Here is an excellent article on how to get the most out of digg.com. What I like about this article is it’s understanding of integrating digg with your greater marketing and sales goals. Social media sites in general, and digg in particular, should be just one element of your overall marketing strategy. It reminds me a bit of pay-per-click advertising, wherein your landing page needs to compliment and follow up on the content of your ad. So too, with social media sites, you have to have a plan of what you want to do with those social media visitors who come to your site.

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As I mentioned in the overview of this course, we are going to demonstrate to you the link building process by setting up and running an actual website.  The site is called Digital Camera Solution and as it’s name implies, the site is going to be about Digital Cameras. 

This site is a brand new site which did not exist a month ago.  It currently has no home page, no back links and is not recognized by the search engines (see below for screen shots demonstrating this fact).  My goal is to take a site which does not exist and walk you through, step-by-step, the process that I use to build up links to this site.  This way you can observe the progress of our campaign and note both how to build links to your as well as what to expect from your efforts.  

I want to note, by the way, that I will be building this site simultaneously with this course.  In other words, this is a live experiment.  What’s more, I am going to try and make money with this site.  This fact is important because it will effect how I go about trying to build links.  Ultimately speaking, link building is an attempt to attract quality traffic to one’s website.  That is to say, people who are interested in the products and services that you are offering.  That’s the key to a financially successful link building campaign, it’s ability to bring to your site the type of traffic that will help you actualize your financial goals. 

With that said, let’s outline the future steps that we are going to take with this site.  We will discuss these steps further in future lessons, but for now it’s worth knowing our general direction.

1. Create a site template
   This doesn’t bear too much on the link building process, except that it has to look somewhat professional (note, though, that there isn’t always a direct correlation between the financial success of a site and the look of a site).
    
2. Create content for the site
   This is a very important step.  People often times link to particular content on a website.  As such, we will need to think about what type of content attracts links.  At the same time, we want to create content which will maximize the benefits of our incoming links, as I will explain later on.
    
3. We need to create a site structure.
   There are ways to organize a website which help with it’s link structure.  Again, I’ll go into detail at the appropriate class.

I am not going to discuss the first task in this class.  I’m simply going to build a website (although I may do some blog entries on how I do that).  Therefore, the next two topics that we are going to discuss is how we can create content for our site and how we can organize our site in a way that helps our link building goals.

In the meantime, here are some screen shots relating to Digital Camera Solution as of March 12, 2007:

First, let’s take a look at the website.  Here’s the home page (not much there):

And here’s the blog (again, not much to look at):

Now let’s take a look at when this site was purchased. To do this we go to Whois.net (http://www.whois.net).  Whois.net has a large database of information relating to domain names.  Included in their database is information about when a domain name was created.  Here is how you look up that information on Whois:

And here is the information that we were looking for: 
 

Now let’s take a look at the backlinks to this site (a backlink is a link from a different website which links to your website - so, for instance, if Consumer Reports were to link to Digital Camera Solution then I would have a backlink from Consumer Reports).  There are a number of ways to do this.  For our purposes, though, Yahoo Site Explorer will suffice.  We will access Yahoo Site Explorer through Yahoo Search. 

To do that we go to http://search.yahoo.com and enter the following command in the search box:  linkdomain:digitalcamerasolution.com.  If you want to see how many links your site has, just substitute your domain name for “digitalcamerasolution.com”.  Here is a visual demonstration of how you search for links on Yahoo:

The linkdomain command tells Yahoo Site Explorer to tell us how many different links point to Digital Camera Solution.  This is important information to know in general.  For now, though, it merely tells us that there are no links pointing to our site.
 

Actually, Yahoo Site Explorer tells us more than the fact that no one links to our site, it also let’s us know that the Yahoo search engine doesn’t even know that our site exists.  That’s why they are “unable to find any results for the given URL in [their] index”. 

An index, by the way, is basically just a database.  However, you don’t really need to worry at this moment about what an index is.  All that you need to know is that you need your site to be indexed by the major search engines (i.e., Google, Yahoo, MSN and, perhaps, Ask.com)  Why?  Because if your site is not indexed by the major search engines then your site will never, ever rank for any search ever done in those search engines. 

Don’t worry, though, it’s easy to get indexed.  All you have to do is get a link to your site which the search engines know about (something which isn’t too hard to do).  I’ll go into greater detail in a later class.

Okay, so that’s the situation as of March 12, 2007.  Our job is to turn this situation around, something we’ll start doing in the next lesson.

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One known link building strategy is leaving comments on other peoples blogs. After all, it is free and easy to leave blog comments and thus it is an easy back-link. But easy should not be confused with simple and free should not be confused with free-for-all. There is a wisdom and etiquette (or should we say netiquette) to leaving comments online. Like everything else marketing related, quality is the key - you want to make sure that your comments add value to the posts that you are commenting on. However, “value” and “quality” are rather vague terms. What does it mean to add to the value of the post? Furthermore, where should you post your blog comments? Are all blogs created equal, or are some blogs more equal than others?

These questions and more are addressed in an excellent post and video tutorial by Amy Gahran of Capture The Conversation (www.capturetheconversation.com). In these posts Amy offers a number of helpful suggestions such as:

• Figuring out who you want to engage with your comments
• How to find blogs which relate to your target audience
• How to make strategic comments
• Following up your comments with posts on your own blog

And more…

The short of it, comments should be taken seriously and that is exactly what Amy has done. I recommend that you check out both her blog entry and the video tutorial (which takes, by the way, a little while to download, so be patient).

Amy’s blog post can be reached here.

Amy’s video tutorial can be seen here.

What I find particularly intersting about Amy’s post and video tutorial is that it shows us how even the (seemingly) simple things need to be done right. As I keep repeating over and over again, the key to marketing success is to offer your customers (where ever they may be) something which they need and currently do not have - in other words, value. Don’t think that your comments (or anything else seemingly small) should be any different.

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Here is a quality post from Graywolf’s SEO Blog about how to help your visitors bookmark your content on social media sites.

There are, of course, other ways to make it easy for your visitors to bookmark your site. Here are some of the better ones:

• If you have a Wordpress blog, use (as we do) Semiologic’s Subscribe me plugin.
• Consider using Ekstreme.com’s Socializer.
• Addthis.com has just come out with a couple of buttons to simplify the whole process. Check it out here.
• Finally, don’t forget the Social Bookmarking Creator at Online Marketing Blog.

Whichever tool you use, it’s a good idea to make it easy for people to add your site to social media sites. Unless, of course, you aren’t really intersted in targeted, free traffic.

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