Be Careful What You Wish For..

So anyone who saw yesterday's post, you know it was about how to be ignored by Digg, which was a play off the post on Cracked.com about rising to the top of Digg. I figured this page was diggworthy and wanted to see if I could beat my personal record of 40 diggs for 1 page.

Unfortunately, I got exactly what I asked for, to be ignored by the Digg community. Oh well, I kind of expected that, so I'm going to take this post in another direction.

I am looking for some advertising to place on the top of my page, I used to use Commission Junction, but that's no longer working for me. Any feedback would be great, currently the advertising seems overly small.

Please email me at 02sense@live.com if you would be interested in purchasing some advertising, I'm looking to go weekly right now, and it will be going for rock bottom prices so I can get my feet wet. Also the ads will need to be 728x60 in order to fill up the top line.

How to be Ignored by Digg

So recently the guys over at Cracked.com did a post about How to get your site to the front page of Digg. Well obviously I'm the last guy who wants to give you advise on how to do that, as I have never been lucky enough to pull that feat off, although I did manage to get 40 diggs on my post titled Music Meet Ransom Notes. Lets see if we can break that record, shall we?

1. Have No Friends - This one's obvious, good friends are what get the ball rolling, sure, there are a few people who browse the very recently posted to see if they can find a diamond in the rough, but typically it will be your friends who get you the boost into the limelight. If you don't have friends, thats a good way to tread water.

2. Post Short Articles - I am the master at this, I build my blog to allow my visitors to stop in, read a page, get a quick chuckle, and move on. Unfortunately most of the top articles on Digg are very thought out, long pages that typically have more than 1 page to them. Again, strike 2 of 02sense, as this is just a list of 5.

3. Write Crap - If you work 40 hrs a week, spend time outside and then come in to blog for 20 minutes and through your page together, it's not likely to hit the main page. This is based solely on the fact that your "digg" is your seal of approval, if you digg it, it's showing your fellow browser that this is good shit, and everyone needs to read it. WARNING: This is not the same as man-law, in man-law it is mandatory that you expose your friends to as much horrible crap as possible, because it is funny. NOT THE SAME!!

4. Repeat the same tired old joke - It's only so many times that you can see the same de-motavational poster, or the same lolcat before you stop enjoying it. Now be careful, this is not the same on StumbleUpon, on SU your thumbs up isn't as binding, so you can see the same thing a few times, which is partially true because they get submitted at the same time and one gains popularity first and the other one is a straggler, but both are still funny. You just won't see them both on the front page of Digg at the same time.

5. Be Part of This Blog - Ok, so the guys at Cracked did it, so you had to expect me to do something similar, given this is a copycat version of their post. But honestly, this blog will likely never reach the top of Digg, although it may generate some good traffic and people will find it funny, it's not the consistent humor that you find on xkcd or Cracked.

Even after #5, lets see if we can get this puppy to the front, digg em if you got em boys. My Digg ID is Toggan, be sure to send me a message if you have something to say, or send me an email at 02sense@live.com.

ScrewU StumbleUpon!

Ask any blogger about Stumbleupon's ability to generate traffic, and many people will tell you some almost unreal stories. Ladies and Gentleman, I'd like to give StumbleUpon the middle finger. Sure, many of you will say, "well Troy, you're posts just don't appeal to stumblers, so it doesn't generate stumbles." Well that's all fine and well if I didn't get consistently over 20 thumbs up per page.

Don't get me wrong, I love stumbleupon for browsing the web, I have almost 5000 thumbs under my belt, and who knows how many pages I've browsed without giving a thumbs up. But it just doesnt seem to work well for me as a blogger.

My most recent post, "Phoenix: We're over the top", at last count, had 25 people who gave it a thumbs up on stumbleupon. You would think this would generate some traffic, well everyone, I give you my Analytics stats for that page for today:

stumbleupon.com

14

13

00:00:04

That's right everyone, that page received 14 page views from stumblers today.

I'm going to have this page submitted to SU, and I know it's against Stumbleupon success rule #1 to bash stumbleupon on stumbleupon, but I'm willing to bet Digg will generate more traffic than Stumbleupon. So if you honestly believe that SU can generate the kind of traffic people say it does, go ahead and give some of my pages thumbs up. Maybe it's because my stumblers are weak, it's possible.

Next person to tell me they love stumbleupon because it generated over 1000 uniques to their blog in 1 day gets punched in the fleshy part of the throat. Don't tempt me, I'll do it.

So let's see, I will track the success of my blog with SU vs Digg vs Entrecard and we'll see who comes out on top. I'm going to start experimenting with reddit, so who knows, reddit might own all...