Integrating Digg Buttons

It's great to learn new things! A while back I tried to integrate Digg buttons into my individual posts. I had given it up as a lost cause when I decided I'd try one more thing, and voila! It worked! (You might have seen the Digg buttons popping up here and there on my blog.)

You, too, can promote your work using buttons from the Digg Integration Tools page on Digg. It's a little tricky (at least for me; remember, I'm a writer, not a techie!) but if you have any questions, feel free to comment or email me.

Digging your blog post is a great way to get a boost in traffic. Just keep in mind that the Digg audience can be a little opinionated at times, and be prepared to receive some varied feedback. To supercharge this technique, build up a list of friends on Digg who you can share your link with once you've dugg your post.

Talent Vs. Publicity - Which Is The Key To Success?

I recently wrote in an email that "being a successful author has just as much to do with marketing and networking as with writing skill." I thought this might be a controversial statement to some, and so decided to expand upon my idea.

First of all, is it possible to be successful without talent? In this day and age, the answer is a resounding YES! I'm sure that as soon as I mentioned it, several names popped into your head, most likely from the pop culture arena. These people make money and stay successful simply by staying in the public eye.

Second, is it possible to be successful without publicity? I could imagine someone writing the Great American Novel while holed up in a cave and then making millions because of the sheer awesomeness of the book. However, I don't think it's very likely.

Granted, you (probably) don't want to be one of those talentless people who cling to fame long after their fifteen minutes are up. But at the same time, you can't rely on your skills alone to take you to the top, no matter how good you are. My advice is to at least consider putting decent effort into promoting your artistic pieces de resistance.

And one more note about the notion of talent - it's constantly changing. For most of the history of writing, there has been a very strict standard for what constitutes a good story. However, with the coming of the internet and the explosion of blogs and other outlets for personal expression, "good writing" isn't necessarily what it used to be. For example, I love the writing on Cracked.com (not suitable for all audiences). It's entertaining, relevant, and intelligent, despite the fact that it's probably not going to be featured in any literary magazines or take home any prestigious literary awards. The Digg ratings that most of the articles receive show I'm not the only person who appreciates the site. So if you're searching for success, stop agonizing over whether your work is the best it could possibly be, and start reaching out to the reading community - both online and off.

del.icio.us: Social Bookmarking as Promotion Tool

Okay, so I'm pretty sure I'm one of the last people on the internet to discover the site del.icio.us. The tastiness of the name has caught my eye many times in the past, but I've always been too intimidated to give it a look. To me it was some scary internet phenomenon meant only for internet uber-masters, something akin to rss feeds (still trying to figure out how those work.) The mysterious url format threw me off. How would I even access it? Did I need to have a special widget to run it? Would I have to locate and install drivers off a mirror site in China? Would it hurt?

Anyways, turns out it really is just a plain old url, and it's not scary or difficult at all. So just in case you're like me and you're new to the site, here's what you need to know.

To get started, you create a profile, and then add a bunch of bookmarks for your favorite websites. You can add a button to your toolbar to simplify the process. Once you bookmark a site, you enter a description and a bunch of tags. The tags will help you in the future when you've collected links to many sites and want to search for only the ones about, say, Tolkien. Or hot dogs. Except you can't use spaces, so the tag would have to be hot.dogs or hot-dogs.

So how does this link back to promoting your writing? Well, the more times people bookmark your site, the higher it ranks on the Popular list (similar to Digg), and the more likely it is that people will find their way there. Also, you can create a network of fellow users, and share your sites with them. And here's one more thing to try: go to the Popular page, and take a look at the tags there. I'm not saying that you should add a bunch of unrelated tags to your sites, but if you see something there that applies to you, by all means use it. For example, this blog is intended to help people with writing/getting published, so I could tag it as "howto" and make it easier for people to find their way here. It's all about connecting people to the information they want as expeditiously as possible.

Thanks to this article on The Dough Roller for getting me to try out del.icio.us!