We knew it was going to happen. Digg users try to game the site by copying articles and then passing those said articles off as their own work. Also users engineer written works in the Digg user base to increase popularity and thus forth increasing traffic to their site.

While other Digg users have gone off to forums such as DP and sitepoint in “Digg-trades” whereas they can gain a vast amount of diggs for relatively cheap or for returning other users’ diggs. (.30 each for 50 diggs in the current example)

However unethical it may be, it is being done and these “Digg Gamers” are taking advantage of the tremendous amounts of traffic sent from digg. Even with the traffic not being the best in terms of monetization (Digg users tend to know not to click ads, and will only do so by accident most times), it is still traffic, and that means return visitors and maybe future sell’s for you and your affiliates.

An article I read over at SEOmoz, titled “The anatomy of a Super Digg” explains exactly how he gamed Digg users with viral articles written simply for the basis of gaining quick readability and interest.

Over the coming weeks I am going to attempt to “game” Digg with some viral marketing and some catchphrase titles, I may use the Digg systems used on the forums however I am afraid I may be penalized by Digg for using these unethical methodologies… only time will tell.  If anyone has any experience with using Digg-trades please let me know how it went for you.

Yesterday and today I’ve been busy at work whipping up logo’s for a few competitions to earn some extra dough, these are what I came up with. Please leave feedback regarding what you think of them, thanks.

Cloaking Affiliate Links

When you come across an affiliate link for the first time you don’t really know whats on the other end, and that your being sold some sort of product or service. Then as time goes by you start to become more and more aware of affiliate links and if your like me, you avoid them like the plague. The solution you may ask? Cloaking!

If you want to cloak your affiliates links its actually pretty easy. There’s numerous ways to do so, but if you are on a budget like me, then you wont want to spend out of pocket large amount of money. So I am gonna show you a uniquely simplistic way to hide your links, without using and backend coding.

Hide your Affiliate Links

Besides making your landing page a better sell , your surfers are way more susceptible   to click through and convert on affiliate link when they distincly think that its legit and totally unbiased. The trust is broken when the link ends up showing up as an affiliate link.

Which would you click through?
www.google.com/?ref=LorneFade2884 or www.google.com ?

You have no idea where that ref link points to, and the fact that it could be some NSFW content or something malicious is hardly worth your suspicion.

Cloak Them!

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/targeturl” target=”_top” onmouseover=”window.status=’http://www.displaythisname.com’;return true;” onmouseout=”window.status=’ ‘;return true;”>Your Site</a>
<img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/1.gif” width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″/>

So just take the code above, fill in your affiliate link and then fill in the link you would like to show your users, they wont know the difference. There are other methods including javascript redirects and the like, however for the time it takes I feel that this method is an absolute must for any webmaster who was unaware.