stuck in 2002 found their techniques to be ineffective and even counterproductive. Some SEO’s started claiming that links didn’t matter anymore, even though all evidence is to the contrary.