10 Reasons why Digg.com is Digging it's own Grave

1. No matter how many times you blog it, Digg is not a fair democracy. Bigger sites, that already have more visitors and who post a 'Digg' icon after a post will get far more votes than a site of lesser traffic. Their story also carries more weight and people are more likely to vote it up like sheep anyway. It is a popularity contest.

2. People are being banned left right and centre for pedantic little reasons, e.g.DotmySpot.

3. You get next to no benefit of submitting someone else’s article.

4. Traffic is good, but Digg traffic often crashes the site or sends the bandwidth bill through the roof (not on blogger blog as they are free). I am not offering possible solutions, just highlighting the problems.

5. You cannot prevent an article of yours being submitted by someone else. This wouldn’t usually matter, but if you wrote an article a year ago which is now out of date, and someone just submitted it, you would look like a damn fool.

6. There are arguably better sites for the same job - I wont mention examples because I don't want to start a war between them…

7. Digg traffic rarely clicks on ads, and so does not equal advertising dollars.

8. Many of the posts are totally off topic of Digg. This wouldn’t be so bad but some actually make it to the front page!

9. You can't Digg an article without logging in.

10. "Digg may remove any Content and Digg accounts at any time for any reason (including, but not limited to, upon receipt of claims or allegations from third parties or authorities relating to such Content), or for no reason at all." For no reasons at all!? What’s all that about!

Squidoo - Web 2.0...and all that

While we sit here blogging, people around us are doing something that will make them rich. Everyone who is at least 1/50th nerd knows that Web 2.0 (social networks, online video etc) is where it's at. Why aren’t I doing it?

1. Because I'm lazy
2. Because I will...in a bit.

In the meantime, while I gather my thoughts and ideas for the future what else is there to do but take a look at these sites and blog about them?

This morning I took a look at Squidoo. I first heard about it on Mylot and I though it could be a good place to promote my referral programs and get a little more traffic for this blog. You also earn on Squidoo from the AdSense ads that are displayed on your 'lenses' (pages) that you create. Sqidoo keeps a portion and you can chose whether to keep your portion or donate it to charity.

"with no other deductions, we pay 5% of our post-expense revenue directly to the charity pool, 50% directly to our lensmasters and retain the rest to pay off investors and employees"

I decided to make my first lens on an affiliate program and see if I could get some referrals (I know I'm so sleazy!). I typed in the search bar, 'AGLOCO', but there were already a zillion lenses on that, so I tried a couple of others and eventually I found one that there was only 1 other lens on; and that was Cashcrate.

Actually making a lens is pretty easy and there’s not really any point in me going through the process, you just follow the steps. The only hiccup was the first two times I clicked 'publish' it said there was an error on in my lens, so I just re-saved everything and it worked after that.

Here is the final product: My CashCrate lens.

The FAQ is pretty good and should answer any questions you have. Personally I think Squidoo is going to be huge, (it already has over 40,000 members). I’m going to do a lot more 'Squidooing' and see if I can make a reasonable amount of money from it. I will let you know the results!

Spicypage is 1 Month Old!

CLICK TO ENLARGE
Spicy page sent this to me, "We are proud to announce that we are officially one month and one day old". I am a huge fan of spicy page. Don't ask me why that screen shot is a bit odd (the pie chart has gonw a funny colour), but you can still see that I get 2.1% of my traffic from Spicypage. The graph on the right is the Spicypage traffic plotted on it's own. You can see it started of high, because after I joined I voted on a whole load of sites and added their Webmasters to my 'Friends' list. Many reciprocated with a vote which got me on the front page for a few days. Its pretty easy to get on the front page, you just need about 10 votes in a day but you wont get massive amounts of traffic like Digg because Spicypage is still growing.

They also made this handy addition:

"Just a reminder that our policy allows for a site to receive votes from the same people every 30 days. So, for those of you who voted for sites 30 days ago, you can vote again for the same sites.

you can send messages to multiple recipients. So, if you need others to vote for your site/blog, let them know and keep on letting them know every 30 days. Your site/blog might be inside the Most Popular section all the time!"

Unfortunately for me I joined on January 25th which isn't 30 days ago. I think Spicypage has some great potential for growth so join now and get voting!

Social Networking

We all know by know (well you will if you have been reading this blog) that social networking is a useful tool for network marketers, whether you are looking to get referrals for an affiliate program or get some extra traffic and/or feedback about your website. SpicyPage is an up-and-coming social network. It is essentially the same as Digg only different...Instead of voting on an individual story or post entire blogs are voted on.

'Voting' on a blog doesn’t mean you have to think its the best blog in the world. It just means you like it and think it deserves a little extra traffic. Voting is a reader’s way of saying thank you to the blogger with the click of a button. Not only is this psychologically rewarding for the blogger, but enough votes will result in the blog/website appearing on the SpigyPage Homepage in the very prominent 'Most popular' section; this obviously brings that blogger more traffic.

SpicyPage is also a great place to make 'friends' - not real friends, but the kind of friend you might ask for a link exchange or something of that sort. Much like Mylot you can invite members to join your 'friends' group and you can send messages to each other. The idea is that eventually it will end up that everyone is interconnected with other people who are in the same niche enabling them to be able to communicate with each other easily.

So go check Spicypage out!