Blogging Elite Retreat :: Neil Patel

You know, before today, I had really given up on Digg. After seeing the maturity level of the Digg userbase as well as never getting any more than 10 visits from the site in a month, I figured that Diggers would never be willing to visit a site for moms. Plus, all I seemed to hear was that getting onto the front page of Digg will pretty much crash your server, but you won’t make a cent off of the traffic.

Not only has Neil renewed my faith in Digg, but he’s given us GREAT reasons as to WHY WE SHOULD CARE in the first place. And Digg isn’t all we talked about - we talked about a pretty stupid viral video that was made for about $600 bucks - but brought in over a million dollars in eBook sales by getting to number #1 on Google Video.

You read that right. Over a million bucks.

He even gave me some tips on how to get to the front page of Digg with a url like eMomsatHome.com. We’ll see how it goes, but if I can get to the front page of Digg, ANYONE can.

Using social networking traffic as a branding tool is the biggest boon - several of the presenters told us about how they got into the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the New York Times by getting onto the front page of Digg.

Some of the best advice we got was to be hyper-perfectionistic about writing great headlines and content summaries. No big surprise here, but Neil told us about a story that made it to the home page despite the fact that the actual story was on a crashed server for two days straight. The reason it made it was because the Digg story title and description rocked.

When I asked about actually making some money off of social networking traffic, Neil made a really fantastic suggestion - Diggers like cheap deals on tech stuff. So ads served up from networks like AuctionAds or product ads on cheap RAM deals will actually perform really well, even if your story isn’t related to these things.

Darren also made an excellent suggestion specifically for bloggers. When he sees one of his posts climbing the ranks, he’ll swap out ads on those specific posts and put in more prominent RSS subscribe buttons, or promote his newsletter more prominently. And if you don’t already use the Related Posts plugin, it’s a wise idea to add 3-5 links manually into your post footer of hand-selected related posts, to increase your page views.

We’re on break, and next up we’ll be brainstorming together as a group… then Aaron is speaking and tonight we’re off to Bobo’s for dinner.

And yes, if you’re jealous, you should be - I would have paid $5K just for the networking that happened last night before the conference even began. It’s THAT good!!!

PS :: Kris is blogging this too! (And he’s giving away more info than I am!!!)