Help people share your content

People love to share good websites with their friends when they come across them. I am always receiving new emails from friends and family for different websites that they think I will like or should check out.  By making your content easy to share you can drive a lot of new traffic and links to your site. Here are some ways you can help people share your content by making it easy for them to do so.

Tell a friend
One of the easiest ways to help your content spread is to add "tell a friend" links on your site. People click these links and then add the emails of people who they would like to introduce that page to. Believe it or not these actually get used a lot. One of the best examples of this that I have seen is on Craigslist. In the top right hand corner of the listing pages they have a link that says "email this posting to a friend", when you click on the link there is a form where all you do is enter both your email address and your friend’s, then when you hit submit it sends an email to your friend, and you are sent right back to the listing you came from. I have also noticed that people will often use these links to email themselves so they donât forget about the page and can remember to come back at a later time.

URLs
There are a number of reasons that short, static URLs are important to have, helping your content spread is one of them. A short URL is easier to remember and also easier to tell someone else. For example, MySpace allows users to create custom URLs for their profiles. So lets say that I chose myspace.com/olthuis, how easy is that for me to tell people and have them actually remember the URL? It’s pretty easy. A lot easier than a URL like this: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=138203302. That would be impossible for not only me to remember but also anyone that I tell. Shorter URLs also make content a lot more linkable.

Not only do these things help your content spread but they also improve the usability of your site.  Consider adding "tell a friend" links and making other improvements to your site so that itâs easier for people to share it with others. 

Web Developer Job at TLA NYC

Readers, we are looking for a full time developer to join the TLA team at our beautiful NYC office.  You will be joining a fast growing company with a great group of team members.

Minimum Required Skills:
Software Developer – Linux, Apache, PHP , MySQL, Security, Javascript, Ajax

Must Have Skills:
* 3-5+ years of strong PHP/MYSQL Web Development on a Linux Platform using the Apache Webserver

* Experience designing integrated and interactive web sites.

Must be available to work on site in the greatest city in the world.  If you or any of your friends may be interested please send your resume to: resumes (at) text-link-ads.com

Thank you for your help!

LinkBaiting and Social Media Marketing Guide

Readers, Andy Hagans has written a great guide on linkbaiting and social media marketing that can be found here.  This is a great guide for anyone wanting to learn how to leverage this great link building strategy.  It is important to build links using as many strategies as possible and leveraging social media is definitely a great supplement to a holistic link building campaign.

Exploiting Google Filters

Joe Whyte recently wrote a blog post about Google filters and how you can get around them as well as exploit them. It seems it has been creating a lot of controversy because of the point he discusses.

What do you think?

Increasing your StumbleUpon Audience

StumbleUpon is one of those social sites that many people ignore, although it is not as popular as Digg or Del.icio.us, it can drive a lot of traffic. Back in September I wrote an article on How to get StumbledUpon and how I received 17,209 visitors from using the techniques described in that
article. Since then a lot of things have changed on StumbleUpon and I have learned a lot more about it, if you are looking to leverage it here are some of my thoughts.

Audience

Each user is given an audience number. The number could be 1 or it could be in the thousands. The overall goal is to get your audience number as high as possible because then when you stumble stories more people will see them, thus increasing your traffic. The following are some ways to increase your audience number:

• Use StumbleUpon on a daily basis – by stumbling and submitting stories (as well as voting) on them on a daily basis your audience number should go up. Just be careful because their algorithm is quite complex and your goal should be to stumble and submit stories you like as well as ones that the community will like.
• Add friends – the concept of friends is that when you stumble stories your friends will also see them. StumbleUpon lets you add up to 200 friends, so be careful and make sure you add friends with similar interests or it could hurt your audience number.
• Join communities – there are communities within StumbleUpon where people with common interests such as "Apple" or "Web 2.0" hang out. Join the communities that you are interested in so that when you stumble, web pages that will interest you come up.

If you do these simple things and become an active member in the community your StumbleUpon account’s audience number should get higher. If you have a high audience and submit a website that the community loves, you should be able to drive thousands of visitors to that website.