Hello bloggers, more than a rumor, it is a fact that Google want to buy Digg. After some negotiation rounds, Google is willing to buy Digg by $200 million, that is a low amount if we compare it with the Youtube’s Deal, which was acquired by Google two years ago by $1,650 million.

The Reason Of This Deal

Digg, is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. Aside the money, one of the rumored reasons about why Digg want to have this deal with The Big G is because the maintenance costs are superior than the advertisement’s gain, being so hard to maintain.

Google is very interested in Digg for some reasons. They want to integrate the voting system with their search engine algorithm, which you will be able to vote and add comments to a specific website directly from Google. Because of that, the Google’s Search Algorithm will be improved with all the Digg’s Data, which will help to Google’s search engine to give you relevant and precise results for your searches. In the other side, the Digg’s voting system seems to be improved with the Google’s Data, improving the Digg’s algorithm to rank the published links.

As you can see, this deal will merge the social media with the search engine system. I think that it’s a great way to improve the Internet, because now we will see relevant results in our searches. But this means that if our pages or blogs are not Dugg they will be hard to found? I don’t know, what do you think about it, will this deal , improve or not the web?

The following one is a video from TechCrunch which you can see the new features of Google, enjoy:

Did you know you can drive traffic to your blog by promoting other people’s content? It sounds weird but it is truth, remember that you can do whatever you want with the Internet’s help. In the latest days, I noticed that the quantity of links pointing to my blog has increased considerably. I think that I have attracted some blogger’s attention and they have included some of my posts in their “linking away” posts. I feel very grateful for this and I want to thank you very much for pointing my posts in your blogs, I really appreciate that.

Ok now, you may be thinking what about the traffic to my blog? Well, if you think for a while, you will get the idea immediately. You can use social media networks such Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook etc etc, to promote all those content where your blog is linked. By doing this, you won’t be promoting your own content, something that could be seen by others as spam. Instead, you will be promoting other people’s content which is very legitimate and normal in social media networks.

Of course, you need to be careful when you are going to do this. You need to promote the content which could be useful for your audience or followers. Normally, if you write about Internet Marketing, the people who follow you also are interested on Internet Marketing. But I mention this because on Mixx, you can share your submission with many groups. So, be sure to share your content with groups related to it.

Another good technique is to share the content through Twitter, Plurk, Pownce and this kind of services. As you know, those services can make something “viral“, and they can be perfect to broadcast anything among many people. In this case, is not necessary that your blog is included in the thing your want to submit. I will give you an example, if you blog about Food, and you read a great article about Sushi, you could broadcast this post through twitter with a little signature which relates your blog. I don’t know if I am being clear, so I will write a little example for you… By doing this, you can attract many people to your blog without promoting it directly. :

Twitter Message: Hey check this excellent post about Sushi ~ *link here* | Related to *your blog here*

Now, you know a few tips to drive traffic to your blog by promoting other people’s content, but I didn’t tell you how can you track all those content. Actually, by pinging search engines you can know how many blogs are pointing to yours, but I will give you another tip here which you will receive an email notifying you about those inbound links. I’m talking about Google Alerts that sends you emails of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. So, you need to create some alerts related to your blog. In my case, I have 2 alerts:

1. Alerts for: Mr. Javo
2. Alerts for: http://mrjavo.com/

With this, I receive an email with the latest updates of Google which includes those strings. Then, I just visit the blogs or websites pointing to my blog, and submit the respective page to the social media networks .

Wow, I’m tired of talking writing, now I would like to read your thoughts about this topic, and if you have another tip missed by me, please share!

Hello my readers, if you are a regular user of Mixx, you should read about this new feature in their newsletter. Now, you can be in a higher level with the personalization of your Mixx with the launch of Mixx Communities. You may have already noticed that the “Groups” tab in your navigation bar has been replaced with a shiny new “Communities” tab. All of your Groups are still there and will reside under this tab but they have added Mixx Communities.

Mixx Communities offer an easier way to focus on the topics and issues that you’re most passionate about. Once you start a Mixx Community, it will reside within Mixx but you can give it your own stamp by importing an image header and/or logo, choosing a custom color scheme, and determining specific topics and categories to include. As you can see, they can be customizable so they can look pretty good!

Your new Community will have the same benefits as a Mixx Group, with a few more bells and whistles. You will have:

• Prominently placed space for your editorial and/or promotional content
• A sub-domain name
• The ability to import existing tags—this means that as soon as you’ve finished your set up, your Community will already have content
• The ability to embed video through YouTube and MetaCafé

Mixx is also excited to announce that as part of our community offering, they will allow users the ability to participate in a revenue sharing program. The revenue sharing will be made possible by Mixx’s integration with the Google AdSense API.

Though it will take a little more time than setting up a Group, creating a Mixx Community is a simple, five-step process that any non-techy person can do. But if you’re not ready to go all out, Mixx Groups are a great way to get your feet wet. It takes just a couple of minutes to set up a Group and you’ll be on your way! Then whenever you’re ready to take the plunge, you can upgrade your Group to a Community.

So, what do you think my friends? I had created a Mr. Javo community on Mixx… I want to invite you to take part in and share with me, and with my followers all the stuff you can find related to Blogging Tips, Internet Marketing, Advertising or WordPress!

Since I started this blog, many useful tools have been born: Entrecard, Spottt, BlogRush….. Now it is the time of Plurk!

What is Plurk?

Well Plurk is a pretty tool similar to Twitter. It is a site that allows you to showcase the events that make up your life, in a dynamic screen where you can see every event posted by your friends. So as you can imagine, it is a great tool to expand your network, make more friends and get new readers!

I signed up two days ago, and I have received hundred friendship requests. Actually, I have 209 people who follow my events, making it a great broadcasting tool for bloggers.

Why to Use It?

When someone invited me to this new community, I reject the invitation. I thought that it was a totally waste of time, but after a minutes I reconsidered the idea and I visited the link. I liked how it looks and I could appreciated the potential for us, the bloggers! So, I signed up, receiving instantaneously several friend requests ( of course, I shared my profile’s link through twitter ).

the following one is a little list of reasons you should use Plurk:

• It Works As A Broadcasting Station: Due to the big amount of people in this community, it is perfect to broadcast your blog events. It’s perfect to promote a contest, polls, new posts and these kind of things.
• Brand Extender: As a good blogger, you need to expand your brand if you want to be easily recognizable in the web. By signing up in Plurk, your name will be spread between many people, who probably will be bloggers or internet marketers. In conclusion, it’s perfect to make new partnerships.
• Traffic Maker: For the same reasons commented above, it can be a new source of traffic. I have received some emails from people congratulating me for my blog, and then they made a little reference telling me that they saw my profile at Plurk. It works? I think so!

Basically, Plurk is a new social network which you can extend your brand through other bloggers, getting more traffic to your blog, increasing your readers and subscribers.

Add me at Plurk!
Do you haven’t an account? Sign up here

What do you think about Plurk? Share your opinions or tips here to feed this community…. By the way, don’t forget to participate in the Poll, which you can find in the sidebar, bellow the Skribit widget.

Bye Bye!

Hello people, as you may know I signed up to SocialSpark some weeks ago and since then, I have been testing this new service/community.

The last week when I posted about this community, I don’t knew it at all, and I skipped some good points which I want to mention this time. I’m talking about the types of marketplace opportunities you have, by signing up as blogger:

1. Sponsored Post: In the Sponsored Post Opportunity, you will create a unique sponsored post on your blog, based on the guidance the advertiser provides. The advertiser can choose to have each blogger include an image, video or press release along with the blogger’s own text, basically you need to meet the terms. The advertiser will pay per unique blog post that is created on each unique blog.
2. Blog Sponsorship: Blog sponsorships are a way which the advertisers promote their website or blog, by utilizing SocialSpark’s unique technology to create a persistent sponsorship banner on blogs. Sponsorships can consist of texts, images or videos. The advertiser pays per day that a select blog runs the Blog Sponsorship. I could notice the advertisers pay between $0.5 and $1.5 a day.
3. Sparks: Sparks are free opportunities that serve as ideas for blog posts. Sparks are utilized primarily by bloggers, but may also be used by advertisers. These “Sparks” are a great way to start making post if you are new on the blogging business. Also, many bloggers create sparks to get reviews, by offering to blog about you on their blogs. This offer is called BlogYouBack™.

So as you can see, there are many ways to earn some bucks with this community. And talking about Marketplace, I want to talk you about the Code of Ethics.

What is this code?

• 100% Audit-able In-Post Disclosure: This post is a perfect example to explain this point. Why? because I posted about socialspark the last week. By getting paid for blogging about a certain topic, even if you would have written about that topic anyway, you run the risk of giving the impression of a conflict of interest. That is the reason they give you a code which set a small box in your post, to let your readers know you are getting paid for that content.

• 100% Transparency: I love this, because you can know who is working and who’s not. Every single profile, as advertiser or blogger, is public to every person in the community, and if you visit my blogger profile for example, you could see that I’m working with IZEA with this opportunity. There is not secrets!.

• 100% Real Opinions: At SocialSpark, there is not restrictions when you are going to post. I’m referring to the opinions, if you dislike a service, you can write it, and if you love it too! SocialSpark has no restrictions on how you express your genuine thoughts on an advertiser’s product or service.

• 100% Search Engine Friendly: As you may know, Google was penalizing bloggers who used PayPerPost. SocialSpark set all your sponsored links with the attribute no-follow, so they are not affecting the search engine’s ranking. This is designed to protect bloggers and advertisers from search engine penalties based on paid linking.

See my public Blogger Profile

I have to say I got some opportunities, and all them has being approved very quick. The only thing I don’t like at all, is the fact you need to write about the opportunity in the next 12 hours after you reserved the opportunity. Is kinda forced!!!

Anyways, they are very conscious because they asked me to resubmit a post without showing advertising on it. This goes against their policy, so I removed the Kontera content links to resubmit my post, which was approved without problems… They could reject my post by they didn’t, they just contact me and noticed me about the issue, letting me to resubmit the post once again.

So If you are not part of this community, I recommend you to join right know. Really worth to be there!

Some weeks ago, I was invited to use this new service in its alpha phase. SocialSpark is a new service of the IZEA’s people, who we know because of services like PayPerPost or RealRank, but what they are offering with this service? Let’s find it out.

SocialSpark, with the tagline “Get Everyone Talking”, is a new service very similar to payperpost because you can make money by blogging about opportunities, created by advertisers. But it has the difference that it is more social, you can interact with all the members, adding them as your friends, voting for posts, recommending a blogger and another interesting features that I will let you to explore.

This is a little screenshot of the main panel, where you can find the most popular opportunities, feature posts and other things.

As you can see, SocialSpark is a kind of blogging community, where you can make friends at the same time you can make money by writing about those opportunities. The best thing is that by this way, you can meet potential partners to work with, because you can “Prop” the users, which is the new way of giving someone your vote of confidence or high rating. You have the choice, in many areas, to offer a “prop” or “drop” to other users, opportunities, blogs, etc. Basically, a prop is a positive vote, and a drop a negative one. And how these props will help you to find potential partners? Simple, because you can search members by filtering their information, as number of props, views and friends, which could let you to determine who is an active blogger, and who is not.

Also, beside to searching members, you can search blogs by average pageviews a month, real rank, blog props, and other factors which let you to know, as in the case of users, which are the active or inactive blogs.

Conclusion

SocialSpark seems like a great place to be, I have made a couple of friends through this way and taken a couple of opportunities. The only question I have is about the payments. I don’t know how I’m going to be paid, because they never asked me anything related to that. Effectively, the payments are made through paypal, as they does at PayPerPost. However don’t wait more and join to this social network, which also brings you the chance to make some money!

Request an invitation