Want to be on the very first page of Digg.com? You’d be famous, right? Here’s how to do it.

Link Bait has one specific aim — get me to the top of Digg.com. The idea is that once you get there, others will click through to your site and you can reap the rewards once they arrive. Of  course, it’s not that simple but if understand the mechanics of how Digg works —and what interests Diggers—then you’re one step closer.

So, pull up a chair, grab your coffee and sit back.

1. Study Digg – this is the number 1 mistake people make. They don’t hang out on Digg, get a feel for what’s happening and learn to judge what will work or not. So, sign up, log in and engage.

Why bother?

Well, it’s like writing a travel guide on Italy without ever having pizza on the Step of Rome. Once you’re there, everything makes more sense. Digg, Delicious and the rest are all the same.

Tip — if you want to succeed with link bait, focus on one site. Don’t spread yourself too thin.

Ok, you’ve signed up. Use a real name if possible, not greenpig715.

People relate to real names; they are more likely to dig you if you sound human than use an avatar. But there are exceptions, I know.

2. Create a Swap File.

A what?

This is a file where you will keep links, snippets of text and other link bait that impresses you.

Told you it would take some time!

Now, this isn’t hard. You just need a text file and then copy/paste in whatever stands out.

Why is this so important?

Ans: headlines.

3. Headlines

Look at the DIGG homepage. What do you see?

Headlines. Lots of them.

Copy and paste the top 10 headlines into your swap file. Do this as often as you can.

Notice anything?

Most of them are lists.

• 5 ways to sleep while working
• 7 ways to wash your iPod
• 10 ways to alienate your children

People like lists. And what else do they like?

4. Benefits

Give your heading an extra boost by adding a nice, juicy benefit.

For example,

• 5 beers that get you drunk faster & make you smarter
• 7 ways to break your iPod & get an instant refund
• 10 ways to alienate your children & win an award

You get the idea.

All of these are slightly idiotic but—here’s the thing—you’re tempted to see what’s on the other side of the link.

5. Write to be scanned

No-one reads on the web, they all scan.

So, write to be scanned.

Write your article or blog post so that readers will scan down through the article — like you’re doing now — go, “yeah, I like this” and then, fingers crossed, hit the DIGG IT button and do us all a good deed.

Sounds to easy. It is. You need to also…

6. Add ‘off-beat’ images

Avoid PC junk. Add an image that captures the mood and will appeal to the reader. Something with an edge but not too risky.

Humor also works. Get it wrong and you look lame.

7. Credibility

It takes time but if you join other networks and comment on others post, guess what?

They’ll hang out with you and give you a few digs. This does work but it’s a really slow way to generate link bait. It does work, but, well, it’s not for me.

8 & 9  Test & Re-Test

Here’s something I do and it works.

Write a 300 word article. About anything. Doesn’t matter.

Spend 20 min and come up with 20 variation on the same headline. Have fun. Shuffle the words upside down, inside out and back to front.

It’s yours to play with. Enjoy it.

• Mon – submit the 1^st headline. On Wed, record the Diggs.
• Thurs – change the headline and submit it. Record the Diggs.
• Sat — change again and submit it. Record the Diggs.

And so on…

Then what happens?

Patterns begin to emerge. Some headings bomb.

No-one clicks on them.

Not even your Mom, kids or pet Labrador, Caesar.

Others take off!

Paste these into your swap file (remember him) and use this as a starting point.

Twitter is also another way to test headlines.

Remember – No-one bookmarks tweets.

It you know how to write, people will click thru.

And finally…

10. Practice

Like all things, the more you practice, the better you get.

Focus on writing amazing headlines, develop super-sharp content, and you’ll get the Diggs.

Want to know more?

Top Diggs of the year

7 Days – http://digg.com/all/popular/7days

365 Days – http://digg.com/all/popular/365days

Check these out and you can see what people are interested in. These are the big hitters.

Avoid news of the day type material. The web is saturated before you even get there.

Write, submit, Digg.

What do you think?

What’s the best example you’ve seen of link bait? Was it the words or the images?

Do you want to update your blog every day?

Chris Brogan provides this framework for writing a blog post (almost) every day. He adds that while it’s not easy, once you develop the right habits, they stick with you. I’m writing quite regularly now, but it took me several years to get my groove down to a science.

Tips on How to Blog Every Day

1. Read something new every day. Try Alltop. (Hint: read something outside your particular circle to get new thoughts).
2. Talk with people every day. I get many of my topic ideas from questions people pose to me, or through conversations.
3. Write down titles and topic ideas in a notepad file. (I’ve given you 100 blog topics and another 20 blog topics just to get started.)
4. Maintain a healthy bookmarking and revisiting habit. Delicious.com
5. Find 20-40 minutes in every day to sit still and type.
6. Follow an easy framework. Here are 27 blogging secrets to start you on what I mean.
7. Get the post up fast, not perfect. You can edit if you have to, later. Perfectionism kills good habits.
8. Dissect other people’s posts to understand what makes them tick. The more you understand HOW they write, the more you can take the best parts of it into how you write. (hint, my 27 blogging secrets post gives you my patterns.)
9. Find useful and interesting pictures. I use Flickr photos licensed under Creative commons for most of my photos.
10. Think about what your customers and prospects need. I write from the perspective of the communities I serve. This focus takes some weight off my worries about what I should write about or not. I write about what my community needs.
11. My best advice about blogging.

How I Blog Every Day

I tend to use the inverted pyramid format when writing longer posts, i.e. as opposed to short snippets.
The “pyramid” is a triangle.

1. The top represents the most substantial, interesting, and important information you want to convey.

1. The middle section discusses the main points of your article, often as bullet points and

1. The tapered lower portion illustrates that other material should follow in order of diminishing importance.

Ken Blake, Ph.D. explains how it works on the Tennessee State University site: “Journalists use many different kinds of frameworks for organizing stories. Journalists may tell some stories chronologically. By far the simplest and most common story structure is one called the “inverted pyramid.”

http://mtsu32.mtsu.edu:11178/171/pyramid.htm and here on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid

Inverted Pyramids in Cyberspace

Jakob Nielsen adds that “On the Web, the inverted pyramid becomes even more important since we know from several user studies that users don’t scroll, so they will very frequently be left to read only the top part of an article. Very interested readers will scroll, and these few motivated souls will reach the foundation of the pyramid and get the full story in all its gory detail.”

References

Chris Brogan: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/how-to-blog-almost-every-day/

Chip Scanlan: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=52&aid=38693

Jakob Nielsen http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9606.html

Having this model in mind helps me structure each article. I write a one sentence intro, break out the content in chunks, and then wrap up at the end with conclusion and/or questions.

Asking a question at the end can be a simple but effective way to encourage readers to post a comment.

What you think!

Ivan

Use Ping to send 1 post to flickr, Twitter, Blogs and Website instantly

Originally uploaded by Tech Writer Boy

Ping.fm is a free social networking and micro-blogging web service that lets your post to multiple social networks simultaneously.

Making an update on Ping.fm pushes the update to a number of different social websites at once.

This allows individuals using multiple social networks to update their status only once, without having to update it in all their social mediums individually.

Ping.fm groups services into three categories – status updates, blogs, and micro-blogs – and updates can be sent to each group separately.

You can configure Ping.fm account to send your content to the following services:

Bebo
Blogger
Brightkite
Custom URL
Delicious
Facebook
FriendFeed
Friendster
hi5
Identi.ca
Kwippy
Koornk
Laconica
LinkedIn
LiveJournal
Mashable
MySpace
Plaxo
Plurk
Pownce
Rejaw
Tumblr
Twitter
WordPress.com
Xanga
Yahoo 360
Diigo
Multiply
YouAre

See ping.fm

Charlene Li and her colleagues at Forrester Research report that companies often approach Social Computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed — ie a random assortment of blogs, communities etc— to achieve a marketing goal. Ms Li argues that “a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for.”

You can use the tool here to get started. www.forrester.com/Groundswell

Features of this profile:

• For an explanation of these groups (Creators, Critics, etc.), see a presentation (8 slides)

• Bars indicate the percentage of the selected demographic that are in each Social Technographics group.

• The white marks indicate the same percentages for the whole population of the country selected.

• The index indicates how the demographic compares to the population — a score of 100 means the demographic is the same as the population average.

• The message “No data available” appears when you request a profile for which our survey samples are not large enough to provide a reliable answer. This occurs for age groups in Japan, Metro China, and South Korea. To see profiles in these countries, set the Age to “Not specified”.

Some really terrific material over here including free case studies, PDF downloads and extracts from the book.

If you’ve read it, please let me know what you think.

Regards,

Ivan

and you can Twitter me @ivanwalsh

Note: Any use of data and charts generated from this site must include the following citation: Data from Forrester Research Technographics® surveys, 2008. For further details on the Social Technographics profile, see groundswell.forrester.com.

Charlene Li and her colleagues at Forrester Research report that companies often approach Social Computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed — ie a random assortment of blogs, communities etc— to achieve a marketing goal. Ms Li argues that “a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for.”

You can use the tool here to get started. www.forrester.com/Groundswell

Features of this profile:

• For an explanation of these groups (Creators, Critics, etc.), see a presentation (8 slides)

• Bars indicate the percentage of the selected demographic that are in each Social Technographics group.

• The white marks indicate the same percentages for the whole population of the country selected.

• The index indicates how the demographic compares to the population — a score of 100 means the demographic is the same as the population average.

• The message “No data available” appears when you request a profile for which our survey samples are not large enough to provide a reliable answer. This occurs for age groups in Japan, Metro China, and South Korea. To see profiles in these countries, set the Age to “Not specified”.

Some really terrific material over here including free case studies, PDF downloads and extracts from the book.

If you’ve read it, please let me know what you think.

Regards,

Ivan

and you can Twitter me @ivanwalsh

Note: Any use of data and charts generated from this site must include the following citation: Data from Forrester Research Technographics® surveys, 2008. For further details on the Social Technographics profile, see groundswell.forrester.com.

I’ve been reading this book most of the weekend. It’s a terrific exploration of social media and how social media technologies are effecting corporations and companies from a business perspective. I thought you might want look at these links as these are the footnotes to the book and provide some very interesting material. Worth a look if you’re trying to get a handle on how twitter, facebook and the rest will impact your profit margin.