Think your hobby can’t be turned into a business?

Think again!

Don’t forget to subscribe to get more of these ideas.

1. The Model Aviator

Tommy was a fairly disillusioned call-center operator. He hated frustrated customers almost as much as he hated the company policies that prohibited him from actually helping them.

His weekend hobby was to fly model helicopters, and he was good at it too. After hearing him joke more than once about what a shame it was you couldn’t make any money doing that - I had a lucky coincidence.

One of my clients needed an upgrade of their reception and they looked into having aerial pictures taken and framed. Those turned out to be anything but cheap. (In fact, I thought taking a pilot’s license would be a cheaper alternative.)

Tom now takes pictures of every new construction and building for sale in his town and sells it either to the owner as an art piece, or to Realtors and builders as marketing materials. He also takes pictures for companies (like my clients) on request.

The great thing was that as soon as one realtor started using his pictures for marketing, many others got scared and started buying his pictures too. He not only found a way to provide something at a great value, more importantly his business created its own demand.

He is making about three times as much as he was getting yelled at all day.

These days he gets a good laugh telling people that his major business expenses are model helicopter parts and sunscreen, and he writes them both off.

2. The Fisherman

Brett loved fishing on the weekends, but like many others, the job he was doing everyday was not really making him happy. He spent most of the week half a step out of the insane asylum trying to deal with a boss he couldn’t stand.The evenings he spent in school hoping to earn a promotion away from his boss.

He had a boat, a really nice one that his father had left him when he passed away. Spending time on that boat was his great escape on the weekends. And kept talking about being a charter boat captain.

Eventually I made him a deal. If he got his licenses and insurance, and it didn’t pay for itself in one year. I would pay for it. If it did work he’d pay me my fee over the next year after that.

He started working weekends, marketing through local newspaper ads on Thursday and Friday. After a while he got a dock close to two hotels, and put a big “Charter Fishing” sign on the dock that was visible from both hotels entrance. I was there to help him nail it up and he was jokingly wondering when they would start calli… that’s when the first call came. After that, he quit both his job and his school and hasn’t looked back since.

I should have asked for a percentage instead…

—

What skills do you have that you think are worthless in the marketplace?

Subscribe for free to get more ideas on turning a hobby into a business.

—

Today Google launched their KNOL (Short for Knowledge) service. A user contributed knowledge base that can take a huge bite out of for instance Wikipedia. But KNOL has a much more interesting aspect.

It is a showcase service for authors, and it has more in common with for instance Digg and Propeller than it does with Wikipedia.

Proprietary Information

On KNOL, the author owns the article. No more moderations where overzealous people nitpick on the smallest details and undo every change that they feel is wrong; regardless of its true merit. On KNOL, the article and author is voted on as wholes. No one but the author can modify it. So in that sense, it is more related to Social Media than it is to Wikipedia. And now we are beginning to see the genius of it.

The Bloggers Dream (or Nightmare)

This creates a very interesting new aspect for online marketers. Especially those that have spearhead knowledge in combination with great writing skills. These authors can now showcase not only their work, but themselves on something that proves to be a very interesting battleground for bloggers. It’s no longer a battle of “who has the most friends on Facebook and Stumble” This one is going to be fought with good old-fashioned writing skills and sweat of the writer’s brow.

The KNOL Effect Is Coming

Now, the best writers, will undoubtedly be able to drive massive amounts of traffic to their blogs, Much like the Digg Effect, a top voted article on any subject is bound to bring traffic in the thousands when KNOL gets established.

The problem here is that KNOL May take over a large part of the referencing capacity from other Social media sites. Especially for “normal” users who are already used to trusting Google with delivering the content they are looking for.

We may see a very large, and quick shift in traffic generation. We will definitely see changes occurring around us when the current big names scramble to counter whatever effect it has on them.

Time is no longer an issue – Were back to Quality

On Digg, you are the flower of the day, here one minute, gone the next.

But because KNOL published works are not going to be time sensitive. It is no longer enough to be the only person that day that posts on a topic. You have to be the best permanent to claim that particular spot. Now quality articles written with the utmost precision will be the best way to create a following.

One Digg - Hold the LinkBait

On many social media sites, Link bait and Flashy headlines combined with funny shtick photos is the mainstay of popularity. KNOL promises something else.

This is a new world, one where being the best social networker may no longer be enough to get anywhere. KNOL may just have cornered the market on quality.

Verification of Authors and SEO

Another interesting thing is how the voting of verified authors may or may not influence the search engine ranking of sites associated with that author in general. THIS may very well be the largest impact KNOL has on the online marketing world.

Google certainly has the power to penalize authors who are viewed as poor writers and translate that into their search algorithms.

—

This is not something where “wait and see” will be a good plan. Don’t for a second think that a social media endeavor, launched by Google, and with its sights set so squarely on some of the largest services out there will have anything less than earth shattering effects on the scene.

—

Click through rates are about as hard to get solid facts on as the Roswell incident.

Since Google Adsense prohibit anyone from revealing their CTR. Finding out if you are doing something right or wrong is hard if not impossible when you are starting out. No one can (or wants to) share. And the web is filled with Promises of astronomical CTR rates. Well, if you are disappointed in what you are getting, maybe this will help.

What I am going to talk about is how traffic sources affect your CTR.

We know that search engine traffic is better than most other sources for CTR. But what about the rest?

—

Since I can’t disclose my clickthrough rates according to the TOS, I’ve converted what is generally accepted as the best source. The Organic Google Search to a benchmark of 100% and proportioned the remainders to it.

50% score means you get half as many clicks from this source as you would from a Google Search.

Exactly how I did this is my little secret. (i can’t give everything away) But here are the results. 

Search Engines

1. Google Organic Searches, - Benchmark 100%

2. Yahoo Organic Searches  86%

3. Other Search Engines  73%

Social Bookmarks

4. StumbleUpon 3%

5. Digg 3%

6. Reddit  2%

7. Mixx  1 %

Trackback Links (others linking to articles)

8. Link lists  13%

9. Articles Referencing 36%

Direct traffic

10. RSS / Atom 24%

11. Unknown 24%

Comments (commenting on other blogs)

12. Short Comments  9%

13. Long Comments  46%

Some Conclusions

Social Networks are the worst for Clickthrough rates. They do make up for this somewhat by the amount of traffic you can get from them. But on average, you need between 30 and 100 times more hits from a social bookmark to get the same amount of hits as you would from a Google organic search.

What is more interesting is that commenting on other blogs is Great CTR traffic

Making Long pointed comments that add value is by far the most effective traffic you can directly control and get decent CTR from.

Having people link to you is also lucrative.
Link lists (see point 8 ) where people make lists of different sites and blogs are decent for traffic, but bad for CTR. However, if you can get someone to write and reference your article ( see point 9 ) , the clickthrough rate is much better.

Recommendations

SEO Is king for clickthrough rates. You have to focus on your SEO to get more of the best traffic. which still is search engines.

After that we are back to the old "quality first."

If you can get your posts to be reviewed or referenced and linked to, you will get better clickthrough rates, but to get links, you need to write good posts.

The best traffic you can control directly is the comment traffic, but you have to write quality comments adding something on others blogs to get the most out of it.
Short comments get little traffic and the traffic is not good for CTR.

RSS traffic is decent. But to get Rss subscribers, you have to write good quality content.

Method:

Results measured on three blogs with a total of 23.434 hits

- I used three basically static blogs with the same template.
- All blogs were wordpress and self hosted.
- The same article was posted on all three blogs to simplify separation
- Ads had the same location, and were identically formatted
- I never promoted any of the blogs under my own name
- I used friends to submit to social bookmarks, and I never voted
- I commented under pseudonyms. Using normal names
- Submitters were not on my friends lists for any of the social bookmarks

Only sources that averaged 50 hits were counted. Many social networks are therefore not reported. only the ones here averaged over this limit.

Comments were only submitted to large and notable blogs on the topic. With alexa ranking under 100,000

Alright, so I’m going to lose more than a few PC points here, but i keep seeing the same problems over and over, and applying the same solutions over and over seems to work fine. (I’m using that as proof positive I’m on to something. )

So take it or leave it as you please. Just please keep the comment profanity to a minimum.

—

1. No IS a Word in Your Vocabulary

Yes, it is important to try and meet the customers’ expectations, but ladies - Please . Stop bending over backwards to please everyone. You are one person with limited and valuable time. I keep seeing women in design for instance re-doing work over and over and over. Learn when to say no, some clients will never be happy. You are well within your right to ask them to stop and clarify in writing what they want. Once you have delivered that, it’s their problem. There are limits, and they are yours to make.

2. You Are Competent

Women have an uncanny ability to negate and downplay their own abilities; especially when in a room with male counterparts. Stop putting yourself down, there is nothing wrong with a sense of modest grace, but when someone is trying to step on you.

It’s time to let them know the female advantage of heels when you step back. Your knowledge is just as good, and just as valuable, as the men in the room.

(Here is a little secret for you, we men are just as nervous as you are, we are just taught to hide it behind a pretense of confidence.)

3. Who Ever Said Being Cheap Was Good For a Woman

Women are experts at reducing their price – especially when they are selling their own competence as s service. Everyone will want what you have for free, but you’d be crazy to offer it.

Stick to your guns and learn how to tell your customers what is free, and what isn’t. You’ll see that they expect nothing less than to pay a fair price for your knowledge once the cards are on the table.

4. Substandard Is No Good – Superstandard Is Unattainable

You have to learn that delivering TO the customers expectations today, will outweigh beating their expectations tomorrow. Too many women are perfectionists with their own work. This is a good thing, but only if you understand when you have met or exceeded the customers expectations. Not your own!

Quite frankly ladies, you’re trying to meet some standards that NASA are considering Utopian. Make sure you make your customer happy. Your own standards are probably going to make them wait.

5. You Can’t Do Everything Alone

Alright, so there are single mothers (and fathers for that instance) who are successful entrepreneurs. But women have a tendency to think that this is how it should be. Single or not.

They try to run homes and families, with the same attention that they would as a stay at home mom. Well guess what, there is no point in trying if you have better options available to you.

Kick that husband of yours in the rear, 50-50 is NOT too much to ask ladies . Talk to the rest of the family, you will most likely find them more than willing to help you out. But you have to set some rules here. Don’t succumb to the sad looks and guilt trips kids are sooo good at dishing out.

And for the sake of everything holy. Learn to ASK FOR AND ACCEPT HELP! It will often be offered to you even when you don’t ask. What’s so wrong with accepting the help and support of the friends and family that love you?

When you let people help you with some things, you can do everything else better. You risk running both your business and your family half-assed otherwise, which is not what you want.

Quite frankly, the single largest reason my female clients are considering quitting their business is that they feel they are neglecting their families, and when I check I see a husband on his ass on the couch. (and he fed the kids pop-tarts for dinner again)

Enough said.

Just remember to Share this if you liked it, and forget it if you didn’t

The thought has been there…

That day when your boss had a bad date the evening before and your supervisor yet again proved that they have no clue what they are doing. That nagging thought that you could do something for yourself. Something that’s what you want. How you want it.

Drop that incredible anxiety about how your 12.40/hr job is so convenient and safe. It’s probably also getting you nowhere all while driving you insane 40 hours a week. There’s better out there, you know it, you feel it. It’s time.

Get Off Your Ass and Do It

Planning is important. In fact, it is imperative. But the best laid plan is worth zip, zilch, nada without action. At some point, you have to sit down and talk to yourself and your family and tell them what you want to do. If your family says go for it. Then don’t wait. Just get off your ass and do it. They are probably going to be supportive when you tell them, because they have no idea how good your plans and thoughts really are. Try them, and watch them be amazed. Reality is that you are your own worst enemy until you do get off your ass.

1. You’ll be dancing to your own tune

I hate it, most of the people I know hate it (and I suspect those that don’t claim to hate it are being nice about it.) You probably hate it too. The office politics of “that’s how we do it.” Even when you know it could be done better, cheaper and faster, no one is interested in hearing it. Well guess what, that insight and knowledge is yours to make what you can out of. You have the idea right there. It’s been slapping you in the face and you just haven’t been listening. Take it and make it yours, and you can forget about the backstabbing moron in the next cubicle.

2. You’ll learn your own power

When you are pushing papers for others, there are always others to blame and others that will blame you. You also know that when you have a great idea, its harder to get anyone to listen to it than it is to actually get it done. Now is your chance to take those ideas to market and find out what you can do with them. And once you get through the first decision to actually DO what you have been talking about, will be the kickoff to understanding what you really can accomplish.

3. You can stop being two people

Most people have a business person and a weekend person. The weekend person is who you really are, the business is the person that adapts to your companies preconceived notions about what you should be. Business-you is probably not as nice, not as much fun and definitely not as interesting. When you are your own boss, you can be who you are with your company, in fact, that will be one of your greatest strengths to distinguish yourself from the cookie-cutters out there.

4. You’ll learn to stop talking and doing it instead

Once you take the step, you’ll see that it wasn’t so hard. And you’ll get better at getting things done instead of just talking about it in general. This will transition into your normal life as well. Don’t think that spending 5/7 of your life conforming to others and waiting for the boss hasn’t slowed you down on the weekend too. You’ll see that you will get much quicker to just get things done and enjoy the results as opposed to dreaming about doing it.

5. Retirement? Why?

It is sad for me to hear people talking about how they are going to live their life after retirement. This is a surefire proof that they are spending most of their life doing what they don’t want to.

Starting your own business, will give you the opportunity to do what you love doing. How many authors, painters, musicians, or other passionate people do you think sit around and wait for the day when they can put the brush down and never paint again? You will determine when you retire, early or late. It’s not about waiting for HR to send you a crappy present and a termination notice anymore.

6. Don’t sweat the small stuff

You’ll finally learn what that means. In corporate structures, you are often forced to deal with small stuff all day. Your little part of the machine. (Which is no doubt important,) but it isn’t a real problem. You will finally get to deal with real problems, and learn through that what the small stuff really is. Once you learn what real problems are, you’ll also learn that they are pretty rare. You’ll be happier for it in the long run.

7. You will finally find your purpose

When you take the step and become your own boss, you will quickly see what success and happiness really is. As a pack animal, you were measuring yourself by wether you got the 4 or 5 % annual raise. Now you will begin to measure yourself by what is really important. How your dreams and ideas translate into reality. And you will be put in charge of your own self-worth and happiness.

8. YCDBSOYA

My father had a little tie clip that said this on it. Y ou C an’t D o B usiness S itting On Your A ss. Well literally you can, internet made sure of that. But the thought remains the same. You have to get moving or nothing will ever happen.

Isn’t it time that you took that idea you’ve been milling for so long, and make it into what it was meant to be all along? YOU!

In “The Extinction of Dinosaur Marketers,” I discussed the problems of bringing the old school of hardcore sales and pushy advertising into the new online marketplace. We are starting to see a new trend blooming that is showing exactly this problem.

This morning I read an article by Neal Levitt, who is discussing the shift from online advertising to online promotions; Coupons, Contests, Giveaways etc. and we can see clearly that fear and lack of understanding is the driving force behind this change.

In the article, Rob Enderle states the problem very clearly. “Promotions are typically tied to actual sales; advertising is vastly harder to measure. You may never know for sure whether an advertising program is truly successful, but a promotion’s success or failure tends to be rather obvious,”

Microwave Marketing

So we are back to what I was discussing in the Extinction Series. It’s not about the actual results, it’s about being able to squeeze the results in to an easy to understand and immediately available metric. Instant gratification rules the show still. It’s the microwave society thinking I’ve been warning about.

Problem is, you aren’t dealing with the same ballgame anymore, now that customers are forcing us to accept that they are individuals with which you need to create a functioning and lasting relationship. You can’t measure the single sale result as a measure of success. The easy to understand metric may be a comfortable and familiar feeling. But to rely on single sale as measure of success is suicide in the age of customer interaction.

Thought Exercise

Which would you mention as the top three websites right now?

Yahoo - Google – Youtube – Myspace – Facebook.. You should have had at least one or two of those In your top threes. Now, what do all of these have in common?

They are user driven – and – none of them are focused on you. Yahoo and Google, provides searches, where your customers can find you at their leisure. Youtube, Myspace, and Facebook are communities where your customers can talk about you when they want to. Although you can buy advertising on Google and Yahoo, your ad will only get seen or clicked on when that is what the customer did a search for.

Any and all attempts to circumvent this, and create an artificial ingress point into your customers interactions with eachother will be considered spam.

Experiment

Create a page with a great sales promotion. Something extremely good, and submit it to Digg or any other voter driven system. Then watch how fast you get slammed with negative feedback and your submission gets buried.

If you think this is irrelevant. Maybe you are thinking that this is a problem with the nature of Digg more than a problem with the approach. Think again. Guess who just got annoyed with you? It was a cross section of your customers. And they just let you know what they think about direct advertising and promotional pushes invading their space.

All these networks are nothing without the users. These users are showing you exactly what they think of the way you are trying to talk to them, and these users are your customers when they leave that particular site. So to think that this is not a great way to check your customers’ reaction to your particular approach is short-sighted at best.

Advertising or Promoting?

It’s funny how the old school thinkers are turning these against each other, when in the new marketplace, they are completely interdependent. They are doing this because the harder to measure metric of online advertising is branding. And branding just doesn’t translate well into an excel sheet.

You can, and SHOULD offer your customers great value, which can be done with measurable systems like giveaways, coupons etc. And you can use contextual online advertising to drive them to the place where they can see it. But you can’t do either without the other. Advertising without having a conversion in mind is fairly brainless. But to do a sales promotion without driving targeted traffic to it is even worse. Now, the reason advertising works for this is because advertising online (when done right) is contextual.

Lets go Viral – Nope… too late

What the thinking behind online promotions is, is that it hopes to drive a viral market. The promotion is intended to create a buzz on its own and make people talk about it. This is actually not a bad idea at all.. Have you started yet? Oops. You missed it!

Once this becomes the standard way of squeezing the square peg into the round hole, people will stop doing it. Once these promotions become the mainstay of every online venture, no one will want to hear a word about a promotion anymore.

Just by writing this post I’ve educated a couple of bloggers that may stop writing about promotions as a result. So you are either ready to go now, or you are probably too late.

The intermediary step is to try and fake it, With undisclosed pay per post articles for instance. But that time has passed too, the social networks have educated each other and undisclosed promotions are getting a lot of negative feedback now. If you at any point make the mistake of thinking that the customer can’t recognize a sales pitch a mile away, you missed out on the real opportunity. To build a relationship based on their expectations, not your need to make a quick buck.

Natural Recommendation Is the Only Lasting Approach

Your customers will talk about you, when you simply meet their needs and requirements, and do it with their end satisfaction in mind. Satisfaction will drive discussion and recommendations naturally. Honest opinions and reviews from trusted sources will never be out of date.

The forced discussion started dying as soon as it became a marketing idea.

Whatever your thinking is for using promotional activities, interactive systems or contextual advertising online, you have to always step back and consider the value to the customer of not only the promotion, but the way you are advertising the promotion.

—

When you meet their needs, they will meet yours. If you do it well enough, they will come back to do it over and over again.

—

We know that social networks like Digg, Reddit, and Stumble are great for gross traffic, but often send quick stop visitors who don’t convert well to ad-clicks and sales.

But how are Social Network users at converting to other social networks? Will a Digger Stumble your post and vice versa? Many do use more than one network, so this would appear to be common at first glance. Guess again.

In fact, this is almost as uncommon as ad clicks. Apparently even though many use both Stumble and Digg, there is a definite lack of transition. It appears that the users are "stuck" on the network they arrive on. Even those that like and digg an article when they arrive from Digg, are unlikely to stumble it.

This is of course a shame for the site. But, more importantly it’s a missed opportunity for the Visitor.

Quick Profile Building

The smart Social Media Networker will use one network to build their profile on the others. Building a profile relies on participating in the network, which means submitting and voting for good articles. Finding good articles can be very time consuming, unless you use one to find for the other.

Once your profile becomes better, you will start attracting other people that are actually interested in your submissions. You will get quality followers organically and can stop adding friends in bulk on your lunch breaks.

Use The Resource You Already Have

A page or post that is currently doing well on one network can be a great submission resource for any visitor. If you can find an article that is seeing good feedback on stumble, and it hasn’t been dug yet. Chances are that your submission will translate well into Digg, which will get. Same goes for all the other networks.

Strong profiles gives you more power to influence traffic in the future. Spend 10-20 minutes a day on your social network and leverage one profile against the other. You’ll see both grow to powerful traffic drivers in very short time.

So don’t forget to

And 

Marketing professionals sometimes get it wrong. And sometimes get it VERY wrong. Here are some examples of what can happen when local talent isn’t used to verify the international meaning of words and images.

Gerber- Your Choice for Ground Baby

The Healthy looking Caucasian Baby on the Gerber Baby Formula packages didn’t do well in Africa. It had however nothing to do with being politically correct.

In Africa - since a large part of the population can’t read - it is standard practice to put a picture of the main Ingredient on the package.

Meet the Wankers

Mitsubishi - had a very successful vehicle in their Pajero, Which sold great all over the world. However, it is sold under the name Montero in South America, after having a big flop in their initial launch.

Guess no one told them that Pajero is slang for Wanker in for instance Argentina.

Wallhamn – a Swedish port and shipping company designed a logo that used their Capital W and an achor.. W-anchor. English speaking workers quickly made the connection. They are now using another logo.

That car Won’t go

Chevrolet had to rename their Nova in South America. Where it was sold as Chevrolet Chevy and later Malibu.

Guess the local market didn’t want to buy the “No va” – Which translates into the “no way” or “won’t go” car.

Are you Using a New Shampoo?

Clairol, had their curling iron named the “Mist Stick” backfire in Germany. Where “Mist” is the slang for manure. For some reason, the image of fertilizing your hair wasn’t appealing to most German women.

Tadpole Soda

The Coca-Cola name in China was read as “Ke-kou-ke-la”, meaning “Bite the wax tadpole” They have since changed the characters used to the more suitable “ko-kou-ko-le”, or “happiness in the mouth.”

—

When you are expanding overseas, it is tempting to just apply what has worked in the past. Be aware that what you think something means could backfire when you apply local culture to it.

It’s always best to verify with the local talent before committing to sell those 900 tons of powdered babies you just shipped.

101 Reasons Digg is Burying Itself

and

7 Ways To Get Front Paged

—

So you want to know why your posts aren’t making Digg’s front page?

I’m guessing it’s because you wrote something original, it had quality, and you didn’t lie or put a number in the headline.

Content is King Crap

To be big on Digg, you should forget quality, and write something that is either half true or just make a list about something. Anything, it doesn’t matter. You’ll get a lot more Diggs if you just put 5 ways to do something than you will by just describing how to do one thing really well and forget about the other 4 ways.  Actually make it 7 or 10, those are apparently better than lists of 6 or 11, Never mind that you’ll have to come up with something brainless to fill the last slots, it’s more important to get the number right.

Forget Content It’s all About the Headline Anyway

You have to write a huge audacious headline. Just like this one, and then somehow stretch the post to the breaking point until you can sort of almost tie it in to the message as a whole.

In this case, it has nothing to do with anything but to prove the absurdity of it. I’m betting that I’ll get someone to Digg this and if it hits the front page, I’ll go drown myself in a bottle of scotch. Then again, since I’m peeing all over Digg here, AND have the audacity to write an original piece, that’s about a snowballs chance in hell anyway.

For Gods sake, DON’T Stay on Topic!

The worst thing for a Digg hungry Blogger is to be on topic and stay there.

If you have a focus and work to stick to your topic you risk having the same people - Your loyal readers - Digg it. And when these same people Digg your site too often, people scream vote gaming, which gets you buried in a heartbeat.

So in other words, you can’t write on the same topic and appeal to a core audience if they happen to be diggers too. Then you are out of the game. Best to write about something completely unrelated. Change your focus everyday, it’s not like you have to know what you are talking about when you write Diggable posts.

WTF is Going on Here?

You want as many WTF comments as possible. WTF is the Nobel Prize of Digg. The Accolade of accolades.

Good writing practise be damned! Write something controversial, let’s make some hair brained claims and as many slippery slope arguments as possible. Don’t worry about accuracy, the less of that commodity you have the more WTF’s you get and the better off you are on Digg.

Re-Hash, Steal, Cheat and Borrow

There is one more thing that works, which is what we see all the time, Re-hashing news that fit the profile to some extent. Have one big news story hit, and you’ll see 200 versions of it in submissions. Now it just a matter of who did the best job of stealing it, and had the best person submitting it for them. Again, screw copyrights, never mind academic honesty. This is Digg! We don’t deal with what’s right, only what gets a couple more WTF’s.

This is by far the best way to get a front page hit, submit news that you just steal off CNN or NY Times with some half baked comment of your own attached to it.

Original content sucks anyway. On Digg it’s all about reading the same news over and over, learning something new or actually hearing an original thought is just too confusing. Canned spam is what you want if you want to be popular.

The Stupefying Algorithm

Now, if you want to have some integrity left in your posts. You need the support of power users to get anywhere on Digg. In other words, you need someone with a fan base that Diggs their stuff. So how did they get there? By promoting as much crap as possible until they earn the right to post good stuff.

The more popular posts they have had in the past, the more chance of getting one to the front page again. In other words, a system that claims to work against vote gaming has bastardized itself to where vote gaming is the only thing that works.

Unless you want to follow the system above, you have to either become a power digger yourself, which means submitting as many posts following the above criteria as possible.  Or get one that has done the same before and now has the power user status behind them.

So the system is set up to become the tabloid of the social media. Unless you are tied in with a power user, you have to submit the “Obama gives birth to own head” post.

Power Diggers Control the only quality submissions, and they are of course tied in together in many ways. So you end up with the biggest vote gamers being supported by the system. (That sentence alone should get this post buried so fast my laptop will explode)

The normal users without connections fight the link bait game where selling your soul for a Digg hit is just about the only way to get noticed.

Just be prepared - when you succumb to the Digg game, your readers will end up being those that think Obama really is Usama’s son and that there really is 7 foolproof ways to make a million in 9 seconds.

The only good thing i see coming out of this is the supermarket tabloids starting to look respectable.

I’m sorry i have to run and read the latest shout about how Google and Microsoft have secretly banded together to take over the world.

See you tomorrow.

As much as I love the big sites like MySpace and Facebook for their incredible and innovative impact on the web and social marketing, I also hate them for being such a mess to get anything really useful out of.

If you look at these massive sites, they cater to pretty much everyone. Getting a piece of useful information out of them, you first have to become a wiz at using their filters to get rid of what you don’t want. Even then, you are more often than not presented with a large selection of mostly entertaining but useless information.

But there is hope on the horizon.

The Opposite of Google

Relevance is the basic of why Google is so big. Its strength has always been to give you what you want, when you want it. They do the filtering for you, and you get relevant results immediately.

In a social network, they try to accomplish this by adding subgroups, filters, search functions and other means, but it is still user driven to the nth degree. This means that spammers have free roam of these networks; and will use the broadest possible definition of every keyword to get their information on your screen. As soon as you step outside the boundaries of your personal group of trusted friends you are presented with the exact opposite of Google. Vast amounts of non-relevant information.

The Future - Targeted Social Media Networks

This week we saw GLCzone.com go live. A niche social media site that targets bloggers primarily writing about health and personal growth. I’ve had a lot of contact with the owner of this site over the last few months and I’ve begun to see the genius of it all.

What this does is create not only a gathering place for likeminded bloggers, but a powerful resource for readers. For the reader, a niche site will remove a large amount of the non-relevant information by design. Creating a ‘best of both worlds" aggregate where you get a variety of blogs presented to you, but gathered around a topic that is relevant to your current needs.

Niche social media sites provide the missing link in social media evolution. They are the intermediary between Googles high relevance, and Diggs "whatever goes".

Better for Publishers

Granted, a niche social site will not give you the Digg Effect with 100.000 readers crashing your web server. What it will get you are targeted readers, with a clear intent of looking for what you have to offer. It makes sense for publishers to be part of a targeted network rather than trying to scream over the noise of a major site.

Bloggers and site publishers who participate in niche sites are likely to get much higher rates of visitors converting to loyal readers. Niche sites do the work of filtering out the rest for you.

Although the Digg effect is missing, this is the only drawback, the rest of your metrics should see a significant improvement with niche site traffic. Less bounce, longer stays with more page-views and higher conversions.

Although sites like Digg are never going to go away, they do embody "Quantity over Quality". For bloggers that are only interested in seeing their hit counters go up, that’s great. But it does little for those that are looking for people to actually become loyal readers and commenters or convert through sales or ad clicks.

SEO Opportunities

A Niche social media setting also does something very interesting for SEO. These aggregate sites will undoubtedly have a higher pagerank compared to the participating blogs. And since they are topic focused, they compete on many of the same keywords.

That translates into both an opportunity and a threat. The opportunity is that these sites will be Google front page material, causing more readers to land there after a search. Smaller blogs participating in niche sites will get a second chance to be in front of readers’ eyes.

Threats

For those that don’t participate, these niche sites will function as a very powerful "front page blockers" Hogging much of this attractive real estate.

So with SEO in mind, not participating is basically suicide until you can fight these sites on your own. In a sense this is the self-serving strength of the niche site. For small bloggers, not participating will slow any progress down, while participating makes them capable of competing and outperforming almost all of the larger blogs that are not part of these networks.

If you consider the tourism industry you will see how this is already in effect. When you search for a hotel by name or location, chances are you will find hotel review and travel sites before you find the actual hotel’s own webpage somewhere on page 4 of Google.

Better for Readers

The readers that come to a site like GLCzone.com are looking for exactly what it offers. Blogs and information about physical and mental health, when they get there, they will not be distracted by an information overload or be unable to find relevant information hidden behind the link bait titles.

This quickly translates to readers who are generally interested in certain topic areas will be more likely to visit these networks to find information. Since the aggregate sites will show up high in search terms, they are easy to find and will reduce the non relevant onslaught of sites like Digg. A niche social media site will be the needed step between an organic Google search and a wide open social network.

Social Media is about to take the leap towards relevancy.

—