Although the original story has been updated as, “This story is a parody and is not intended to be taken seriously,” we can take a lesson on how to drive traffic to your website through an innovative marketing. (or is it scam?)
Regardless whether the story is true of not, this concept has proven to bring about 6,000 backlinks and made front page of digg.
Interesting fact is that the story was intended to target the keyword, “credit card” on search engines and I bet whoever is behind this did profit a little just couples days of this stint.
What can you learn from this?
Well, do not go out there and write a fake story but use something “viral” that everyone will find “unbelievable” or “looks too fake”.
When money.co.uk posted a story titled 13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers, the idea was that it could be read as a humorous parody piece that could get attention from social media sites, yield quality backlinks, and draw in hundreds of thousands of visitors. The backlinks would help the site achieve higher rankings on search engines, especially for the target keyword phrases that would include the words “Credit Card”.
Digg will still hold its traffic as it has been steady with a large number of bloggers using the service.
For Yahoo Buzz to get even more popular, they need to open it up to all the bloggers, not just via invites.
I am sure this will happen soon and Yahoo Buzz might take a big share of the social networking market.
Furthermore, Yahoo Buzz has a more diverse audience than Digg. While Digg’s young, male, techy audience has been the stuff of legend since the site’s beginnings, 51% of Yahoo Buzz’s visitors are women. This doesn’t matter much to the users but it does matter a great deal to the advertisers; another legend has it that diggers never click on ads, and this might not hold true for Yahoo Buzz.
No More Notebooks, a social shopping bookmarking service was just launched.
Basically, it’s a social bookmarking service so you can make/save/share your favorite shopping list.
Although there’s already a big array of shopping social networks out there, (my favorite is wists) No More Notebooks might be able to be successful through it’s price comparisions and through more innovation.
There’s always plenty room for new sites especially at the rate the internet is growing today.
My name is Luke Harrison and I have recently finished my final year project for my New Media degree at The University of Leeds, UK.
For this I have created a brand new social networking website based around creating wishlists. The website has been built entirely from scratch single-handedly by me and I am now hoping to take it past a university stage and into the real world. I would therefore like to submit it to your startup review. There are still a huge number of features to be added over the next few weeks/months but I still feel the current product is something really useful to the online consumer.
Well, I was over at AdTech 2008 today, an exhibit which shows off America’s best advertising/publishing companies. Today, I found many new ways to monetize our blogs and social networks through various different affiliate and publishing programs.
I did get a chance to run into John Chow and also ask my own questions about how to make money online and the secrets behind his success.
I figured to take a video and share it with the world so maybe it will help you make more money too:
Wow, it’s been a fun ride with our new site, SiteHoppin.com. Although we haven’t really made that much money off traffic, the good news is that we’ve “doubled” our network traffic as whole in just 2 weeks since SiteHoppin’s public beta launch!
It’s great that our traffic is going up, but how can this help you? Go submit your blog posts at SiteHoppin‘. (The more you bookmark, the more it will get distributed to the SiteHoppers)
Zedomax Network, a Web2.0 Web 2.5 company based out of San Francisco, breaks through 16K unique visitors for the day on January 11th, 2008, one day right after the founder Max’s birthday.
Thanks to their new site, SiteHoppin’, which brought more than 10K unique visitors for the day, contributing to the Zedomax Network.
Check it out if you want to see our site being revamped live.
On another great note for year 2008 and 4am in the morning, we got a new knol project called http://knolproject.net. Right now, we don’t have anything on there but we are planning to “open-source” the paid wiki concept to let everyone get in the new “paid wiki” wave. Basically, we will teach you how to make a wiki site like the One Buck Wiki or the new Google Knol Project. We are currently accepting any freelance developers to contribute and share ideas for the site so if you are interested in community development, shoot us an email at zedomax [at] gmail.com and you will be included in our exclusive list of developers for the new open source project.
In this special post, we will tell you how you can increase your PageRank!
NOTE: Although we admit that there are many “standardized” methods, this method was learned through experience and actual trial-and-error by SEO experts at Zedomax Network.
So here’s your TOP5 List of Things to do and watch for when trying to increase your PageRank:
1. Link to high PR blogs and sites. (In other words, linking massively to websites with high PageRanks is a very good thing) Install the Google Toobar if you don’t know what PageRank is. (It’s that little bar that says PageRank.)
2. BE VERY AWARE OF incoming comments, pings, and trackbacks from other blogs and social networking sites.
In other words, you have to only let “real” blogs and “real” websites link to you. If you have any doubt the sites is a splog (spam blog), or a scraper site, you will want to not let that person, blog, or website leave any trace behind.
3. Google Algorithm is simple. The more links you have coming in, the better. The more links you have going out to high PRs, the better.
This is slightly different from the conventional, “the number of links coming in divided by the number of links going out.” Google somehow ranks you higher if you link to high PR sites and this is what “we” learned through time and trial/error.
Even splogs can help your PageRank as long as you are not linking back to them.
4. Write posts on recent “big” event that’s considered brand new. Doing this automatically gets you some traffic since it’s something new.
For example, if iPod just came out and you were the very first blogger who wrote about it, I bet you are still pulling in traffic from Google. This type of “iPod” keyword can easily boost your PageRank and get lots of traffic.
5. Use the above advices today and take action!
How do you know if it’s working? Well, using all the possible measurement systems today, you’d probably still wouldn’t be able to compute it. But, you will start to notice that you start getting more search terms from Google daily. (Yes, that means your PageRank IS going up.)
Higher PageRank = More Traffic
It’s that simple although there are exceptions with some high PR sites that don’t get as much traffic as others. But we theorize that PageRank is directly correlated with Traffic.
Right now, there’s the new project by Google, Knol Project. We will actually doing this on our older brother site, Zedomax.com. We are trying to see if we can show up #1 on Google for “Knol Project” since it’s so new.
I have been keeping a keen eye on the new project by creator of Million Dollar Wiki, Graham Langdon. His new EntreCard, a free widget for bloggers, allows bloggers to advertise and trade 125×125 pixel ads for free. The above is a Alexa web traffic charts comparing BlogRush and EntreCard. As you can see, BlogRush did get MASSIVE traffic in the beginning and slowly on its way downhill. On the other hand, EntreCard started very very SLOW, and seems to have caught up with BlogRush already. Once EntreCard gets out to even more bloggers, the viral effect will cause EntreCard to exponentially grow. Am I an EntreCard evangelist? Hell yes, because it’s a great advertising system built on great functionalities unlike BlogRush.
Now, you can see a close-up of what’s been happening between EntreCard and BlogRush in the last 4 weeks. I bet it won’t be more than 2 weeks before EntreCard eclipses BlogRush. What will happen to BlogRush? It will probably die and suffer massively while EntreCard “converts” BlogRush users to its own.
If you are a blogger and haven’t tried EntreCard, try it today. Our card is the one with One Buck Wiki and EntreWiki so, drop us a card!
