After putting up my list of dofollow blogs I got a lot of questions about the whole “dofollow” thing as there is no such thing as a “dofollow” attribute. If I need to explain this to you, end your career in Internet marketing now (trust me I’m saving you a lot of time!) Anyways I called them dofollow because pretty much every blog now uses the (rel=”nofollow”) attribute on all hyperlinks posted in comments. I simply called them dofollow in the sense that there is not a “nofollow” attribute attached to the links in those blogs.

The nofollow attribute was designed by Google in 2005 to more or less remove a large amount of spam from Google’s indexing process. Links that have the (rel=”nofollow”) are not indexed by Google’s spiders and doesn’t have any influence on the target link’s PageRank. After Google made the move, everyone else followed in line and now respect this attribute. However, not all engines interpret the attribute in the same way:

This spam control method is now used almost everywhere. WordPress implemented it in v1.5 to automatically attribute all comment data URLs with nofollow. Large media sites like Digg, Furll, and YouTube have also implemented the attribute to control spam. One of the biggest deterrent for some spammers is not being able to draw link juice from a page… No juice means no ranking for the terms they are spamming therefor why bother on that blog? However, if you are just looking for traffic the nofollow tag does not matter.

Tired of the same old, boring, introductions? Use these 6 strategies to write better introductions to your posts and content. Using these, your readers will be much more apt to read the rest of the content and get involved in some manor.

1. Don’t Write The Introduction First
Yes that’s right, finish the content first. You can create a much more enticing introduction if you know exactly what your content is. Sometimes you may write the introduction and instead of letting content flow creatively, you write content tailored to an introduction that most of the time won’t be as interesting.

2. Ask A Good Question
You might have heard this before but most say a “yes” or “no” will do the trick. Why strive for mediocrity? Push further and develop questions that require a real response that would require a full sentence or more. Not only will this be more likely to hook readers, it will also push people to become active on the site with comments, voting, etc.

3. Start With A Shocker
Shocking facts are always a good way to start. Did you know that on any given night in America there is anywhere from 700,000 to 2 million hobos sleeping on the street? Not only does this spark a reaction from the reader, but it let’s them know what they are in store for if they continue to read.

4. Start With A Good Quote
Whether it be controversial, factual, or comical, a quote can bring a sense of authenticity to a piece of content. The Internet is full of information and when people take the time to insert legitimate quotes people realize that your content must also be informative. Just make sure you state your source, and that the quote is relevant.

5. Open With A Problem / Dilemma
This is a great way to touch base with your users. Make sure to present both side’s viewpoints and encourage feedback. An introduction like this is more uncommon and more likely to catch users off guard which can be used to your benefit.

6. Ask yourself “what will people first think about this?”
Identify with what your reader is looking for and address the possible negative viewpoints on a piece. Take everyone into account and continue to lead them into your ideas. Readers are much more likely to continue reading if they feel like the content somehow pertains to them. When you learn how to do this, you will be unstoppable.

The Three Golden Rules:
1) Avoid the dictionary introduction. Its bland, boring, and just plain lame. You can do better!
2) It should hook readers in somehow and promise them whats to come.
3) Be brief. People spend a lot of time on the Internet sifting through huge amounts of content and if your introduction is a page in itself guess what they are most likely going to do?

Looks like Ben & Jerry’s has gotten in to the Social Media world as well. Their “Imagine Whirled Peace” campaign is a combination of a new flavor, “Imagine Whirled Peace,” and 2008’s Peace Day that they have scheduled for Sept. 21. They saw Social Media as a perfect way to reach the youth population and a better way to reach out to communities. You can read the full article here.

What can you pull from this? Well it shows that if hippies can do it, you can too hahhaaa. B&J is one of the most social friendly brands in the world in terms of their ecological and social matter participation. If B&J and other corporations are starting to use it, it must be working.

There is quite a bit of buzz going around various outlets about problems with the “Extreme Acai Berry” and “Acai Berry Power 500″ offers from a variety of affiliate networks.

The company behind the offers does not allow traffic from Utah on their website but does not forward this information to the networks. What does that mean? Anyone who is sending traffic from Utah and paying for it are not going to make any of that money back and they will not be compensated because they do not accept orders from Utah.

Might want to disable ads for Utah traffic to be safe.

Like many social media sites, everyone is working to be the first one to submit something new. While all of that duplicate content starts to pile in, there will only be one winner who ends up with the story that everyone across the social network sees. However, taking focus off of the story itself and creating a different type of content around this breaking news item, can be much more viral and a lot easier to get to the front page of Digg for instance. Being able to spin breaking news is key.

For this example I will use an event that got a ton of coverage, the 2008 summer Olympics. Take a look at this page of Digg search results. Using all of the buzz the Olympics were generating, a lot of these people created content tottaly unrelated to the events themselves. Instead you see images and articles making fun of George Bush, top 10 lists for everything under the sun, and of course the most embarrassing moments.

Here are some ideas you can apply to other current events. Ask yourself these questions and within your answer you will find ideas for content that works well across social media networks.

1. Competition - Did Apple just release a new product? What does this mean for the industry and their competition? Did Microsoft have a response?

2. Best of the Worst - Top 10 worst players in the NFL, most embarrassing moments of the 2008 MLB highlight reals… Creating content that showcases the best of the worst always does well.

3. Dead People - Were they famous? What amazing things did they do with their life? Was this an avoidable tragedy or was there foul play involved?

4. Shock and Awe - Effects of nuclear weapons testing. Is the internet doomed by [insert new service here]. Will there be an aftershock to the earthquake that just struck California?

Creating social media content whether its for a blog, or for marketing requires that you think outside the box. Your chances of being first to cover a breaking news story are slim so why not increase your odds and create content thats possibly more interesting than the original news item or current event. There will always be relevant news to your niche so find a way to spin it. Hopefully this will allow you to see current events in a different light because when it comes to SMM, they can be your best friend.

Lets face it… Digg and StumbleUpon could possibly be the hardest traffic sources to monetize. Their users are notoriously ad shy and conventional methods must be highly targeted for them to work. Becuase SU can send such large amounts of traffic and have a more steady tail, its important to realize the potential money that can be made from it.

1. Push affiliate links. If you have a lot of affiliate options availbile, why not plug them were relevant. This is one of the best ways to make money on social media traffic as it should fit perfectly in to your content. Just make sure you somehow cloak your URLs so you don’t scare anyone away.

2. Convert them into RSS subscribers. If you can get them to come back, chances are you will make money sooner or later. Another bonus of getting them to subsribe is the ability to put ads in your RSS feed. This method allows you to retain the user, and possibly make some money.

3. CPM Method. This one is more or less like fishing with dynamite. Where all other strategies fail, this one almost never looses. Just make sure you have enough traffic and a good CPM rate or your just wasting your ad space. If you have accounts with various advertisers (you should…) make sure to shop around for the best rates.

4. Private ad sales. If you manage to build up enough exposure, you shouldn’t have a problem getting someone to buy ad space. Have your traffic and or demographics availbile and make it known that you have ad space up for grabs. However, you may want to use some judgement with the ads you get back becuase you also want to keep them relevant or you might end up allienting users due to over saturation of ads.

Four more ways to make money on SU. Quite simple really, you can either go very broad with the CPM or very targeted with private ad sales and affiliate links. Make sure you have stumble worthy content however before you worry about making money off it. Theres nothing worse than a brand new site with Adsense blocks the size of your head plastered everywhere.

I was just reading over at TechCrunch some news that SpeedDate has hijacked 500,000 users from various Facebook Applications. From a social media marketing standpoint this is an awesome example. At this point its most likely they paid some goof money for the applications. SpeedDate raised $6 million dollars in funding last month and im willing to bet some of that went into aquireing these applications. This could have also been a planned move seeing as how all three apps were created by one “HappyAppy” so they could be part of the same dev team.

Facebook has been put under fire for allowing this little episode to go down. The applications have been changed over to SpeedDate and the users were never asked to opt-in or in other words without their consent. Even after 10 days of user complaints, Facebook has yet to react to the switch. This move also draws attention to Facebook’s extreme lack of control over the actual application code base. The very thing that made Facebooks app platform a success(its openness) could now be coming back to bite it in the ass.

Congrats to SpeedDate however. Im sure that out of the 500,000 people that use the three apps some of them are now using the service. Just another great example of how you can leverage social media. It really isn’t that hard to acquire smaller apps either. One could easily pick up a small app and flesh it out so it becomes more viral and do it on the cheap. Once you have a larger user base, you in effect have a grade a marketing tool that you can apparently change at will.

The main difference between StumbleUpon and other social media sites such as Digg is that SU is much more targeted. While it may not be as targeted as you like, its still much more niche friendly than Digg would be. Even though it takes no time at all to thumbs up a page or stumble away from it, the content can make a big difference to what action the user will take.

Green Thumbs

These examples will give you an idea of content that will perform well with StumbleUpon’s user base.

1. Lists and effort. People on StumbleUpon love lists, it’s no secret. If the SU users notice that you took the time to create content worthy of reading, most of them will give you the thumbs up.

2. Use the strange and bizarre to your benefit. Found someone selling something crazy on eBay? Why not write up a post relating it to social media and submit it to StumbleUpon. You will be surprised at how many SU users like to read this type of content.

3. Something new and informative. The best way to possibly captivate SU users is by giving them something they have not seen yet. A good “How-To” on something that hasn’t been covered a thousand times is most likely going to perform well. Give useful advice and users will reward your effort to share.

4. Above the fold link bait. Throw in a catchy title with a flashy image and most of SU will take a gander. If the content is worthy, you’ll be seeing green thumbs in no time! BONUS: Hot chicks work awesome on sites like StumbleUpon.

We’re Not Worthy!

While these types of content may not totally suck, its best to stray away from them and use these types in a hail marry situation were you are low on ideas.

1. Irrelevant or overly personal posts. Most people on StumbleUpon are not going to care what you had for dinner last night. Sometimes its best to only submit content to StumbleUpon that works well with your niche and try not to alienate your possible new users.

2. Link dumps. Throwing together a list of links with a couple sentences explaining them will not do much for SU traffic. Think logically here, you may be low on ideas but these are people already sorting through random content. When they stumble to your page and find a bunch of links to other content sources chances are they won’t give your page the time of day unless its crafted extremely well and includes plenty of information.

3. No substance included. Your eight sentence post on why tying shoes is fun will be skipped over faster than the fat kid in dodge ball. Your content must include not only a topic, but tips and advice. An easy way to make sure you include this in every post is to develop your own template for creating content or make a theme prevalent in the post.

There you have it folks. Like most social media the key idea to success is creating real content. Many “SEOs” have a problem with this because they are used to creating automated traffic through the use of SERPS. Practice writing content in different ways using these tips to see what works best for you.

Still can’t make any money on Facebook? Stop crying I’m here to save the day, unfortunately it must be your own fault at this point. Here’s nine reasons why you probably aren’t making buku bucks with Facebook yet.

1. You don’t do any testing. Before you go and sink $100 in to your first campaign, take the time to do some real research. Get in the habit of fine tuning your demographics and research the groups you will be targeting. A simple $10 test can tell you whether or not an offer will sink or swim (or just float even) so why not make the extra effort? Being a lazy tool will not help you in this part.

2. You set it and forget it. Facebook is not a rotisserie oven people… Your ad performance will change throughout the day much more erratically than with most services such as AdWords and TLA. Slowing down your ads during the day and pushing them during the night for instance seems to make better money. Why pay they same amount for clicks during the day if they do not convert as well? Simply lowering your CPC earlier in the day can save you a lot of money in wasted clicks but still allows for some people to click through.

3. You think you know everything. If you do, comment on why you are reading this? I would say I can make a nice buck or two on Facebook and I am still finding new quirks and trends withing Facebook Ads on a daily basis. Read all of the information you can find on Facebook’s Ad Manager and benefit from it.

4. You don’t learn from your mistakes. Any entrepreneur can tell you they have made mistakes. The difference between someone who makes it in this industry and those who don’t are the ones who learn from their (few) mistakes. It’s very easy to go from making $3,000 a day on Facebook to waking up and being $1,000 in the hole for the day because you decided not to read that e-mail about various campaigns ending. Stay sharp and don’t be discouraged by failed attempts.

5. You have no originality. Sure you can sit back and copy everyone from the ad board and probably make some money at it too. However this tactic is not only dirty and time consuming, but if you put the effort into generating your own ideas you would probably make a hell of a lot more cake. My word of advice on this one, be the leader not the follower.

6. You have no fall back strategy. Someone has copied your current Facebook campaigns and you only made $500 for the day compared to your average $2,500. What’s your next move? If you cannot answer that question and have no fall back campaigns ready, expect the money to zoom right by you. Always be prepared for the worst and know how you’re going to respond in these situations by keeping fresh ideas waiting in the wing.

7. You are not aggressive / decisive enough. When it comes down to it, you have to get your hands dirty. I can give you page after page of awesome material to help you but you are the only one who can use it. Sitting back and running your 2 ads a day will not do much if anything for you on Facebook. Change shit up and make your decisions wisely. While acting on impulse can sometimes bring you lucky money, its educated decisions that will make you long term money.

8. You are to afraid to front. The thing with making money is that most of the time you have to spend money to make it. Until you can be comfortable with the fact that you might loose every penny you throw into a campaign, you should not fuck with Facebook. The traffic moves very fast and your daily budget can rocket during the day. Point one is a great example of how to prevent loss of your cash. Facebook is one of the more volatile markets and your money can do a 360 by sun up to sun down. If you don’t have your full confidence in what your doing, you may wan to question yourself why you are doing it.

9. You ain’t got them bommmb cuts. If you have not used NeverBlueAds on Facebook you are most likely loosing out on some good money. They offer a lot of offers that are like crack on Facebook and they always have good pay out. Don’t get me wrong, there are deffinantly other networks for use on Facebook but a lot of my money comes from NBA. Shop around for different affiliate networks to see what offers they have. Chances are you will find some good offers on a number of networks that you otherwise would never have known about.

Many people seem to believe that Social Media traffic is not worth it’s weight because it doesn’t pan out over long periods of time. While Social Media traffic does flow differently, the key is learning how to retain this traffic and turn people into come back customers. Planning out your social media campaign is an important step to insuring the best possible growth.

SERPs & Search Traffic – When it comes to this category, you are looking for long term organic growth. Search engine results are not going to appear over night for your site (in most cases) so its important to stay at it. Stay active on relevant sites and work on building links back to your content. Sooner or later it will gain traction and people will start linking you. This does however imply that you took the time to create content worth linking.

RSS Subscribers – One of the best strategies for retaining social media traffic is pushing them to your RSS feed. The easier you make it to find and sign up, the better. Offer multiple options such as feed and e-mail features, as well as direction. Notice a high volume of traffic coming from a certain social media site? Throw up a welcome message reminding them to subscribe to your site.

Remember To Brand Yourself – If you are marketing a blog you are essentially selling yourself to the masses. Continue to write how you normally would and include your thoughts and persona in your post. People are reading your blog because they like something that your doing… Changing your style can push avid readers from the site. For businesses, creating a strong sense of community is your goal. Make visitors feel at home instead of making them feel like they are reading information on a faceless corporation. Become the leader in your niche by creating content that sets you apart from the rest.

Sustaining Traffic – After a while you will notice that traffic builds up and at some point becomes steady. This is a key point in time where you must make the most effort. You may be running low on ideas but making it through this hump and continuing to create content will allow continuous growth and organic link development. Constantly striving to push the bar will insure that you will always have traffic.

This should help you with some ideas if you feel stuck. Overall the biggest task is putting yourself out there for people to find. Social media can be much more than a short-term traffic boost, it comes down to knowing how you can retain the traffic.