As a blogger one of your goals might be to become popular. You might be able to do this by [optimizing your blog](http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/optimizing-your-blog-for-search-engines.html) or by using the diverse [social mediums](http://www.stumbleupon.com) out there today. These methods are great and can really boost your popularity, but they are usually not in your control. The one thing that you have in your control is the content on your blog, so here are some ideas on how you can increase your popularity through your content.
Archive for September, 2006
What is 9rules?
Recently [Paul Scrivens](http://wisdump.com/) from [9rules](http://9rules.com) announced that [9rules round 5](http://9rules.com/blog/2006/09/9rules-round-5-october-25th/) will be taking place on October 25th. Some of you may be thinking about entering your blog in round 5 and some of you maybe wondering what 9rules is all about. This blog and [Cameron's blog](http://www.cameronolthuis.com) both got accepted into 9rules during round 4 and ever since we have been discovering exactly what 9rules is all about. A lot of the people whom I’ve talked to see it as a blog network, but as a member here is how I see it…
Catchup – 9/22/06
* [YouTube & Warner Strike Music Licensing Deal](http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=3801)
YouTube and Warner Music have announced an advertising revenue sharing deal with will distribute and license Warner Music Group Corp’s copyrighted songs and other material through YouTube. Under the deal, Warner Music has agreed to license its songs to the people who upload their videos to YouTube. Meaning that any video producer can now legally use Warner Music in their videos as theme or background music, or even produce alternative videos for Warner songs.
Marketing with How-To Guides
How to guides have been a smashing success on the web. New how to guides are written on a daily basis and you always see them popping up on sites like [digg](http://www.digg.com) and [del.icio.us](http://del.icio.us). So why do how to guides have to stop with the web? Why not create commercials based on that principle, such as [how to save money on your phone bill](http://www.vonage.com). Or even how to see a girl naked…
BMW is sleeping behind the wheel
I’ve always been a big fan of BMW and if you’ve ever had the pleasure of driving or owning one you know why. Last night I was watching TV and a commercial for the new BMW 3 series coupe came on, since I also had my laptop handy I decided to hop online to see more. I went to Google and searched for “bmw 3 series coupe” and this is what I saw…
How to get on the digg homepage
Lately many bloggers have been making an extra effort to try and get on the [digg homepage](http://www.digg.com) so that they can increase the popularity of their blog. Many of the bloggers will do almost anything to accomplish this, some go as far as telling all of their friends on their AIM buddy list to digg their story while others go to the extreme of joining digging groups where everyone diggs each others story. If you really want to get on digg, here is how you do it.
Targeting Social Media Optimization
One of the reasons I love trading emails is that I’m often inspired to blog about an idea that comes up. In a recent email swap with David, from the [Social Media Optimization blog](http://www.social-media-optimization.com/), we started talking about SMO strategies and how to target the different channels. With SEO it’s easy, you pretty much want to rank on every possible search engine there is, anytime someone performs a relevant search you would want to show up. Right? SMO is different, most social websites have their own unique communities. For example, if you’re a ["cooking" social network](http://www.bakespace.com/) then Digg is the wrong site to optimize for, [Chowhound](http://www.chowhound.com/) or some of the other recipe sharing websites might make more sense for you.
A comparison of SEO and SMO
Social Media Optimization (SMO), if you haven’t heard already, is a term that was recently coined by Rohit Bhargava which refers to the process of ensuring that a website is easy to link to by utilizing the different social media sources including but not limited to, blogs, bookmarking websites and media sharing websites. There are a lot of similarities and differences between SEO & SMO. Because of this, and the idea that one cannot take over the role for the other, it is important to know when and why to use each optimization technique.
Using digg and Netscape to get traffic
In the last couple of months more and more bloggers have been catching onto the power of [digg](http://www.digg.com) and [Netscape](http://www.netscape.com). Bloggers have realized that if they get their blog on the homepage of digg or Netscape thousands of visitors will flood into their blog within minutes. So the question is, how can digg and Netscape be leveraged for traffic, and what results can you expect from them?
Discovering a new Google design
As some of you may have noticed, I am addicted to stats. Every couple of hours I have to look at my blog stats or else I go crazy. Today I noticed that my Google traffic went up drastically and my referrers showed that I was getting traffic for terms such as “soesman”, so I decided to do a Google search and check it out. And lucky me, when I did a search I saw a newly designed Google search result page.
