With all of the social news and bookmarking sites out there people tend to miss out on big traffic because they don’t pay attention to lesser known social networks. With a little work, I can tell you that Fark can drive well over 100,000 hits a month to your site if you know how to get your foot in the door. Here’s some tips on getting into Fark, and then owning it for your personal gain.

Format For Success
Fark has their own way of doing things that most Digg, and Mixx users may not be used to. First off, no capitalizing every word in your titles, write them out normally. Also make sure to add a funny tagline to your submission. Although Fark has a different atmosphere, explicit content is still defiantly not allowed and neither is NSFW content. Obviously the humor does better on Fark so the funnier you make your title, body, and submission, the better your chances are of diving traffic by the hundreds of thousands.

Become a Power User
Having power user status will bring you more to play with as usual. On Fark, the top submitters can be found right on the homepage making it a bomb place to get your submissions noticed if you put in the effort. Start submitted something easy like humours content to build up your account. Submit quality content and let your reputation build, in no time you will begin to see what kind of benefits having your submission visible to the masses include.

The Fark This Plugin
Another tip is to grab the Fark This extension for Firefox. If you are looking to build your account and make your day a lot easier than this should be your new best friend. the plugin can take a lot of work getting your submission almost totally ready for you including title, url, source, and topic choosing. Combine the ease of submission with the endless amounts of funny content on the internet and you have a recipe for success.

Fark Your Logo
Send a copy of your logo (72px x 27px) to Drew @ Fark.com. The image will worked into your submissions and can really make your link submissions stand out with the use of a good looking logo. This is also important for when you start to submit your own content. Don’t flood the site with your own content and remember that you walk a thin line when you are submitting your own goods. People may like what you submit, but if they notice you are going all out for self promotion they may not be as nice.

Humor Is King
Creating funny content also does not have to be exactly what it seems. Creating humorous titles for relatively informative posts can work as well. However, if you are really looking to just boost traffic then you should be looking into submitting for funny content. It performs well on Fark and if you don’t care about the traffic being targeted, your in business. Only 5% of submissions make it to the front page and most of them are “funny / humorous”, and “unbelievable”.

So the bottom line is quite simple. Fark, like every other social network has a type of content that does better over anything else. Here are some main points to remember and recap on:

• Submit humours content to build your account.
• “Stupid / Unbelievable” breaking news also performs very well.
• Only 5% of submissions see the front page.
• FarkThis plugin can save you crap loads of time.

I did a post not to long ago on Twitter Grader and I must say this tool blows it out of the water. twInfluence gives you information that is actually interesting such as your network reach, veloticty, acceleration, and more from your Twitter account. Over all it help you show what type of influence you have in the Twitter network.

While more and more people start to realize the power of Twitter when you get an audience, tools like this will be even more usefull. Looking at it from a sales standpoint it would be an added bonus to tell your clients you have a 1 Million plus user reach on Twitter. Having real stats like this when doing consutancy is a bonus when it comes to social media.

Here are some other cool feature that would be nice to have. Whether or not these are all possible for a third party service I don’t know but it would be cool.

Active Followers - Check the followers to see who is active, and who has not updated in months.

Link Tracking - It would be nice to see how many times a shared link appears across your network.

Spam Buster - Another idea would be a feature that checks the users of your network for common signs of spam and displays a warning about those users.

Geographic Features - A nice Google Maps mashup would be nice… Show all of your network that has their location set, on Google Maps.

If you have any ideas on features, or use of the tool leave a comment. I feel like a smmGuru Twitter tool is on the way for my readers.

We all know Digg has changed so why not look to Mixx for a new form of social news. Especially for those of you who have been exiled from planet Digg. Luckily, Mixx is panning out to be a very nice alternative with more diverse content on your customized front page. Here’s 20 resources to get you into the Mixx.

1. Mixxing In, and Why Early Adoption is Important: A Review of the Newest Social News Network - Learn why you should get on Mixx now, instead of waiting.
2. Most Popular Diggers Leave Digg for Mixx – Why Diggers are leaving their island.
3. Add Mixx to the WordPress Sociable 2.0 Plugin – How to add Mixx support to your WordPress Sociable plugin quickly.
4. Thrown In The Mixx – Why Tweed Couch is a dedicated user of Mixx.
5. 10 Things I Like Most About Mixx – 10 things to dig about Mixx.
6. Top Digg Contributor’s are Frustrated: Is Mixx the Answer? – More Digg/Mixx commentary.
7. Is Mixx Actually Becoming a Viable? – Could Mixx become a viable investment.
8. Mixxing Your Blend of the Web – Why Mixx is more inviting than Digg.
9. A Digg Clone That Might Actually Make It – Why Mixx can go long term.
10. Mixx Locations – An article on Mixx’s location features.
11. Digg users flock to Mixx – Why unfair rankings have many Digg users pissed and heading to Mixx.
12. Frustrated with Digg, head over to Mixx – Yet another article on making the switch to Mixx.
13. Tired of Digg? Then Try Mixx – Wow, not too many people seem to like big Digg.
14. What A Mixx Up: Interview With Mixx Founder Chris McGill – Brian Wallace does an interview with Mixx founder Chris McGill.
15. 12 Reasons to Join Mixx and Abandon Digg – 12 more reasons to join Mixx.
16. Getting into the Mixx – More views on Mixx.
17. Mixx: My Blend of the Web – Her thoughts of Mixx.
18. I Love Mixx, but I’m Still a Digger – Some will always be a slave to Digg.
19. It’s In The Mixx – Some more Mixx Info.
20. Why Digg Should Be Scared of Mixx – Why Mixx should be causing Digg to shake in their loafers.

That should get you started for now. Mixx looks like it could be a serious Digg contender with some work. Leave any Mixx resources you have in a comment so I can add them in later.

I was just screwing around on Twitter and noticed @shoemoney talking about his blog being DOSed by someone (most likely a botnet.) As far as I know I think he runs his blog on his own server with memcache and all kinds of tools to reduce page load and resource hogging. But this brings up an interesting view. Jeremy gets paid by a lot of private advertisers to run ads and making over $300K on month on them means they are paying a premium for space on his blog.

The blog has been down most of the day and he is working on a solution. But, if he can’t get it back online within a week or so I bet some advertisers are going to be a little miffed. If he doesn’t shell out credit I wonder if they will leave. If your blog went down due to a hacking or something for more than a week, would you be able to take the hit? I know a lot of people who fail to even backup their databases and what not. Having a new backup emailed to you every hour is very handy, and very easy with some of the backup plugins for WordPress. A word of caution to anyone who is developing a trafficked site as with success comes envy and some people like to play rough.

I know Jeremy has a strong background with security and linux enviroments so it should not be an issue for him to get back online. However he is away right now (good planning by the attacker…) so it may take some time before shoemoney.com is back to full operation.

Ranking for keywords requires that your content is indexed in a timely manor. While some websites are indexed daily, some only get visited by Google Bot weekly or even monthly. Having your content indexed fast can mean being the site that breaks news, or missing out to another site that was indexed faster.

Have A Sitemap
Having a sitemap tool is pretty much the first and foremost thing to get done. It can seem like a pain in the ass but its actually really easy. For WordPress users there are various plugins for doing this, and most of them will even let Google, Yahoo, etc. know when you have an updated site map. Setting your sitemap to update with every new entry is a great way to get bots to your site quick. Also make sure you sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. 

Go Dynamic
Dynamic content normally comes in quantity and for that reason it performs much better when getting indexed. It’s much easier to create 20 pages of dynamic content then putting together 20 handmade pages for each piece of content. Having a dynamic website also allows you to include elements like recent news, latest comments, and other dynamic elements. The idea is to give GoogleBot something new every time.

What The Ping
Using ping services is a great way to let major services know that you have new content available. If you are using WordPress or like software, chances are there is a built in ping function with some options to use other ping services as well. Make sure you have the most possible places to ping as the more you hit, the better the chances are that bots will come to the site. Leave a comment if you have any ping lists.

Use Social Media
Chances are there is at least a few social media sites in your niche. Become a prominent member of the site and build a reputation making sure you have a link in your profile to your site. The more and more you build your profile, the more long tail traffic and link juice you push to your site. Also make sure to include any useful widgets that the social network may have available as it can also provide unique content on your site when GoogleBot comes by.

Add A Photo Stream
Photos are a great way to let people know who you are, and what you are about. They are also a quick and easy way to add content to your website. Implementing a Flickr plugin to show some pics in your sidebar is an extremely easy way to give people content. It takes maybe a second to snap a picture and then all you have to do it upload. The dynamic aspect ensures there is something new for GoogleBot as well.

Also keep in mind that when you are creating content you should really be working on making quality content. Something that the bots are going to like. Constantly pumping out content that is 200 words long will not do. It may also work against you making the bots think you are spamming. Just something to keep in mind.

Increasing your social media credibility will defiantly make your job a lot easier when it comes to promotion. Having power user status on various social media sites allows you to funnel traffic in a number of ways, to pretty much any page you want. Obviously, this has its many benefits but in order to get that status you need some credibility. Here’s how to get it.

1. Pick a Good Name
If you are looking for long term social media traffic and not just rankings, don’t pick a spammy keyword filled name. If you are not using your own name pick something original that people will not shy away from. In other words, don’t make your name BigAssSerialKiller. People will most likely stay away from you.

2. Try Not to Spam
Most likely you are going to submit some of your own content sooner or later. Just try to save it for later once you have established power user status. Submitting your own content on a new account will quickly give you spammer status and you don’t want that now do you. Instead, take some time to flesh out your account by submitting other good content you find. Or just go to a popular website and submit their content.

3. Don’t Be A Vote Whore
This is one of those situations where quality beats quantity. If people see you voting for everything under the sun including the most crap of posts, you will get nowhere real fast. Take your time to pick through the content and vote for the good stuff and the stuff you find interesting only. Start to friend people who submit relevant content and don’t go crazy on this objective either. Sure you can go crazy and friend everyone in your niche but stay away from going nuts and making everyone on that network your friend. Chances are no one will return the favor if they notice what you are doing.

4. Get a Dam Picture Already
If you don’t have an avatar in your profile I can almost guarantee people will skip right over you. It’s the first tell tale sign that you are to lazy to be worth looking into. I would recommend a real photo of yourself, not those gay cartoon looking avatars. People respond much better when they see another human, and not a skull and crossbones ya dig.

5. Cross Link Your Social Sites
Chances are that if you are in a certain niche you have friends on multiple social networks in the same niche. Look for these friends on every social network you use. Creating a network like this will not only strengthen your account but make you more visible, and more importantly more prominent in your niche.

6. Perfect Timing
Most of the social media sites you are using have predominantly U.S. traffic. Use that to your benefit when you are submitting content. Chances are if you submit a story at 9:00PM you will have a hard time getting it to the front page or voted up. Submit your content early in the day, or in the afternoon when there is more people scouring across all of the social networks. The more people that are online when you submit, the better your chances.

7. Have Depth In Your Posting
Not submitting your own content at first is important, but you also have to diversify what you are submitting. Try to submit real news stories, or news related to your niche. Submitting 100 pieces of content a week on making money online will most likely place you in the spammer category to those who see what you have submitted.

Before you can use social media for your own personal gain you must create some credibility, and authority. Without those two key components, you will never be able to create a large enough audience to be of any use. There are other routes you can take, and if you are looking to spam for some quick traffic then by all means go ahead. It will work, but be warned the aftermath will be worse. Not only will the traffic die out quickly but you will alienate everyone on the network and possibly get your accounts banned.

There are quite a few ways to build traffic, and decent backlinks using Digg. This particular idea uses the sites Digg links to, instead of the Digg article pages to generate traffic and backlinks. And if your lucky, they won’t be no-follow backlinks.

This method does not have to be used just on Digg either. Any relevant social media news site will work. What it comes down to, is finding content that is going to become popular or has just become popular. Once you find the content, chances are there will be an option to leave a comment. Very simple, go and leave a comment on the content page and on the Digg/Social Site you found it on. The idea behind this is that the content page itself most likely does not have many links pointing to it yet. Once it becomes popular (espcially with Digg) the page will recieve tons of exposure and dozens of backlinks. That linkjuice will now be passed on to you. Propeller, Newsvine, and Shoutwire are some other great places to snipe.

Keep in mind that you should keep any and all comments relative to the content. Spam most likely won’t stick once the traffic gets jacked up becuase people are going to all over that page and notice you are simply dropping a link.

Most likely you know by now that commenting on other blogs can bring you decent traffic to start with. What most don’t know is that you can easily begin to use the tactic against yourself and hurt your blog or brand. Here’s seven ways you may be shooting yourself in the foot:

1. To Much Self Linking - Nobody likes a spammer and your not working with bots here. People can tell your a spammer when they see 3 links to your various blogs in every comment. This includes just dropping links with no comment, or irrelevant links and comments alike. A link here or there pointing to a resource or article related to the post is the way to go when it comes to link dropping. You will find people respond much better to the latter.

2. “That’s Great!” Comments - People can also tell your just baiting when all of your comments are 2-4 words in length. Combine this practice with dropping links and your sure to wreak havoc on your brand or blog. You could be placed on spam lists, blacklists, and people may realize what your doing and publicize it. Make your comments count and don’t go for quantity over quality because sooner or later it will bite you in the ass.

3. First! - Now that people are using comments for traffic, people have begun to post comments just to be first. There’s two ways to look at this one. First off, if you are posting a quality comment its not a big deal and can actually be a useful tactic. When you start to write two word comments just to snipe the first position you will annoy everyone on that blog quickly. Take a break and let someone else get the space for a while as well, people will respond better if it seems more organic than forced.

4. Spammy User Names - With the addition of the Top Commentator widgets on many websites, people did not miss a beat on filling their names with keywords. While this is not really a big deal, you can take it to far. If your name is 4 – 7 words long you are pushing your luck. Not only will it look unnatural but all of the keywords will make it appear spammy. This can again hurt your brand or blog and get you blacklisted on your niche sites.

5. Personal Attacks - There’s a fine line between ball busting, debating, and attacking someone. Aside from walking away with an altered ego, you can really do some damage to your reputation here. Whether a comment was misinterpreted or not be the bigger man. If you disagree with something and respond to it shooting from the hip, expect things to escalate. Unless you want a reputation for poppin’ off at the mount… Don’t do it.

6. Did You Read The Post - Always read the FULL post before submitting a comment. There’s nothing like feeling the impulse to write a comment and then realize you now look like an idiot because your way off base. If you do, it’s going to remain there and you cant do much about it. Developing a reputation for eating your words is sure to damage your brand, and credibility. Take a moment to look things over before getting into comments.

7. Comments Have No Value – While its a no-brainer it apparently needs to be reinforced. If you are adding comments to a blog that have no value you will quickly see a chain reaction with the end result being a damaged reputation for your brand. The easiest way to add value is by helping other commentors, posting relevant information or news, or in other words act as an authority. While it’s okay to crack a joke or two at other’s expenses you don’t want to be a bully so take it easy.

Bottom line: Remember that everything you post in a comment will be public and most of the time you cant edit or delete whats said. If you think something has the potential to damage you rep or your brand then don’t post it, its that simple.

When you first start blogging, getting new comments can be an exciting development. Not only does it let you know people are reading, but people are feeling the need to comment. Most importantly, the chance to build a brand and reputation is there. Building comments can be slow, and its not exactly an easy task for a new blog. Now that you know how to convice people to subscribe, its time to get some comments.

Be Direct And Ask For Comments
You can be direct as you want… For the most part people will actually respond as well. Ask our readers what they think, do they have something to add, or is there something you forgot to mention? Simple, but can be extremely effective.

Be Controversial
Controversial content can be a great way to get a reaction from people. And, if it becomes viral you can see a massive response of hundreds of comments. Naturally there will be some more aggressive comments but that’s part of the game, its up to you to decide whether or not censoring certain comments is necessary. I personally don’t censor anything unless it contains a lot of swearing, or anything explicitly adult. The idea is to have a debate going with both sides present.

Before I changed the focus of my blog I had done some posts about a Microsoft Xbox 360 contest called “X Marks The Spot.” Basically they would give you clues as to where you can find the green X’s and you had to find the word containing the green X. These words where spread across numerous websites. I thought it was to much of a pain in the ass so I built a SOAP protocol for the site. Microsoft for some reason did not feel the need to encrypt the list of answers so every night at midnight I would hop on and get the list within seconds then post it to my blog. The contest was like 60 days I think and within the first week I had over 1,300 comments on the 7 posts. By the end of the two months I had over 30,000 comments on my blog.

Offer Something For Comments
If can be frustrating having a large readership but no commenting. Contests are basically the bread and butter of incentivized commenting. Randomly selecting a comment very day, week, etc. for a prize can be very effective. You can offer cash, advertising, review services, tool access, eBooks, etc. A word of caution though: If your not careful on how often people can win you will most likely see an increase of useless + spammy comments.

Comment On Other Blogs
This seems to be a tip that I give in a lot of posts. It’s incredibly easy and it works so use it. Finding relevant blogs is easy as using Google or Technorati search. After you find some blogs make sure they will be easy to dominate comment wise. You want to make it to the top commentor position on blogs that have substantial traffic. Most people now have the Top Commentators plugin installed so this should not be a problem.

There are a lot of ways you can improve traffic on your blog. Some of them are no-brainers but there are also some that you probably haven’t thought of. Here’s seven untapped tips to improve your blog traffic.

1. Save your best posts for the best time.
If you are cranking out content, you should have a lit of posts waiting to be published. You know some of them are better than others so why not submit them on days your blog has higher performance. Take a few minuets to log into your analytics tool and see what days your blog gets more traffic and on those days, publish the best content you have in the line up. The better performance maximizes your chances of sharing, social mentions, bookmarks, backlinks, etc.

2. Answer questions.
If you solve peoples problems chances are they will continue to come back. If you are getting questions in your comments, and in your e-mail then answer them. Chances are it really won’t take that long but the more you increase your reputation, the stronger your blog and brand will become.

3. Get away from your computer.
Go to the mall, go out to eat… Go do something totally unrelated to computers, the internet, and blogging. Look for titles and text in the places around you and think about how they can help you. Use what sticks out on your blog and see what reaction it brings. The importance of titles has been mentioned by everyone, everywhere on the internet so it must carry some kind of weight. To generate hype around a post it will be necessary to create a title that’s just as good as the post itself.

4. Use your competition.
Subscribe to industry news feeds, and feeds of blogs in your niche. Know whats poppin’ in your industry and stay relevant. Your competition can be a great source of content. Not only the feeds can help you though. Why not craft a piece of quality content and submit it to a prominent blog. They get a quality post on the site, and you get some great exposure for your blog, name, and brand once again. This is highly effective and is no harder than if you where creating some content for yourself.

5. Update your posts.
Look at your posts and see how you can improve them. Can you make the details stronger, the title better, include more links? There are a lot of strange factors that go into creating a viral post. While it is just blogging, you can’t have horrible grammar. For the most part people wont mind (myself included) some simple mistakes. But if your post reads like it was written by a ten year old, you may run into some problems. Take the time to read over your posts and you will be thankful, chances are it won’t take long for you find some errors.

6. Interlink your blog posts.
If you post a great resource or a post that’s performing well, go back to other posts and link it. For instance if you write a good post about “linksys routers,” go back to five or ten related posts in insert a link to your “linksys routers” post. Work the link into the post so it looks natural. Another great technique is creating large resource lists and updating them to include your posts as time goes on. While the list becomes increasingly popular, all of your posts will too.

7. Keyword your high traffic posts.
A lot of the time you will notice that people end up at your content for related keywords that you don’t have in the title. Taking some time to work the keywords into your title can increase your search rankings, and the traffic that goes with it. Being on the first page of search results can be extremely beneficial for many reasons.