Cow Shows Chow How

Hi gang, its been a while since we’ve set foot on the Big Beef’s pasture, but since we’re here today, we will let you in on a little secret that influences the amount of traffic certain blogs seem to get from the different social bookmarking services out there, all the time.

Hitting the front page on Digg or Reddit is a wet dream for many aspiring money making bloggers and affiliate marketers. The amount of raw traffic that will pass through your blog can be tremendous and the conversion of this traffic into clicks can pay off nicely. We won’t go into the specifics of how to monetize your blog to its fullest potential, Mr Chow would be out of a job if we did, but we will give you a few tips on how to get that potential surge of traffic going with the helps of your friends.

You can pay for traffic.

This is probably the least ethical way of getting featured on that front page. Many a webmaster forums have certain sections where users can ‘Buy and Sell’ their stuff. Don’t think this is just buying and selling websites, articles and reviews; It also includes lots of shady services. We have used these before with varied results as experiments in our early days. Stuff that we never thought was going to work, hit over 1500 Diggs before the site was banned, others reached up to 75 and still did not get popular. Digg for example has several ways to see if you are gaming the system. If you get passed the automated Digg security, you’re not even half way because you have the horde of Digg users to face. A thick skin is advised as front page articles tend to lure out the trolls.

You can ask for traffic.

On those very same forums, not all social bookmarking and voting services have to be paid for. Lots of people simply offer to return the favor. This tends to happen a lot with Stumble upon posts. If you’re lucky, you can find some people that are in urgent need of votes and will give you 4-5 stumbles in exchange for 1 from yourself. Another source to turn to is obviously your friends. We often used to ask people in our IM list to do a quick Digg or Stumble, but at a certain point, that too gets old. So what do you do? You join a secret mailinglist where the only emails that fly back and forth are requests for Stumbles, Diggs, Sphinns, Zoom, Reddits, Delicious, Farks and god know what more. We’re part of one of these little underground communities, and we know that there’s some pretty well-known names in the industry involved in this sort of traffic points trading.

You can earn your traffic.

It might sound silly, but if you really work hard and write the best damn article the world has ever seen on the day you post it, you will earn your traffic. This is probably the only method that will leave you extremely satisfied. After all, you will have proven to yourself and all those Internet users out there that you are capable of achieving things on your own. Not only will it save you a lot of money which you otherwise would have spend on buying votes, you’ll also utilize the time you used to ask your friends for the same votes, to improve your skills as a writer. It might take a while before you hit the jackpot, but it’ll be worth your effort!

Quick tips from our experience.

Seeing that a lot of you will probably choose the quick and dirty (Why else would you read this blog otherwise 😈 ) way, be careful that you will not make the following mistakes:

  • If you’re buying traffic in the forums, don’t ever paste the URL you want the link you want to get Dugg and preferably don’t even participate in the thread. We have seen and experienced at first hand that Digg isn’t stupid and they read the same forums. They spot your URL and you’ll most likely get a free ban for life.
  • If the deal seems to good to be true, it is. Getting 100 Stumbles and reviews for $10 means you will get Stumbled by users with names like; stumblr4hire1 stumblr4hire2, stumbler4hire3 etc etc. We won’t even tell you what kind of crappy comments they leave behind. We’ve got a sneaky suspicion that Stumble Upon isn’t silly either and they will see if you’ve received genuine or artificial votes. They won’t ban you but you just wasted time and money on a useless service.
  • If you’re in a top secret mailing list like ours, keep in mind that it’s always going to be the same people that are adding votes to your stories. The social bookmarking sites will pick up on this too. Even though this is what’s needed to get the ball rolling, it will not promote organic growth of your popularity.

And that’s all we have time for today kids, we’ve still got our own blog to run and if you’re done reading here, feel free to click over to our part of the pasture.