Daily Archives: July 4, 2008

Quality Content is Not Enough

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Want success on the social networks? Everyone tells you to write compelling, quality pieces that will appear to like-minded social users. “Digg Bait” is writing so that it appeals exactly to the “Digg mind” and by doing that you will have massive success on the social networks, including Digg. This statement is only about half correct, quality content is nothing without the promotion.

It doesn’t matter how good the piece that you created is, it just won’t become popular without promoting it correctly throughout the social networks. Try it yourself, spend a whole week creating some study that is tech-related which social geeks (like me) will love. Then submit it to the networks and watch what happens…nothing.

The reason behind that is they are called social networks for a reason and you need a bunch of people to take interest in your story before it will go out and spread into the wider community.
You need to build a list of “friends” that will help give your article a push into “view”. Without enough votes, thumbs up, Diggs, stumbles or whatever, people will not see your creation, and it will be an absolute waste.
Building up a good network of “friends”, takes time and a lot of effort, many of the successful social media marketers I know participate in their networks full time. It’s not something that you can start and then have some success a day later.

Successful social media marketers have put the effort in, consistently and now have their own networks of several hundred to several thousand people. When they submit an article to the social networks, it gets a lot of attention because of their following. An article submitted by an established social media marketer will attract dozens of “votes” without ever even having to ask, this will propel the article into view and it will start to the gain traction organically. From then it will more than likely hit the “popular page” of one or more social networks, attracting tens of thousands of visitors.

On the flip side, the power of an integrated social networker can get an under par article onto the “popular” page of a social network. This is because their loyal following will vote for the story almost habitually and not even consider rating the story negatively. It’s a strange phenomenon, where your loyal followers will support you almost blindly no matter what the quality of your work.

That’s not to say any old garbage will do well, the piece needs to have some good qualities otherwise people outside their network will destroy the article’s chance of success.

The moral of the story: If you want success, build your network. Otherwise, try and convince an active social media marketer with some influence to bump-start your story.

WP Super Cache – An Essential Plugin for Your Blog

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I’ve always tried to keep my hosting costs low as possible as it’s a bit of a necessary evil. Hosting costs vary wildly, from $1 a month to several hundred for a small blog like this. Obviously, huge sites can spend millions.

I’ve been through my fair share of hosts and thought I had found the perfect cheap host when someone recommended Hostgator. It’s inexpensive, has 24 hour support and has really amazing up time.

However, even this company let me down eventually. I wrote a post called 10 Google Easter Eggs and spent at least six hours researching, writing, and formatting the post. Then I proceeded to promote it on the various social networks. The article was doing really, really well and two hours after launching the hosting company turned off my hosting. Without ANY warning!

I contacted them straight away and while their online support is good, they didn’t have any power to turn my site back on again, nor could they tell me what the actual problem was. I created a support ticket and and started a dialogue with their support team.

Here was the one of the emails I received back from their support team:

“You have exceeded your cpu quota, by driving system load up almost to 20. Normal system load is less than 10. Your account is starting to cause service outages for other users on the server, and re-instating it will continue to cause slowdowns and problems for other users. With that in mind, what do you feel is fair in this situation?”

Now, all I run is a blog, and who am I to know that their server can’t handle it? More to the point, I don’t know what’s fair? All I want is my blog running and yes, I don’t want other peoples’ sites to go out.

I literally begged for them to turn my site back on, but to no avail. Twenty emails later I got this response:

“The only way to get more CPU resources is to purchase a dedicated server: http://hostgator.com/dedicated.shtml However, there are quite a few things that can be done such as installing WP-SuperCache or another caching system and optimizing the database or using a theme that doesn’t have so many callbacks.”

Now most people know about WP Super Cache but I never thought it was necessary unless you are trying to hit the front page of Digg consistently, or were generating tens of thousands of visitors.

WP-Super Cache generates HTML pages directly from your Apache server instead of generating load-bearing PHP pages. This obviously stops your server from crashing, even if you get a huge amount of traffic, from Digg or somewhere else. Or in my case, I had a theme which was generating too many call backs and loading the server more than usual.

Click the link here to download WP SuperCache, it’s a great system and can save you tons of money and even more importantly, a lot of time and hassle.