It’s great to see a local lad launch a lovely world wide web widget to generate traffic. OK, so I got carried away on the alliterations, but check out Mark Schumann’s site Publicity Wheel.

Hat tip to Bill Hartzer for alerting me to this site. In a guest post on Bill’s blog, Mark says he is an e-learning developer who built edutagger, a K-12 social bookmarking site for educators. He also built the Fame Experiment, from which was born the idea for Publicity Wheel.

Publicity Wheel works by placing some code that generates the 125×125 pixel button you see above. Your visitors click this and are taken to the publicitywheel.com site, where they can sign up and get their own button. Each click earns the site owner some points and a pie slice in a conceptual Wheel of Fortune game. More clicks mean more chances to win when the wheel is spun. Winning means their site is “featured”, so people will check out such featured sites and generate the traffic to them.

I won’t be using this button on every page here because the traffic lottery is weighted against me. Being a low traffic site, the number of my readers who own a website are lower; so the chances of them installing this button are even lower. On the other hand, the Publicity Wheel site gets a lot of traffic.

I notice that Bill too did not install the PW button on his site. I wish Mark well with this project.

Popularity: 32% [?]

In the past two days my contacts and best friends have invited me to join:

• Konnects
• Ziki
• hi5
• Assorted groups in BlogCatalog, Facebook and LinkedIn

In the past few weeks there were invitations to other sites I had not heard of. There are networking addicts who join everything that comes along. Some of these sites allow you to import an existing profile, such as from LinkedIn, which is such a tempting feature for the networking junkies.

SEO Implication

I see all this as a big duplicate content risk for the wannabe social networking sites. When most of the members post the same profile on numerous sites, do you seriously think that Google’s algo will let this content be displayed above the established sites? Ideally, the profile acceptance process should include a Google query to check for duplicate content, and then it should ask the member to submit a unique resume.

Popularity: 39% [?]

Thanks to a comment following Matt Cutts’ post on this topic, I tried a couple of plugins and realised that my understanding of PHP was nonexistent and I could not follow the directions of their authors. Thankfully, Chris Hunt posted a link to a plugin by Rob Marsh, SJ (a Jesuit priest in a teaching order like we had in my old alma mater, St Xavier’s Boys’ Academy, Bombay). This plugin is dead easy to implement - just enable it and go to Options and edit the CSS statement to change the background colour, as per the readme file provided. The default CSS statement merely achieves an indent, which isn’t as striking as changing the background colour.

URL for plugin: Highlight Author Comments

Popularity: 57% [?]

Todd Malicoat (stuntdubl.com) said that there are two main ways to get links through linkbait.

1. Identify and target the distribution channel, then get their attention. Use hooks such as ego, sex, humour, picture, resource, incentive, news, attack or a contrary hook. Use a combination of these for an added punch, e.g. an interview uses the ego hook and a resource hook if the interviewee has something useful to share.

2. Target webmasters by writing about their websites. They will gladly link to your article without asking. This keeps their attention. Todd encourages all to read the Cluetrain Manifesto (http://www.cluetrain.com/) particularly the 95 Theses.

For targeting Digg, Andy Hagans (domaindev.com) said that the audience seems to consist of sensitive 16-year-olds. Use catchy titles else they will bury you. Reddit attracts people interested in politics, tasers and conspiracy theories. Delicious is full of resource-hungry librarians and info junkies and easiest to spam manually. StumbleUpon attracts bored Ritalin users who are happy to be taken to some random site. If your main content is above the fold, you will do well with this audience. Tweako is for the “how to [anything]” nerds. Hugg is for greenies. DZone is for hard core developers and Sphinn is for targeting SEOs.

You should display social media “add this” buttons and target all SM communities at once. Some bait will fail and some will work.

Bill Hartzer of MarketNet recommends targeting sites that are known to link out. Use blogstorm.co.uk to to see which sites are using linkbait to their advantage and add your site to its Tracker tool. Here are the pathetic results for this site - all because you are not linking to me!  :sad:

Popularity: 27% [?]

Michael Gray (Graywolf) offered some tips on what works for Social Media.

• Selling should have a low focus
• Products do better than services
• Consumer goods do better than business goods
• Target impulse buyers
• Offer doorbuster prices
• Let the customer get the content any way they want, such as an RSS feed or Twitter. e.g. Southwest Airlines gives airfare deals, Carnival Cruise, JetBlue.

Example sites: thisnext.com, techdiva.com

There are some pitfalls:

• Mention if there are restrictions or goods in short supply
• Anticipate demand - Microsoft was embarrassed when it promised a USB key to all survey participants but only made 1000 keys.

Alexander Barbara spoke about Monetising Digg Traffic

He mentioned a new site about health and wellness - not your typical Digg candidate because Digg is dominated by 16-year-old geeks - but it got good exposure through a targeted campaign. A site has just 24 hours to stay on the Digg home page, so it needs to be compelling.

Some points to consider if your site cannot withstand the load of Digg traffic:

• Consider making flat pages and serve them, which will reduce the load on MySQL.
• Provide a 302 redirect to the Google cache of your page.
• Use Coral Cache (http://www.coralcdn.org/), a free service that will provide peer-to-peer caching of your content.

Other observations:

• Digg users do not click ads.
• 50% of Digg users will unsubscribe from your RSS feed within two days.
• Monetise directly with CPM ads, not AdSense.
• Monetise indirectly by buildign long-term, loyal readers.

Laura Fitton of pistachioconsulting.com started using Twitter in March 2007 and offered the following tips:

• Build lasting value.
• Ads are ailing - you can make more money by helping others to buy.
• Listen: markets are conversations, but conversations suck if you don’t listen.
• Watch what others are saying about your company. Set up alerts. Buy the negative domain names such as [yourcompany]sucks.com before a disgruntled ex-employee or customer does.
• You cannot game the market. Facebook Beacon got it wrong.

Popularity: 29% [?]