YBO Interactive Blog

How much does it cost to bring a story to Digg front page? There is a guy offering this service for $500. Isn’t that a great price for 30K visitors?

Invesp has an interview with a Digg top user that tells a little about the way it works.

This guy charges anywhere between $300 - $500 depending on the quality of article, and $700 for for a submission and promotion, irrespective of whether the article is good or not.

He was asked if he feels like he is cheating the Digg community.

His answer was very straightforward:

Yes! I would feel guilty if I was the only one but find me one Digg user from the entire community who doesn’t cheat the system… I do what everybody else does. It is obvious that good content does not make it by itself on Digg.

At least on this interview he was honest!

update: For those who misunderstand my thoughts, I don’t think that cheating the Digg audience is a good idea. All I’m saying is that the Digg system turns into a sophisticated marketing machine and is less credible than it ever was.

Nearly 15% of Fortune 500 companies communicate with consumers via blogs, according to a study conducted by Burson-Marsteller.

Why is this number so low? I think the most common excuse would be “we have nothing to say”.

David Wallace wrote a great post about corporate blogging. Here is his answer for the we-have-nothing-to-say excuse:

• Write opinionated posts related to news and events surrounding your industry.
• Announce new products and/or special offers.
• Write in-depth product reviews.
• Highlight customer testimonies and praise.
• Do a Q&A style of post to deal with most common inquiries from clients.
• Publish company news - the more personal, the better.

Cover news in your specific industry. Add your own commentary to make your content unique.

I think that marketing managers don’t realize what a powerful communication tool a blog can be.

There is no reason to be afraid of it.

The beginning is always hard, but once you start, I promise, you WILL find yourself blogging about things you want to tell the world, and wait for comments, instead of sending those regular web1.0 emalis…

update: SEC had announced that companies may now spread their official news by posting information on their websites and blogs, rather than press releases distributed by press release companies. How cool is that!

How old are you? If you are under 30, look at the list of Top 20 websites run by people under 30 . Wouldn’t that be nice if you can get your website in that list…

It is quite inspiring, and maybe surprising to see in the list sites like wordpress that makes $56M a year and Digg that makes $31M. The list is long, read it slowly, stare 5 minutes at every item and think: Why didn’t I think about it!

It’s official. ‘w00t’ is a word!

In fact, it is the word of the year 2007.

The official definition is:

expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word “yay”

In case you are wondering, the spelling can be w00t, woot, wOOt, W00T, WooT or WOOT!!!!!

w00t!