I just want to say right up front that this list is by no means some “super secret” list. This list is not guaranteed to help you gain more web traffic, nor will I promise it will help you get more blog readers. That being said, this list has helped me tremendously.

First, a little background on where I’m coming from. I started dabbling in Web Marketing about six years ago. At first I was running student travel websites, using mostly affiliate programs and Google Adsense. Back then it was fairly easy to succeed online because comparatively speaking there were far fewer of us working within the realm.

During the first year I probably lost more money than I was bringing in. However, the second year I managed to pull in upper $X,XXX and it got better every year after. Was I getting a ton of traffic? Not really. But, the traffic I was getting was high quality and was easy to convert to buyers, clickers, or subscribers.

It wasn’t until about two years ago that I actually started to break in to some serious traffic on my own sites. When I say serious, I don’t mean 20,000+ visits per day, but I began seeing 150,000 unique visits per month on several of my sites, which was pretty big in my book.

What’s the secret?

Truth is… there is no secret. There is no rocket science, there is no magic wave of the Google wand, and there is no blogging SEO 101 that must be followed. Instead, I used a combination of common sense, online networking, and basic user friendly page edits.

1) Network & Reach Out
We all know about social networking. We should know by now that interacting with other bloggers and building relationships is vital, but do we actually go a step further and actively seek to help other bloggers succeed with no motive of personal reward?

This was key for me. I spent about a year seeking out bloggers who were small, but had great writing talents and who I believed could be superb additions to the highly active side of the blogosphere. Once I identified these bloggers, I worked to enable them to reach a wider audience, I gave them the attention needed to make sure they understood how the new media realm functions, and I viewed their projects and blogs as if they were my own.

Now, I find that the more these bloggers grow, the more I grow simply because they jump at every chance to promote and plug me along with any and all of my projects. And not just the promotion of my work, but also the ability to reach out to them when I have something I need promoted, linked to, or pushed out through the sphere.

Seth Godin once said “ask not what new media can do for you, rather, ask what you can do for it, and how you can immerse yourself into it”. I believe that by helping others succeed, you yourself will succeed with them.

Also vital to networking are the major social networking sites. I find that LinkedIn, while not quite as active on the social front, ranks VERY well in search engines. My LinkedIn profile has always been on the first page of results for my name and it’s a great place to plug yourself, your projects, and your web affiliations.

(By the way, you can request to link up with me using ericjodom@gmail.com.)

The second big one that has helped me is Facebook. Facebook is extremely active, and I’ve been able to grab quite a few subscribers via my feed on my profile, as well as the various Facebook groups that I run.

You can connect up with me on Facebook here.

My Facebook profile isn’t huge by any means. I only have 430 friends at the time of writing this. That being said, I actually know every one of them and have had personal contact with each of my friends at one point or another.

Which brings me to my next item.

2) Groups
I can’t express enough how important it is for us bloggers to be involved in online groups. There are many, MANY places to get plugged into a group, but the most productive for me are Google Groups and Facebook Groups.

I only belong to about ten different Google groups, but they are all very active and a lot gets accomplished. Some are political, some are internet flavored, and some are tech/geek related. But they are all active and consists of people who are interested in grouping together to achieve success online.

Facebook Groups are a different animal, but they can be just as productive. Get connected in with others and be active… it WILL pay off.

3) RSS
This is a no brainer, but for some reason a lot of bloggers do not do enough to make sure the feeds are readily available, easy to subscribe to, and quickly noticeable by the eye.

I have thousands of subscribers across all of my blogs, and they all watch what I do very closely.

4) Update Regularly
Are you not?

5) Basic, general, common sense blog SEO
This doesn’t need to be anything extreme. But you want to make sure you have good title tags, a good permalink structure, and that you link out to other sources often and generously.

For you Wordpress junkies, you can check out this great basic guide to SEO for Wordpress.

Well, that’s about it! This list alone has helped me develop a very strong network of bloggers that have helped me push stories to the front of virtually all social news sites.

I know the list sounds basic and lacking (where are the ones about e-books, directories and video?), but it’s all I’ve ever needed and it works quite well.

What about you?

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My earlier post requesting a Digg Widget hit the front page of Digg and slammed me with 7,000 visits today. The extra chunk of visits was nice, but the real bonus was the Digg Widgets that came with it.

The first one to come along was Mike’s version in the form of a Wordpress Plugin.

From the looks of it Mike will be putting a lot more into the plugin over the next few days.

The one that has me sold, however, is a flash version (shown above) by David LeMieux. The new Digg Widget pulls data from your Digg friends list and puts it in a scroller. The scroller then displays the title and number of Diggs for the most recent Diggs in your friends list. The widget also comes with a link to your user profile.

This should be complex to install right? Not at all. Simply go to the set up page, enter your user id, hit submit and copy the code.

David used my design concept for the widget and I must admit it looks quite nice.

Good job, guys! AND THANKS!!!

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Last night I had some free time to relax and take a break from the daily grind. Well, I didn’t really *have* time, but I made time. While most people kick back and watch the tube for relaxation, I surf the web with no real goals. So I decided to spend a little time on Netscape.

I’ve had an account with Netscape for six months now, but I’ve never really gotten around to surfing the pages or submitting news. Last night I decided to give it a go. I pulled up the RSS feeds and knocked out a few stories that had come up within the ten minutes of me checking. It gave me a chance to get a feel for the site and understand the differences between Netscape and Digg.

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YouTube, Digg, Netscape, and many other social networking sites have opened up to the political scene and traffic has increased to ALL of them because of it. Mixing politics with the social realm of the internet was a winner long before it came about. It was only a matter of time before these social giants were ready to go live with what may be one of the most important part of political campaigns moving forward.

Now MySpace has entered the game. Welcome to MySpace Impact.

Thoughts?

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The guys over at Eventful had a booth set up across the isle from ours at CPAC so I got a few chances to talk with them about the Web 2.0, social networking style project. After getting to know the system and what it is that it does, I put them on my top ten online tools for political campaigns list.

Then they displayed their generosity by putting me on their official blog roll.

Link love… gotta love it!

(I’ll be adding them to mine very soon!)

-Eric Odom

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There is a BIG shift in the way political campaigns conduct election war these days. During the 2006 elections I was contracted to do some work for Sharron Angle for Congress and it was a very educational experience and the race taught us many things about the new direction of political campaign marketing.

In our race for congress we were lucky that the opposition had little experience in online marketing. The reason we were lucky is that I had my hands full with other parts of the campaign and couldn’t spend any time on the website or out and about in the www community.

In the end we lost by about 400 votes, but the knowledge that came from working on such a campaign is something I’m thankful for. I was able to see one of our opponents get ripped to shreds by the online community because he virtually ignored them and his site did everything possible to avoid having to engage the group. At the time, this attitude worked because the social networks of Nevada were limited. Now, however, these networks have gained big momentum and I believe that if we were to see a repeat of that race he would have a very tough time slipping by without getting the online community involved.

The same can be said across the country. With more and more voters and activists moving their networks to the web, political campaigns are forced to move in that direction with their campaign plans and message marketing schemes. I believe we’re witnessing the birth of a new era in US elections.

Political campaigns would be wise to lend an ear to this massive movement of information and there are a plethora of tools that can help them do just that. I’ve compiled a list of what I believe will be the top ten players in internet activism.

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As a campaign consultant and internet activist I can attest to the direction political campaigns are heading and a LOT of it is shifting to the Internet. Political campaigns such as John McCain’s (by the way I met with his blogger, Patrick Hynes, in DC last week and he admitted that the McCain website was launched with a lot of bugs and was not ready to be public) have fully embraced the power of social networking and the online community, and most other campaigns are beginning to do the same thing.

Digg.com is getting in on the action as well. Digg recently added a 2008 Elections category and it quickly became a happening place. Wikia has also added a political section that in just a matter of days was getting Dugg and mentioned on big sites like Little Green Footballs.

YouTube must be seeing dollar signs in this as well. The video sharing giant recently launched “YouChoose“, a sub-site for political campaign related videos to be published and viewed.

When you have Hillary Clinton announcing her Presidency via a YouTube video, you know it’s a powerful tool.

Even the group I work with as a private contractor, Citizen Outreach, is getting ready to publish a YouTube channel that will display news related to Nevada politics and other tidbits. It’s some thing we feel is too important to pass up.

While YouTube is taking hits on the copyright front, it is still growing and I think Google is pulling the right strings by adding this new YouChoose section.

Only time will tell if it’s successful though…

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C-SPAN has a great discussion panel running on TV called Political Blogs & 2008 Elections. The panel discussion is sponsored by the Robert Dole Institute of Politics. The speakers for the panel are Erick Erickson, Jerome Armstrong, Scott Johnson, Joan McCarter, and Patrick Hynes.

A lot of the discussion is very general and hardly scratches the surface, but there is certainly a level of wisdom between the group and it shows in the panel dialog. However, I notice that none of the bloggers present the problem with elitism within the blogosphere.

Many, MANY bloggers have talked about the “long tail” of the blogosphere. If you aren’t familiar with the long tail, it’s basically a way of explaining the majority of today’s blogs.

The top blogs make up the head, which represents the largest section of traffic, and the rest of us make up the long tail, which represents the blogs with less traffic and influence. Normally I would give you examples, images and links for such an explanation, but I’m currently on a flight to Washington DC so I have no internet access. I’ll try and add some links in within the next few days. UPDATE: Check out this link for more info on the “long tail”.

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An individual who is involved in the back end of politics.wikia sent me an e-mail this morning that includes the following paragraph. Note that he is not interested in giving his opinion on any political issues, but found it interesting that statistics were supporting my assertion that Digg is biased.

http://digg.com/tech_news/Is_Digg_Biased_Against_Conservatives was
made popular with 30 diggs. But then it was buried immediately after
– literally within a minute or two (we were watching). Given your
thesis, the irony is incredible!

Incredible indeed, but not surprising. I recently wrote about my personal experiences with Digg and its flaw that allows a large group of users to actively bury stories with little or no merit, and it ended up getting quite a bit of attention.

My assertion is that there is a group of Left Wing Diggers who troll the upcoming stories in search of stories with which they disagree with, or have been asked by friends to bury. Digg has a flaw that allows stories to be Dugg or buried without ever actually visiting the story. This means that users are burying stories that they haven’t even read, which I would view as cheating the system.

Many, MANY complaints have been sent to Digg, with little or no response in return. It’s obvious that Digg is aware of the secret army of Digg trolls, yet it does not view this practice as an issue important enough to deal with.

Having this in mind, I’m left with little choice but to conclude that Digg indeed is biased towards Conservatives. Now if only they could admit such a thing.

I digress.

-Eric Odom

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It was only a matter of time before web 2.0 was embraced by the Conservative realm of the internet. Conservatives, I’m sometimes ashamed to admit, aren’t always the first group to jump on a new innovation, but it can be said that Conservatives know how to make one work rather quickly for their purpose.

The blogosphere is a great example. Bloggers like Michelle Malkin, Patrick Hynes, Erick Erickson, Scott Johnson, Chuck Muth, LGF, and others had success on a proportionate scale soon after the Blogosphere was given life. LGF, for example, can has in excess of 70,000+ visitors in a single day. No doubt, Conservatives know how to communicate opinions, articulate issues, and network together to inform others will relative ease.

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Personally, I’ve felt for a VERY long time that Digg is loaded with mostly Liberal minded people. It’s a shame too because Digg is a HUGE community that contains many networks of web surfers on the hunt for good news or stories. A front page story on Digg can translate into tens of thousands of instant visits, making the site a Mecca for solid web content.

What may be surprising to some is that I have no problem with the community being mostly Liberal. In fact, I encourage it because I believe in a Democratic style Internet and Digg is just that, a people driven database of news. But just because the majority of Digg users are Liberal doesn’t mean that Conservatives should be completely shut out. Unless, of course, Digg wishes to label itself as a Liberal site and begin marketing it as such.

Until then, I think Digg needs to lay off the bias and play fair on all sides. This goes for both the community, and the management.

Digg Community Bias
Now before anyone starts screaming that I don’t know what I’m talking about, let me say that I’ve submitted hundreds of stories to Digg and not one, NOT ONE Conservative story has made it past the last stage before hitting the homepage. The real meaty stories that I’ve submitted usually get Dugg very fast, but then suddenly around the 200 or 300 Digg range the story gets shot out of Digg in a way that resembles a sandblaster removing paint.

As mentioned above, I have no problem with Liberal Diggers working together to push stories to the front page, but when they start working together to keep others from the front page then I think the idea of it being a free place to submit news and stories for ANYONE kind of goes out the window.

It’s been suggested countless times, but I think Digg needs to reduce the value of the bury button. It gets abused on a very big scale and it’s keeping a good chunk of Internet users away from the great resource many of us have come to know and love, Digg.com.

The Management
Digg’s management has been known to play along with this bias by banning Conservative members for less than valid reasons. The most recent example of this is the banning of Conservative Digger, Brandon Henak of GOP3.com.

Digg management claims Brandon was informing people how to “game” the system, however, after a closer look we find that Brandon wasn’t at all doing what he is accused of.

From the original post in question:

4. Click on the Friends tab again and you should see all the news your friends have “dugg” lately, you can then digg all the interesting news you see with the knowledge that you are promoting oft ignored conservative news and opinions to millions who may never have seen it.

Notice how he doesn’t tell people WHAT to Digg, rather, he explains that users are free to Digg whatever they wish to Digg.

Is that worse than other Digg posts and stories?

The Bottom Line
It’s becoming more and more apparent that Digg is a beehive for Liberals, which is fine, but Conservatives simply aren’t allowed onto the same playing field, which is not fine.

From Digg’s own “How Digg Works” page:

#
Share
Email your friends (Diggers or non-Diggers) when you find something you Digg.

Build a friend list; then your friends can track what you’re Digging. They can also subscribe to an RSS feed of your submissions and/or your Diggs.

Regardless of your political view, don’t you agree that everyone should have the same advantage from the day they open an account at Digg?

-Eric Odom

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When I first had a look at the new John McCain website I was excited to see that the campaign had fully embraced the power of the Internet, specifically the blogosphere and social networking. It only took a week to make me take back every positive thought that I first had. Now I’m convinced that the new McCain website is flat out broken and was launched WAY too early.

Apart from the technical problems, there seems to be a serious issue with censorship. In my case it appears as though I’ve been turned down for a McCainSpace blog. I applied for one of the blogs the first day the site went live… I think it was about a week ago. I received the confirmation e-mail and went through all of the steps, and here I am a week later with no word on my blog approval.

If Eric Odom, operator of ConservaBlogs.com can’t get approved, then who can? And if they just haven’t decided yet, then who the hell takes more than a week to approve a blog?

Then there is the technical problems. Since then, my account has somehow vanished. Well, it will ask me the security question to try and get a new password, but then it tries to convince me that I’m wrong about where I was born. Go figure.

John McCain’s exciting website seems to have quickly failed the test.

Next.

-Eric Odom

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