Day 2: New Article, Amazon Cover Upload, and Digg Comments

In: Education|Marketing By: Brian Armstrong

18 Jun 2007

Here we are on Day 2 of the website marketing challenge.

My three tasks for the day were:

Finished another article for lifehack.org which will appear in the next week or so. I’ve become a regular contributer there and it has helped drive traffic through my “about the author” section at the bottom. This has actually been the biggest contributor so far, and is a technique I talked about in this video. I need to try and become a contributing author for some other big blogs.

I submitted Breaking Free to Amazon.com today. Hopefully it will appear in a couple days. I also formatted and uploaded image files to Amazon’s servers so that they will appear in search results. Once the book appears, I’m going to get the copy text on their page edited, send an email to everyone who has purchased it so far to ask them to leave a review, and mail Amazon a physical book so they can scan it for their Search Inside program.
Finally, I read this article a while back about generating traffic from Digg comments, so I tried that today. I left four comments on upcoming business related stories that were valuable but also included a link to my site. One problem I encountered is that digg doesn’t allow HTML links in their comments, so my links were just plain text (meaning someone would have to manually copy and paste it or type it by hand, they couldn’t click it). I’m not sure if this is something Digg has changed recently or not. I will need to get more of my stories submitted to Digg in the future as well, since they are a major source of traffic.

Side note: as a result of switching to FeedBlitz I had about 20 people unsubscribe, probably just because it was confusing and annoying to see that email go about about the switch (I don’t blame the reader who shouldn’t know or care about such technical details, Feedblitz required it). I should have sent the post about the upcoming switch BEFORE it took place, so lesson learned.

Be Sociable, Share!

12 Responses

Chuck667

June 18th, 2007 at 2:32 am

Stop spamming on Digg. it is annoying.

Brian Armstrong

June 18th, 2007 at 7:53 am

My apologies Chuck, didn’t mean to offend anyone.
Brian

Danilo

July 2nd, 2007 at 1:58 pm

Two very important suggestions. Submitting stuff on digg drives traffic even if its not on the frontpage. Generally business topics are not as popular as tech, SEO or blogging.

Also, being a collaborator on sites I think works wonders. Writing posts for sites that are already established can drive from day one a lot of readers and it will also give you important backlinks.

Don’t stop with digg, try also the other sites and also Netscape.

Brian Armstrong

July 2nd, 2007 at 5:51 pm

Thanks Danilo!
Brian