You have no doubt heard of Digg.com -probably never spent much time there, but you know of this site. The social media news sharing website was part of a handful of power figures 4 years ago. Quantcast estimated Digg’s monthly U.S. unique visits at 3.8 million, while Digg’s popularity prompted the creation of copycat  social networking sites Reddit and Imgur,  allowing story submission and voting systems.

Now only a few years later, it’s Digg that has lost ground and is slipping through the cracks. In 2006, Digg had a cover story with one of the co-founders and was said to be worth over 200 million dollars. It also had been said that over the years, they raised more than 45 million dollars with the investors who came in. Neither of the companies commented on if this was true, but a lot of talk on the Internet pretty much confirms it. Back in 2008, Google almost bought out the company for 200 million dollars, but ended up deciding not to.

Just recently, Digg sold themselves to Betaworks. Both of the companies have confirmed the buy out, and the cash exchanged for the buy seems pretty weak in comparison to how well they were doing just a few years ago. $500,000 was all that was given to the owners of Digg.

The rise and fall of this social media site has now set the stage as a blueprint to know when you have peaked.

If you never went on Digg, it was a website that users could submit links or stories to, while appearing as a news feed for current information on popular niches. In it’s prime, it was a new Internet feature and lots of users flocked to the website to try it. Unfortunately, as many other websites have found, eventually people stopped going once it reached its peak.

In 2010, Digg came out with a new website do-over called v4, claiming that it was a re-vamped version of the website. Sadly for Digg, this new update caused even more problems and was the eventual reason why the growth of the company began to take a turn for the worse. Most people who were regular visitors to the site hated the changes. One day, users had an “Abandon Digg Day” where nobody went on the site. After this disaster, one of the CEO’s, Matt Williams, claimed that they were going to fix the problems on the website, but this never happened. The glitches continued and people started to become more and more fed up with the website that was once so popular. At this point, Reddit had come out of the woodwork and was the same idea as Digg but more simple. People quickly converted.

Betaworks has said that they are going to completely revamp their website, claiming big changes will be coming soon. They are going back to the beginning, with a small team and a low budget hoping to make the website as popular as it once was back in 2006. Betaworks is using it’s own employees and getting rid of everyone who currently works at Digg, so in with the new ideas and out with the old.

Things aren’t looking too bad though for co-founder Kevin Rose, who was the one who appeared on that 2006 cover claiming their fame. A few months ago he made a deal with Google to help them get Google+ going and put a nice 15 million dollar paycheck into his pocket. Hopefully if everything works out with Betaworks, you should see a new and improved Digg and maybe it will even gain back some of the popularity it lost a few years ago…but I doubt it.

Look, I know what your thinking, but hear me out; If you aren’t getting enough visitors to make a profit, or selling enough items through an affiliate program, Lijit.com is for you.

Lijit was founded in 2006, and has since spun off into one of the webs greatest new ways to earn quick, easy money for your website. The major advantage I find when using Lijit’s platform is the customization. Never have I been allowed to create passback tags with an advertising company before, using their platform. Lijit allows customers to adjust payments so rollback ads can appear if one particular ad isn’t reaching a strong CPM rate. The floor price determines the minimum CPM value of the ad and the better paying banner gets shown. -Meaning you can run Google AdSense  as a fail-safe if Lijit can’t find a company that can better the price of the banner. So far they have been able to earn more than AdSense in all of the clients niches that  I have tried. While I do have thumbs up across the board for this Lijit Review, I do however think they need to improve their international campaigns, yet a side from that, high grades across the board.

Also, I really like there’s no grace period. Once installed on your website, you’ll start making money quickly. While the dashboard and passback tags may sound diffiucult to some, their customer service is excellent and will walk you through the steps.

Lijit is also completely free. Their services don’t cost money to sign up and do not take sneaky money out of your account like other websites do. They have a daily count so you can monitor stats, and quick payouts.

If you are interested, go to Lijit.com today and sign up your free account.

Dollars and Cents

I can’t exactly show off client earnings, but I can say that Lijit has surpassed the Adsense ad’s which I used as passback tags, or in additional to the Lijit ads.

From my experience I have found different banners to seem to pay better than others. Of course they use the standard sizes, but currently I’m seeing ranges of $1.20 to $1.77 CPM for the 728px|90px while the 160px|600px banner can range from $1.10 to $1.57 CPM. These number are on average over the last two months, although they have had solid single day spikes.

Updated Oct 2012: Since I first published this Lijit.com Review back in July I have seen spikes in many campaigns. It seems if your website is in a popular niche you can really ramp up earnings from popular brands.

The following are 5 Common SEO Mistakes When Blogging

1. Keyword Stuffing: Many people feel that making their article keyword rich is a good idea to tip-off search engines. This is true, but in turn keyword stuffing an article can have more harm than it’s worth. It is best to avoid any such keyword stiffing as search engines will notice. The article may also read awkwardly, something that may annoy any readers. Remember, you are writing articles or content for people first.  It is better to maintain keyword density within your article and try to avoid any excess usage. You may think your getting to the top of search engines, but when visitors are reading your content, they may not return thinking your article was not useful (or sucked). Bounce rate is becoming even more important that ever in SEO.
2. Poor Titles: The title tag is a very important factor that you need to keep in mind when optimizing your articles. Google goes for reading from left to right so you need to make it a point that your title tag must hold at least 3-4 words of your keyword phrase. You must never leave a title vague as it may leave Google in confused state, along with your readers.
3. Meta Description (Google Snippet): A precise description is one where you include your keyword. A mini recap of your article using the most descriptive words you possibly can.
4. Forgetting Simple Anchor Texts: Lack of anchor text is yet another SEO mistake that is made. Hyper linked words in web pages are known as anchor text. You can use these anchor text in internal links, external links and deep links too.
5. Forgetting Alt Tags on Images: Many people forget about images. If you want to increase your SEO chances of improved traffic and serps, you must re-title all the images. You need to use keywords in the file name of these images.

Top 10 Ways to Increase Your Google Ranking

Competition is growing so much these days in the internet marketing world that it has become more about what you do after you write your article than it is about the article itself. Of course, content is king and I’m exaggerating, but you understand what I mean.  There are several ways, in which you can help achieve top rankings in Google. You need to be dedicated as well as completely devoted to the work of your website. Let us learn top 10 ways to increase your Google ranking:

1. Unique and excellent web content:  You must have excellent and unique information on the keyword and website you are dealing with. When you have unique information, more people come to visit your website.
2. Back links: You must get excellent back links with the help of numerous alternative websites that revert you back. This helps in adding additional traffic to your website.
3. Forum posting: You must search for some of the top forums related to your keywords and website. Spamming never works, join into the conversation and slip in your links after you have built up the trust of the site. Use Forum signature links
4. Update posts regularly: To maintain that your website is on top ranking, you need to update your website by posting new posts every day.
5. Article marketing: Article marketing has been known  to help with back links and traffic. It is necessary and you post your articles to the best article directories like ezine and article base. You must add links of your website to the base of your articles so that more users visit your website.
6. Blog Writing: Another approach to increase Google ranking is continuously coming up with recent blog posts. You can write blog articles with a blog on your site or by guest writing on a high traffic site in the same niche
7. Online advertisements:  Online advertisements are one of the best methods that help you in Google ranking. You can place advertisements on various other websites and even Google too. Depending on your niche, Facebook has proven to be a very effective way to generate leads
8. Google prefers high ranking links, why not comment (not spam) on a high ranked article in your niche. Add a backlink
9. You must go for optimum utilization of H1, H2, and H3 Meta tags.
10. Social networking sites are of great importance. Try to get your website links in them.

With these top 10 ways to increase your Google ranking, you are sure to get best ranking in Google search results.

5) Reach out to your customers

Create a section on your website that offers up-to-date news about your business. Try to write articles or posts on this section of your site a couple of times a week with either changes to your company, news or promotional deals. By creating buzz worthy news, you’re encouraging people to visit your site more often.

4) Meta Tags

Adding Meta Tags to your site is a simple way to create a “thumb print” to what your site is about. Some believe that Google doesn’t look at Meta Tag’s anymore when distributing page ranks, but  that doesn’t mean other search engines aren’t using them or that you shouldn’t create this simple bit of code. There are Meta Tag generators you can use to create the best key words and description to represent your site. Adding the perfect amount of key words can be very helpful, but don’t go overboard as too many or duplicate key words can actually hurt you.

3) Social Media

It may sound cheesy, but things like Facebook and Twitter really do work for creating traffic and hold weight as incoming links to your site.  You can create groups or pages on facebook and get employees to join and help promote your business.

2) The Right Type Of Link Building

Inbound links are very important in the eyes of search engines, but the more natural the link the better. When a link is pointing to your site, you are seen as a place of reference and will earn more importance on the web, but if the site that has linked to you isn’t relevant to your niche than the link doesn’t really hold much SEO weight to your site.

People have been known to  buy links in articles and in sidebars on web sites, but the more natural one can obtain an inbound link will help your site that much more . Link building is an art form and can be easy to do, although spamming is a rookie mistake that you should never take part in.

1) Guest Write Articles For Other Site

Ezinearticles.com is a great place to start for link building, it can really allow you to show off your skills and knowledge about your field. Ezine is a high ranked site with tons a traffic, just getting a one way link to your site alone is worth the time it takes to write an article. Other blogs and sites in your niche will typically allow guest writing if you ask them nicely, the trade off is free content for them and a free link and exposure for your site. Exposure is ramped up on other peoples blogs as it is a completely new set of readers.

The virus is added through backdoor FTP clients that add a new file in your scripts directory called jquery.js . They then insert that file into the header or footer files of your site. It also inserts an iFrame that calls a 3rd party site which is known for malware or other malicious activities.

Here are a few simple steps to help when such a problem occurs

1. Add a Maintenance Mode plugin
   This will allow you to not fill pressured in a panic situation when trying to clean out your site.
2. Contact Godaddy
   Let them know that you’ve been hacked. They are not worth wasting a whole lot of time on as you are the one of hundred people probably with the same problem.
3. Clean
   Click on Editor and go through all your php files, remove the unwanted code. Usually it’s sitting at the top of each and every page. **If you don’t make these type of changes on a regular basis get a hold of a copy of the wordpress theme. Open it up and compare the code at the top of the pages
   Helpful future tricks:
   Backup your files
   Change your passwords with Godaddy’s hosting network.

If you are still lost contact me. I have a anti-virus code that can clean your site is 5 min.