After lunch and some networking Neil Patel was the next Elite Retreat speaker discussing Social Media.

Neil started out with a very in-depth overview of Digg.com. FYI: Neil was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal HERE as one of the top 20 digg.com users in the world.

- Neil talks about building your friends list. He says that while Digg has removed the ability for users to see who the Top 100 diggers are, other lists have been created to mimick the list, including this one HERE from a top netscape user.
- Neil says to use the list to befriend the top 100 users – the idea is that your friends will Digg your stories and therefore increase your change of getting on the Digg homepage. Neil says that you’ll have to space adding friends to Digg.com since Digg will only allow you to add so many users over a short period of time.
- Don’t self promote.
- Write interesting titles (eye catching) and descriptions
- Neil says the best time to submit a story is 12:00 – 1:00 PST.
- Top Digg topics: Digg, MySpace, Apple, YouTube
- Neil talks about understanding the Digg community – For instance, making fun of Kevin Federline or submitting pictures of urinals is the type of stuff liked by Digg. However, the Digg community is does enjoy tech stuff like tips on using Google, etc.
- Neil favorite categories are Tech and Politics.
- Neil suggests to not digg multiple times from the same location – you can get your digg account banned.
- Neil suggests to e-mail friends with Digg accounts within the first hour you submit to Digg. This will give you a nice base and will show other digg users you story is popular.

- Attendee asked about titles and descriptions – Neil suggests not to reveal too much in the post – use the Title and Description to sell the content of your post.

Neil talks about other Social media websites.

NEIL ON STUMBLEUPON:

- Neil says to install the Stumbleupon tool bar and stumble websites you like
- Neil says it’s OK to stumble your own stuff as long as your stumbling other random stuff
- Neil says to befriend up to 200 stumbleupon users – Since stumbleupon members only allow 200 friends you should only keep freinds that befriend you. This way – friends who have befriended you are more likely to stuble your stuff.
– *Neil said that unlike Digg.com, Stumbleupon is not great as a strategy for building links. However, if you’re looking for traffic, Stumbleupon could be great.
- Stumbleupon is mostly guys.
- Neil says to leave comments as much as possible when you stumble since this is a way of getting friends.
- The typical stumbleupon user is

NEIL ON NETSCAPE:

- Neil is a lot like Digg – it’s a Digg wannabe
- Neil suggests to befriend as many people as possible.
- Neil has 18,000 friends
- Neil says since tech stories are harder to make the homepage so focus on “do it yourself” and non-tech topics.
- Netscape delivers much less traffic than Digg – about a tenth of the amount of traffic.

NEIL TALKS del.icio.us

- del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website
- Neil says the main key to getting on del.icio.us is to leverage your audience and optimize your submission.
- Neil says if done correctly del.icio.us is a great source of links and high quality traffic
- Pro Blogger Darren Rowse admits that there is incredible value in understanding and using del.icio.us
- Getting on del.icio.us will also get you diggs or dugg, and
- Attendee directed everyone’s attention to the “links for you” button on the top of the del.icio.us homepage – he suggested that this is a great way of getting bookmarked on del.icio.us

NEIL ON REDDIT

- Neil doesn’t like Reddit because of its down voting feature
- Neil suggests that befriending is very important here
- Neil suggests to kickstart your submission by IM’ing friends or buddy lists.

NEIL ON MYSPACE:

- Neil suggests that he’s not a huge user of MySpace
- Shoemoney offered some insight into MySpace
- Shoemoney has a popular MySpace page
- Neil and Shoe suggest that MySpace has a lot of limits in place to prevent affiliates from monetizing their traffic
- Neil suggests that if you’re gonna create a profile use a “hot chick” approach since most hot chicks get more friends. (LOL, but that’s what he said).

Neil opens it up to Q & A.

At the end of Neil’s presentation we took a 15 minute break and then did a 1 1/2 hour site clinic where attendees were able have each speaker analyze their goals / websites.

FYI: One of Elite Retreat attendees is also blogging this event at http://www.emomsathome.com/blog/.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 5:28 pm and is filed under Elite Retreat, affiliate marketing, search-engine marketing, social media optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.