It’s not much of a secret that getting a story onto the front page of Digg is without a glimmer a doubt, something that will absolutely skyrocket your traffic (hows 20,000-50,000 visitors sound?), and while many successfully manage to eventually get their much beloved websites there, it often takes a whole lot of blood, tears and bucket loads of sweat to make it. Well except for Digg user msaleem, who’s managed to successfully and legitimately land a whopping 1,161 articles onto the fortress heavily guarded by nerds armed with a barrage of unwarranted insults, and an abnormal lack of exposure to natural sunlight and society as a whole - otherwise known as Diggs front page. And if that wasn’t enough, Muhammad has also managed to become a top user over at propeller.

If I mentioned the user name ‘msaleem’ out of a pool of over one million registered users to a regular contributor over at Digg - or Propeller for that matter, chances are they’d know whom I’m referring to. A self professed social media maven, extremely talented writer, creative thinker, and university student, Saleem is considered the second most successful and largest contributor on Digg - so when the opportunity to conduct an interview came along, best believe I wasn’t going to let this one slip. And now that I’ve ‘obtained’ Muhammad until the end of the interview (let me check if his still confined to my dungeon), we better get crackin’ before he finds a way to escape.

Thanks very much for agreeing to take time out to do this Muhammad. Let’s kick things off!

How long have you been involved with social media?

I’ve been involved in social media since Late 2005.

What do you find most frustrating about Digg?

One of the most annoying things is that the algorithm actually works against the top contributors which is counterintuitive. Also, they need to be more open in their communication with their community.

Is there anything in particular you can tell us about Digg and Propeller traffic? How much of it do you manage to retain? *

They say that the conversion rate for social media traffic is one-third that of search traffic. However, after using social media, you also increase your google traffic, which you can add to the conversion.

What kind of articles - in your experience - typically tend to hold up well after submission?

The articles that truly create value, and content that is evergreen is more likely to convert better, and also bring good long-term traffic.

I understand you deal with a whole string of other social media websites. What would you deem to be your favorite, and why?

My favorite has to be StumbleUpon. The content is great, I love the discovery aspect of it, and the community is genuinely appreciative of your participation. I love networking through StumbleUpon.

What do you feel is key to making an article hit the front page, and why?

Honestly, there is no magic to it. You need good content, submitted by a user in good standing and you have a hit on your hands. You have to participate on the site, of course, to know what kind of content the community appreciates.

Have you fallen victim to the notorious ‘comment abuse’ that seems to regularly occur on Digg - and if so, how has it effected you?

I’ve been abused on the comments a few times but I’ve learned not to care about that. Anonymity on the web breeds idiots and we just cannot let it bother us.

Browsing around on your StumbleUpon profile, I noticed you were also a hired scout on Propeller. What’s that like?

Being a hired scout has been great. We get to interact with the management, the programmers/developers and get to give direct input on the future direction of the site. We’re also going to be unveiling an awesome new site soon.

You can visit Muhammad’s blog by clicking here.

Imagine having your performance monitored through the measurement of your heart rate, body temperature, brain signals, movement, facial expression and blood pressure through the use of a Big Brother style monitoring system, employed by your employer to detect signs of stress, productivity and overall well being. Sounds like something out of Sci-Fi movie doesn’t it?

Microsoft is currently developing an advanced employee monitoring solution, capable of delivering alerts to your manager if signs of stress, frustration or incompetence are detected. The software will function through the use of wireless sensors, designed to measure an employees metabolism, and has understandably forced civil liberty groups and privacy lawyers to unleash the hounds on Microsoft’s latest attempt at getting something right.

“Imposing this level of intrusion on employees could only be justified in exceptional circumstances,” Britain’s Information Commissioners Office said.

The US Patent office have confirmed the patent was filed eighteen months ago, and was finally published last month, with patent lawyers warning it could be granted within the following year.

Microsoft, which has taken an annoying unofficial stance on refusing to comment on projects under development, has issued a surprising statement defending the creation of the technology, and indicating that the heart beat data is only an example of what could potentially be used in the application.

“This particular patent application, in general, describes an innovation aimed at improving activity-monitoring systems and uses the monitoring of user heart rate as an example of the kind of physical state that could be monitored to detect when users need assistance with their activities, and to offer assistance by putting them in touch with other users who may be able to help,” said Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s vice president of intellectual property and licensing.

“It is important to keep in mind that with most organizations in the business of innovation, some of our patent applications reflect inventions that are currently present in our products, and other applications represent innovations being developed for potential future use.”

Far be it from Google’s moral capability to randomly slap websites around when the office pie supply has reached a critical shortage, consequently halting the war and allowing employees to resume normal duties, rather than tactically and wastefully disposing of food by engaging each other through the use of indoor guerrilla fighting tactics. When the sound of pies flying, volleyballs being whacked, and massage chairs vibrating cease, Google employees are more than likely dishing out barrages of slaps, in what seems be some sort of twisted revenge it seems to insist on handing to its loyal users.

First came the unbelievably stupid Adsense referral restrictions - reducing payouts, and cutting a sizable number of dedicated websites from a loop that was already spiraling down hill. Now comes Google’s PageRank surprise, in what must be among the largest volume of websites I’ve seen take a beating after an update. Needless to say, this blog received a PageRank downgrade (which was reasonable to expect when I went ahead and erased the posts made last year in a bid to regather focus by erasing the past), which really couldn’t bother me less as long as the PageRank number remains completely and utterly useless.

I couldn’t help wondering why Google’s mood has been incredibly intolerant and rather snappy lately, and why on earth Yahoo or any other half sane competitor doesn’t step up their game and take advantage of the situation here. Let’s be realistic for a moment. I can’t see Yahoo ever returning to what it once was (popularity wise), and the thought of MSN being the leading search engine is as realistic as George Bush growing himself a brain - however the opportunity to seize a portion of the Adsense market is a possibility that cannot be ignored.

The Yahoo Publisher Network started off with a massive hype campaign being carried by it’s very own users, which is obviously a good sign, however as the service matured they have managed to drive themselves downhill, with a decline in their rate of pay, and have yet to allow international users access to the network. I mean come on guys, why would those of us you’d actually accept into the network, switch to something even crappier than Adsense?

I must admit that the MSN network is becoming an alternative I may just consider looking into, as there seems to be a lot of industry talk regarding their effectiveness. I still believe MSN can up its game, and get a little more aggressive with Google, by somehow throwing money at the problem to fix it (hopefully our much beloved Microsoft will have some left after they foot the bill for Vista ).

Call me arrogant (please don’t, I’m sensitive ), but Google appears to be stepping on a lot of toes (judging from what other blogs are posting), and while some sort of backlash is inevitable, it’d be ridiculously hilarious to believe it’d effect the search giant in the slightest. In the end Google is a business, and it has to protect its interests, however when you have such a dominance over a market, and a slogan proudly denouncing evil (like my evilness) I think it’d be fair to expect some sort of moral obligation. It has always been my opinion that one company shouldn’t hold so much power over the internet, and would welcome some sort of government intervention to cap its capabilities and growth. I mean Google can’t possibly continue as a super power forever, and it’d be interesting as to what leads to it’s demise, whether it be ten or ten thousand years from now.

What do you think? Is Google going a little too far with Adsense, and the latest PageRank update? Are we growing to expect too much of the company, or am I being unreasonable here? I understand that the number of people trying to game the search engine must be astronomical however with the amount of money power and dollars the company has, there has to be a way to counter the problem without affecting the genuine users.

I’d love to hear your opinion.

Once a backyard operation run by a pair of college students in early 1996, Google has since expeditiously exploded into the most distinguished and authoritative super power on the internet. It has reduced the once acutely prominent Yahoo search engine into something currently struggling to maintain its market share, and has ruthlessly demolished anyone game enough to attempt to compete with its interests. With an utterly astounding and remarkably large portfolio of services, Google has grown beyond a simple search engine, currently offering approximately one hundred and nineteen products and services ranging from Google Earth (offering satellite imagery of the entire world), Gmail (the worlds second largest free web mail provider) to YouTube (the largest video sharing site on the web). The success of the company has also seen its name officially added to both the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary. But you didn’t need me to tell you all that, because anyone unaware of these facts couldn’t have even been living under a rock for the last twelve years.

The success of Google stems from creativity and the ability to effectively cater to the needs of the masses - not from a cookie cutter website directed towards an already extremely saturated market (hint hint hint to the cookie cutter turn-key people ). Larry Page, and Sergey Brin knew that a search engine employing a page ranking system would naturally yield much more accurate results than what was currently available, and would consequently set them apart from their competition. In essence, these two college students effectively toppled the already established and successful corporations by simply taking an idea (a search engine) and enhancing it. While this article is geared more towards what we can learn from Google, I felt it’d also be ideal to dedicated a few sentences to the entire MySpace vs FaceBook saga. FaceBook employed the very same tactic as Google by effectively taking the concept of a social networking website and building upon it, and is now widely regarded as a superior alternative to MySpace.

Sometimes a lot of us are really just after the quick fix easy miracle and instant solution and don’t take the time to slow down and a look at the traditional techniques for success. Sure, there’s a million and one other things you can employ to yield quite a punch, but establishing a solid foundation like Google, FaceBook and even Apple among of a countless series of the most successful companies, is absolutely crucial to your long term success. All the marketing in the world cannot help you if your website and its content is a load of mumbo jumbo every average Joe is already using.

Google’s rise to stardom wasn’t driven by a massive smear campaign against the other search engines (oh boy do I miss the days of Excite, Lycos and Hotbot), nor was it driven by a link baiting strategy. It didn’t solely depend on another website to direct hoards of traffic to its shores, and It didn’t pull a massive stunt to attract attention to itself. It didn’t plaster the forums and blogs of the internet with spam comments linking to its product, and it didn’t sit back and expect things to magically work themselves. By employing an innovative service, world of mouth was what mainly shot Google up to a position which exceeded even the wildest imagination of its developers, and while that term is loosely thrown around these days, I think its safe to say that this can surely be deemed an exception.

I still remember how people used to excessively moan and groan back in the early days, when they’d struggle trying to generate useful results from fatally flawed search engines. It seems like yesterday when I’d hear the bi-weekly (and often weekly) search engine suggestion, assuring me another search engine would cater towards all my needs, and that the rest were becoming absolute because their lack of accuracy was finally about to catch up with them. Google wasn’t about honking its own horn because the masses were satisfied enough to gladly do it on behalf of the company.

It has always remained my opinion, that building excessive hype towards a service or product will always create standards one cannot possibly live up to, and would therefore prefer to wow my audience through the much beloved and traditional element of surprise. I believe Google has proved my opinion is indeed valid, workable and most probably practical for a majority of websites seeking to unload a new service into the overly saturated realms of the internet.

Renowned for its traditionally simplistic web layout, Google has never really been a fan of cluttering a service with a cluster of unnecessary and therefore pointless features. Aside from enabling users to effectively generate results without being forced to look a portal overfilled with a series of flashy advertisements and imagery, this has enabled the online giant to effectively stay focused on its core service - and while we do witness a string of advertisements when browsing through search results, I think it’s rather safe to say that Google doesn’t ram them down our throats. Webmasters, entrepreneurs, and circus trained monkeys, need to understand, that when offering a service or product - projecting a barrage of unwarranted features towards a user can only really generate confusion and a sense of frustration. Instead of forcing people to rummage through your website, and on that account waste time, handing your offering on a platter will typically lead to increased usage.

Google is considered one of the most ideal places of employment in the world, offering free gourmet lunches and dinners, massage chairs, an on-site masseuse, Google child care, a gift matching program (matching contributions of up to $3000 made to non profit organizations by employees), an on site doctor, free shuttle service, financial planning services, a car wash, gym, hair stylist, fitness classes, bike repair, dry cleaning, sauna, an outdoor volley ball court, roller hockey, ski trips and what in my opinion is genius - 20% development time, allowing employees to take one day a week to work on their own projects - among a series of other delicious perks. Google truly values its employees, and understands that they are the heart and sole of the corporation and therefore key to its success. There’s way too many websites out there who under value their employees, which obviously leads to a lack in motivation and moral, and if there’s anything you should soak in from this article, I’d strongly suggest this paragraph.

First and foremost, I’d like to apologize for the bad grammar in my previous article. I’ve picked up on a few mistakes, and while I like to consider myself somewhat of a super hero, the reality is I’m simply a human being who over the previous few days, has managed to excessively exhaust himself. Maybe I’m being a little too harsh on myself, however I find nothing is worse than a blog post full of grammatical errors - I like to think I’m my own biggest critic, and I’d like to thank my readers for putting it with it. I’ll make every effort to ensure things remain at the high standard they’ve previously been.

On a more positive note, I thought I’d so something a little different today, and compile a list of resources I’ve at one point or another successfully employed throughout my many years online. I hope these resources will be of benefit to my readers, and while anyone can really just type in a few words into Google and retrieve the same results, I think a lot of us don’t really go out looking for some these resources because they simply haven’t crossed our mind. I’m also basing this off my own experience, and can pretty much vouch for every link in the list.

I’ve decided that I will not be employing affiliate links inside my blog posts in the foreseeable future without providing an alternative link which will directly take you to the requested destination. I’d like to give my readers the option to choose whether or not they’d like to contribute to the blog by clicking and considering registering or making a purchase on an affiliate URL. The following list is therefore completely free of affiliate links.

Discussion Boards (In order from most preferred)

Social Media Outlets (In order from most preferred)

Web Design (In order from most preferred)

Web Hosting Companies (In order from most preferred)

Webmaster Related (In order from most preferred)

Websites Inside My RSS Grabber (NO affiliation with any sites)

Website Monetization (In order from most preferred)

Wordpress Plugins (In order from most preferred)

Some of you may find this list to be extremely helpful, and at the very least, a recommendation of the stated websites, while others would have probably already known all about all these websites. I know there’s a few that I’ve forgotten, and will therefore continue to update this list until my brain collapses and alien spacemen invade the world as per our contract, consequently crowning me as ruler… woops, off topic and wayy too much said.

In one of my previous posts, I recommended checking out the competition when setting up a marketing campaign. I’ve noticed a whole heap of websites neglecting this because they often feel their competitor has corned the audience in their selected advertising platform. This is often not true. Sometimes it’s handy to know what the other players in your industry are up to, and even though sometimes using their ideas isn’t plausible, it will at least give you something to work with when setting up your own marketing campaign.

Since I hardly consider anyone my competitor in this industry(ahh the beauty of blogging), I’ll give a rundown of two blogs that are known to make some serious cash. First up (prepare the plank!) - Mr Jeremy Schoemaker.

Top 5 Traffic Sources

It’d be expected that direct visits would top the list for Schoemoney in particular, as the this photo has been spread to pretty much every Adsense user. The Adsense Cheque is the second most viewed page on the blog, with the main page leading suite.

John Chow is another prominent blogger who makes a killing in this industry, and while I still consider Darren Rowse the leading player by far, it’s still interesting to check out other bloggers. John Chow’s blog didn’t release any official traffic figures like Shoemoney’s, so I did a little bit of snooping (very simple stuff anyone can do with the help of good ol’ Google)

John Chow’s blog was heavily Dugg in September 2006. The articles that became popular were:

John Chow’s blog was heavily contributed to by Digg, which saw him earn $17,828.61 the very next month (August 2006).

Jeremy and John know how to convert first time readers into recurring visitors, through the employment of well written, unique and honest articles. Content is, and will always remain king. While both bloggers enjoy buckets of traffic from Digg, getting an article to hit popular status on Digg can often be a daunting task. These guys stuck it out. I don’t think getting five articles to hit the front page was easy for Mr. Chow, however this guy managed to exercise a great persistence and boy did it pay off.

We also learned that traditional SEO is and will always play an important role in online marketing, with Shoemoney still getting a major influx of traffic from Google. Sometimes it’s good to just skip back to the basics, instead of diving in and attempting to find a magic solution, and while SEO can sometimes be a pretty difficult task, when correctly applied will pretty much always deliver results.

Everyone knows it. I know it, you know it, your visitors know it, my pet lemon tree knows it. Link baiting is one of the most rewarding, well proven, cost effective marketing techniques at a webmasters disposal and allowing an opportunity to caste out some bait slip by, is definitely something you’ll be kicking yourself about later down the track. Link baiting has the ability to easily turn you into an overnight success. It can completely transform your SEO ranking, and even dramatically increase the value of your website.

For those new to all this, link baiting is practically supercharged link building. Instead, link baiting is the art of generating something so unique, significant and outstanding, that it spreads virally consequently generating links to your website. Here’s nine ideas that can be used to encourage link baiting;

Organizing a contest designed to encourage users to interact more can often generate massive amounts of buzz - especially when an exciting prize lies await. Give away products or services relevant to your niche and remember to let generosity shed it’s colours - the more you give away, the more exciting the competition as a whole is. Offering an iPod to the publisher of the most interesting five posts on a technological forum for example, would be extremely effective if handled correctly. The bigger the contest, the bigger the feedback from outside sources.

Organizing a massive give away is also extremely effective, and in my experience has yielded much better responses than contest. A perfect example for a blog would be to offer $50 to a random four individuals who subscriber to your RSS feed.

Shoemoney tried this by deeming the seemingly unpopular US President George Bush as the greatest president in the history of the United States. This generated a mega amount of buzz both on and off the website, with back links cropping up left, right and center

Humans are naturally curious beings, and using phrases such as ‘change is on its way…’ or ‘it’s coming’ can assist you in using that curiosity to your advantage. Make sure that ‘the change’ is worthwhile and lives up to the hype, or this can very well backfire.

Finding fault in what the bigger websites say can often be extremely challenging but yet very very rewarding, especially if you can bring up some evidence to support your claim. This can add credibility to you, and shift some of their viewers onto your website, especially if word gets out.

Make sure you post something unique and compelling to read, as this is your opportunity to lure some of the host blogs readers onto yours. Remember to make sure you’re allowed to include a by line in your post.

Darren posted a list of blog posts comparing blogging to alcohol, dating, golf and fishing, among a series of other things. Definitely a very amusing read, and something that can generate links for both him and the writers. This can also easily be applied to websites.

Exposing an ill-dealing in your industry by conducting your own investigation and being the first in on the scoop can yield absolutely explosive results. Make sure what you’re saying is genuine, and doesn’t defame anybody.

I know it’s much easier said than done, but arranging an interview with a renowned and a well respected industry figure can on its own yield traffic and results. Placing them on the spot by projecting unexpected questions at them is what really spices things up. Be creative, but also ensure that they do not take offense to these questions.

The Digg effect is often dubbed as every webmasters dream, and hey, let’s not kid ourselves for a second here - getting an influx of traffic to the point where your web hosting will struggle to keep up is something that can bring some of us close to tears . Others will run through a forest wearing nothing but their underpants, and others will resort to climbing trees and doing back flips on a main road. Many webmasters are often unprepared for the sudden surge of traffic Digg can bring, and will consequently miss out on having their content in front of thousands of visitors.

This is why ensuring your website is up to scratch before trying your hand with Digg is absolutely paramount, and because I love you all so much I’ve gone ahead and written up 10 ways to survive the Digg effect. Here they are!

Most shared web hosts will not be able to support all the traffic Digg brings in, regardless of the amount of bandwidth included in your plan. This is simply to do with the fact that catering to such a large number of guests will use up a considerable amount of system resources, and will eventually bring other websites on the server to a crawl. I’d strongly suggest checking out MediaTemple who have engineered a ‘Grid Server’ solution especially for traffic surges. Most dedicated servers and some VPS should also be able to cope with the traffic surge.

WP-Cache is a life saver, and will improve the performance of your website while under extreme pressure. Upload WP-Cache to your plugins directory, enable it in Word Press, go to options, select ‘WP-Cache’, and it should run an automatic configuration. It should also provide you with instructions on rectifying any issues you may have.

Installing a PHP Accelerator such as eaccelerator will boost the performance of applications currently running PHP. If you’re unsure as to how to do this, your web hosting provider should be able to help. Eaccelerator has been known to reduce server loads by around 40%.

Use ab to run a stress test on your website before submitting anything to Digg. This will help give you an idea of how your website will cope under pressure.

If there’s any unnecessary images and other media on your website, get rid of them for the time being. This will help ensure things remain smooth, and will assist in keeping your bandwidth usage to a minimum. Alternatively you can turn images into text links while you’re running your Digg campaign.

Apple today launched its latest meanest and loudest product, the new Mac Pro. Equipped with a staggering eight processor cores, and a brand spankin’ new system architecture - capable of outperforming its predecessor by at least two times, the New Mac Pro employs the latest Intel technology and uses new 45 nanometer Quad-Core Xeon processors running a whopping 3.2GHz. The Mac Pro also comes with a ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card with 256MB of video memory and can support the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB of video memory, or NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB of video memory. Prices start at $2,799.

According to Apple, this Mac sets a new benchmark for the rest of its product line. “The new Mac Pro is the fastest Mac we’ve ever made,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “With 3.2 GHz 8-core Xeon processing, a 1600 MHz front side bus and 800 MHz memory, the new Mac Pro uses the fastest Intel Xeon architecture on the market.”

Designed to be the most expandable Mac ever, the Mac Pro features four hard drive bays with direct attach, cable-free installation of four 1TB Serial ATA hard drives, totaling 4TB of internal storage and support for two SuperDrives. With optional 15000 rpm SAS drives that can deliver up to 250MB/s of RAID 5 disk I/O performance, the Mac Pro is without doubt an absolutely ideal solution for film editors.

Leopard - which has been dubbed by countless industry critics as something superior to Windows Vista, is also included and is filled with 300 additional features such as Stacks, a redesigned finder, Quick Look, Spaces and Time Machine.

The launch comes shortly after Apply recently announced its share price had tipped $200, consequently making it the third most valuable technology based company after Microsoft and Google. With the success of the iPhone, iPod and now the Mac - which seems to be infiltrating Microsoft’s massive market share, Apple seems to be only going up.

Source.

As many of you would already know, the Adsense referral payment system was today changed and brought back to the old module. According to the Adsense Blog, this is how things will be from now on.

About a year ago, as an experiment, we changed the pricing structure for AdSense referrals so that when a user you referred to the program earned $5 within 180 days of sign-up, you would also earn $5. When that publisher earned $100 within 180 days and removed all payment holds, you’d receive $250. We have decided to conclude this experiment and return to the original pricing structure. As a result, we’ll soon no longer be offering the $5 bonus or $2000 bonus, and the payout for referring a user who generates $100 with AdSense in the first 180 days will return to $100.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, Google has decided that foreign webmasters are useless and have therefore discontinued the service for anyone living outside North America, Latin America, and Japan . This is the most outrageous thing I think Adsense has ever done, and I cannot for a moment understand the logic behind it. This is an absolute joke and I cannot see why they’d apply such drastic measure to their service.

- If you’re outside of North America, Latin America, and Japan, AdSense referrals will be retired.

For publishers not located in any of the three regions detailed above, we’ll soon be retiring referrals promoting AdSense. We’ve found that this referral product has not performed as well as we had hoped in these regions. Again, please keep in mind that you can still generate referrals for the other products listed under the ‘Referrals’ section of your AdSense Setup tab.

This means I’ll be forced to drop Adsense, since I’m currently residing in Australia. I can to some extent understand the reasoning behind the changes in payment structure, but I’m shocked at how far they’ve gone with this. Other Australian bloggers have been affected by these changes including Darren Rowse.

As a publisher who blogs from Australia but who has a blog on a niche topic that relates perfectly to AdSense and which has the vast majority of it’s traffic from the USA (and which has consistently referred publishers to AdSense that have converted at the $100 in 180 range) I cannot understand the reasoning for this change.

I’m just one example (I’m the example I know best) and a quick look at my stats shows me that I’ve displayed AdSense referral ads close to 20 million times. I’ve sent them tens of thousands of visitors and have been responsible for thousands of sign ups. I cannot even begin to imaging how much money those signups have made AdSense - yet today they’re telling me that they don’t feel that that kind of evangelism for them is worthwhile paying for?

Google - you’re a bunch of absolute idiots who cannot obviously be bothered to look after your existing publisher base by employing simple filtering methods instead of going as far as banning entire countries from your service. The only thing this can possibly do is drive seas of publishers to Google’s competitors - who are the only ones who will benefit in my opinion. Good riddance Adsense - thanks for the ride.