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Showing posts with label Blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blog. Show all posts

Monday, September 28, 2009

Make money from blogs - Using CreativeCommons to protect your work

If you post content on the internet, then people will find ways to get to this content. They can get your content using your RSS feed, or directly copy from your site, and there are very few tools that can actually stop a dedicated thief from stealing your content. However, for the other people who copy your content in the belief that content available on the internet is free, and can be copied without any problems, a brief insertion of legal terms and a copyright notice can be enough to scare them. Read more information on this in a post (link to article):


You can put a small copyright policy on your blog such that it stops people from copying your content, and one easy way of doing that is through a site called http://creativecommons.org/. On this site, you can setup a copyright policy by asking a few questions, and you get a small HTML cope that you include in the template on your site. If you go to the specific site called http://creativecommons.org/choose/, you can specify whether you want your content to be copied to be used for commercial purposes, or even prevent modification of your work.

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Blogger: Beyond the Basics: Customize and promote your blog with original templates, analytics, advertising, and SEO (From Technologies to Solutions)

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Make money from blogs - You find a site that copies your site, and want to take legal action

Suppose you come across a site that has copied your content, and you value content enough that you would like to get the other site to remove such content. The owner of the other site has not heeded your complaints, and you want to take the next step of requesting the hosting companies as well as search engines to remove the stealing site using the legal avenue of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). This post (link to article) details the items you should make sure you do before you proceed on this path;


1. You should realize that proceedings under this could take some time to come to a result
2. There are not too many precedents under this law
3. You will certainly need a lawyer to help guide you through
contd..


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Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Make money from blogs - Migrating from a blog hosted on Blogger to your own domain

It's a common occurrence; people start out with a blog that runs on a free service such as Blogger or Wordpress.com, and then over a time develop a readership and a Good Page Rank. At some point during this process, the person running the blog realizes that maybe it was a mistake starting the blog on a shared domain (or a free service). It does not look professional, there are limitations on what you can do and the services you can launch, but you are stuck. Moving onto a new domain will mean that you lose your existing readers, you lose your Google Page Rank (and if you have a Page Rank that is greater than 4, there is no greater fear of a blogger than having to lose that Page Rank).
An easy solution could be to put a link on top to the new domain, but that really does not work. The Page Rank is not tranferred, and the readership does drop. So, what is required is a way that the blog can be moved over to your own private domain (hosted on some common hosting company), without losing these items. I was reading a post (link to this post)

But this year, I tried a little different approach and it worked – now Digital Inspiration is located at www.labnol.org and there’s no dip in search rankings, organic site traffic and the RSS subscriber count. Here’s that very secret recipe explained in 10 easy steps:

The author does not have complete success, in the sense that the Blogger / Blogspot blog still generates more visits than the Wordpress blog, but it is getting closer, and there are many seeming advantages to having a Wordpress account. Read the linked post, and see whether you want to go down that path.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Make money from Blogs - Stop Plagiarism: Using JavaScript to prevent your content from being copied

Let me start out right away by stating that I really don't prefer using a method such as JavaScript to prevent my content from being copied. Why not ? After all, it is a pretty simple way to prevent people from getting at my content and copying it. And it is fairly simple to go onto the internet and find a large number of free Javascript snippets that will disable people from being to right-click inside your blogs, and hence not able to copy the content.
Well, here are some problems with this approach.
1. It will stop only novice users. People who have RSS in the case of blogs that provide a complete RSS feed will get the entire content already.
2. Also, when an internet page gets loaded onto a browser, it is already sitting on the user machine, and can be copied from the cache.
3. It can create resentment pretty fast. For somebody wanting to just take a small section of your blog and use it as fair use, or for sending in an email, or even for attribution, it can get annoying.
4. It does not work on all browsers, and if Javascript is turned off, there goes the support.
5. If there is a browser where the Javascript rendering engine is faulty, it can cause some vague errors that the reader will have no idea as to what this means.

In short, use it if you feel that a rudimentary protection scheme is useful, but understand that it will irritate some users, and for the serious copier, it will not be a block.

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Blogger: Beyond the Basics: Customize and promote your blog with original templates, analytics, advertising, and SEO (From Technologies to Solutions)

Friday, September 18, 2009

Make money from blogs - Detecting plagiarism of your blogs - Use the Copy Tracker service (free)

In the last few posts, I have been concentrating on figuring out some of the tools you can use to stop plagiarism of your precious posts. After all, when you have written some great stuff, the last thing you would want is for somebody to copy your content without letting you know, and then posting it as their own. And if this site is a site that comes in search engines before your blog does, then you also end up losing traffic when somebody searches for that context. That will certainly pain you; however, it is not very easy to stop somebody from copying your content; what you should be focusing on is how to detect when somebody has copied your content.
There are many tools that you can use for this process, including the simplest available option of searching for a somewhat unique term from your post in Google search, or configuring Google Alerts for finding content very similar to yours. In addition, there are other tools that also help you find content that has been copied from your blog, and posted on another blog. One such free online tool is called CopyScape (link to site).
The usage is simple, just enter the URL related to the blog which you suspect has been copied, and the tool will find searches.
Once you find such blogs elsewhere on the net which seem to have copied your content, you can take the various actions that you would take in order to get the offending sites to remove your content.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Make money from blogs - Great article on copyright steps you should take

For the last several posts, I have been focusing on how to prevent copyright theft (essentially when somebody either manually or automatically copies your content and then posts it on their blog). It is something that is not pleasant to watch. I had this happen to me a couple of times:

- Once when I discovered that another site was copying my content totally (an email to a couple of email addresses such as admin@, webmaster@, and so on managed to stop this copying without an actual response from the other side.
- Another time I had an email from another site owner where he wanted permission to take my content. It was polite, but when I looked at the other site, it had copied content from many sites with just a credit at the end. I suggested that the other person could just copy a paragraph, but I did not get any response after that. That ended that particular discussion.

I realized that I needed to do more research in this area, and came up with this article (link to article) that enumerates some steps that one should take. The site recommends steps such as adding a copyright notice in your blog, add a section about how to license your content, and then use tools such as third party tools, and others such as Google Alerts to actually detect whether your content is being used elsewhere.
The first few steps will not stop anyone from actually using your content, but to a person with even a certain amount of ethics, it will cause them to pause and reflect.

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Blogger: Beyond the Basics: Customize and promote your blog with original templates, analytics, advertising, and SEO (From Technologies to Solutions)

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Wordpress Plugin: Digital Fingerprint - How to identify a splog that is copying from your blog

One of the biggest problems facing Bloggers is the proliferation of copycat blogs. You post some rich content, the work of lots of effort, research, and something you really like, and suddenly it is being copied and posted onto other blogs without a credit (and for a normal reader, it would seem that the other blog is the creator of that content). And since you made your content available on the web, it is very very hard to prevent somebody from copying your content. You can try using some solutions that will put off some automated tools, and other solutions will thwart people who are less able, but it is impossible to prevent your blog from getting copied (even though you own the copyright to your content, the legal process for shutting down another blog can take time).
What you need to do is to find out quickly who all are copying your blogs so that you can take action geared towards warning these sites, and preventing them from copying your content. There are many tools / plugins that can do this, and one of these solutions is a Wordpress Plugin called 'Digital Fingerprint' (available at this site):
From the site:


This plugin helps blog owners stay vigilant against unauthorized content use by the overwhelming majority of blogs that are splogs. To combat splogs use of your content, this plugin will place a digital fingerprint, customized and tailored by each individual user of this plugin, into blog posts. The fingerprint is only visible in the RSS feed, not on the website itself. For example, already I have included my fingerprint in this post and unless you are reading this in an RSS reader, you haven’t seen it.
Once embedded in your post, the plugin allows you to quickly and easily search the blogosphere for references to the digital fingerprint using Google Blogsearch, BlogPulse, and Sphere (see the admin screenshot, above). It also allows the quick and easy search for your digital fingerprint of the web itself using Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.


You should refer to the site above, read the steps, and use the plugin; it can be real helpful in your effort to prevent people from copying your blog and going scot-free.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Make money from Blogs - Make it harder to copy, set the RSS feed to provide only a summary

Let's start with a simple statement: It is impossible to prevent somebody copying from your blog. I was once set a challenge by somebody that an online exam result cannot be copied. The site where the exam result was posted had set the result to be opened in a new page without any title, with right-click disabled by JavaScript, and many other protective measures. Many of those worked, but I was finally able to get the content by looking at the Internet Explorer Cache folder. This was just an example of how you cannot prevent a determined person from getting your content. What you need to do is to make it more difficult to get (since that will prevent many of the less-technically equipped people from leeching your content); and you need to focus on identifying people who have stolen your content, and focus on them removing this content.
Now, let's talk about your RSS feed. An RSS feed has many advantages, since RSS provides an easy way to implement the logistics of building up readership on your blog. If you didn't have RSS, you would have to build an alternate system that would allow people to easily subscribe, that would notify them when you have added new content to your blog, and that would also allow this content to be easily viewed on many different feed readers.
However, the RSS feed also provides the same advantages to somebody wanting to copy your blog. Normally, when you configure your RSS feed, you get 2 options - you can either just deliver a summary of the RSS feed, or deliver the entire contents of the blog. Hence, if you are more concerned about another blog leeching your contents (and if your blog occurs in search engines lower than the other blog), then define your RSS to deliver just a summary of the content. Poeple will get a link to come see the full content.

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Blogger: Beyond the Basics: Customize and promote your blog with original templates, analytics, advertising, and SEO (From Technologies to Solutions)

Use Google Alerts to detect if somebody is copying your Blog

It is not uncommon to find somebody copying your content, and the hard fact to accept is that you may not be able to do anything about it. The internet makes it so very easy to find and copy content that you may be fighting a losing battle in trying to prevent people from copying your content. As an example, a RSS feed provides your content (partial or full) to anybody who can receive this RSS field, and even if you were not providing access to a RSS field on your blog, there are many other ways to get RSS updated content from another blog or site.
The recommended process is to find who all is copying from your content, and then try and get that content removed from all those sites where it is being copied (by corresponding with the site owner, or through a complaint to their host, or to Google Adsense if the other site is running Adsense). The question is, how do you detect whether somebody is copying your content ? There are many tools available (commercial or free) available for this purpose - Google Alerts is one of these tools that can be configured to send you a periodic report (link to Google Alerts site).
What are Google Alerts ? Learn more at the FAQ (link)
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Google Alerts are emails automatically sent to you when there are new Google results for your search terms. You can also choose to have your alerts delivered via feed to the feedreader of your choice (e.g., Google Reader or add the feed to your iGoogle page).
What is the maximum number of alerts I can create?
You can create up to 1000 alerts. To create more alerts, you can either delete any existing alerts or request alerts to be sent to a different email address. Please remember that you can only have up to 10 unverified Alerts at any given time.

What are the different types of alerts I can sign up for?
Google Alerts currently offers 6 variations of alerts - 'News', 'Web', 'Blogs', 'Comprehensive', 'Video' and 'Groups'.
A 'News' alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.
A 'Web' alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.
A 'Blogs' alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.
A 'Comprehensive' alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.
A 'Video' alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.
A 'Groups' alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.

So, define one string that you believe is getting copied, and update that into your Google Alerts page.

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Saturday, September 12, 2009

Upgrade your Wordpress blog frequently to keep it more secure

There are a large number of people who want to start blogging, don't like using a shared platform such as Blogger, and install a Wordpress blog on a shared hosting service. And once installed, they start adding new content, generating more user visits. However, a huge percentage of these people do not upgrade to the latest Wordpress version, with many of them having versions of Wordpress that is many versions old. It does not even occur to many of them that is infact a security risk. A security risk ? How come ? One would think that maybe you can lose out on a few new features by not upgrading, but how would this be a security risk ?
Well, not upgrading your version of Wordpress is like not installing the periodic security patches that come with Microsoft Windows. These security patches are meant to close holes that have been discovered in Windows, and not installing them means that you stand to risk somebody being able to hack into your system. Similarly, Wordpress is an evolving software, with holes being discovered, and the Wordpress community patching these holes through more recent versions. Consider the following page (link)


Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.
2.8.4, the current version of WordPress, is immune to this worm. (So was the release before this one.) If you’ve been thinking about upgrading but haven’t gotten around to it yet, now would be a really good time. If you’ve already upgraded your blogs, maybe check out the blogs of your friends or that you read and see if they need any help.

The above example is a live example of why you would want your Wordpress installation to be upgraded to the latest available version. Who wants to be in a position where you have to fix your blog after you find that the worm caused lots of problems ?

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Saturday, September 5, 2009

Make money from Blogs - Learn more about Adsense success stories

For people who write blogs, there are various approaches with regard to making money. There are some people who disdain the idea of anything to do with advertising; there are others who believe in their writing, but don't look away from the prospect of making some money on the side; there are others who fill their sites with ads (including Adsense ads) and whose sites can look fairly ugly; and then there are the ones who learnt a lot about how to use Adsense optimally and started a huge jump in the amount of money that they have started making.
Wouldn't you like to make more money from your blogs ? More money means that you can devote more time to your hobbies, to doing things that make you happy rather than toiling away on a job ? Well, it can be done, but it is not a one day effort. People who have learnt to make a lot of money from Adsense have done so after doing a lot of reading, trying out tips, experimenting and deciphering what works for them, and what does not.
One good place to start is by using the success stories posted on the Google Adsense Help page at this link.
As an example, consider the case of a site called http://seatguru.com, where the creator of the site originally was struggling with several affiliate links, and then finally stumbled upon using Adsense. After experimenting with different formats, he uses channels to determine which of these experiments are successful, and hence has worked out a lot of optimization to increase his Adsense revenue.

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Here are some more videos from Youtube that might help you.

Google Adsense Tips



5 Surefire Ways to Increase Google Adsense Earnings



AdSense Optimization by Lockergnome

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Making money from photo-blogs - second part

In my previous post, I had talked about some of the concepts around creating a photo-blog, and making money from that (through Ads primarily). This post will talk more on the same subject, and should hopefully help you move further on that line.
1. As part of a post on Wordpress optimization, I had mentioned that it puts less load on your server if content / scripts, etc, are loaded from a different server. So, wherever possible, put your photos on a different server, or on some reliable web hosting solution elsewhere. For example, you can put your photos on Amazon AWS, Photobucket, Flickr, or any other photo sharing site, and have the thumbnail on your own site. Thus, when somebody clicks on the thumbnail, you will get the actual photo on your own site.
2. Make sure that you have a system of analytics setup on your site. This will help you determine which photos are being viewed the most and are in demand. You could focus more on photos that seem more in demand, and get more visitors to your site.
3. Once you start getting people to your photo blog, explore whether you want to join the world of photo stock (where you can sell your photos, either as part of Micro-stock, or as Rights Released photos). Some of the more popular sites are: CanStockPhoto, BigStockPhoto, The3dStudio, Fotolia, Shutterstock. Learn more about stock photography at these locations.
4. There are a large number of photo directories on the net (you can find many of them on Google), so make sure that you enter your site on these site; these increase the chance of more people visiting your photo sites
5. Post your better photos on places such as your Twitter account, Facebook account, etc, and refer your photo blog location. This also attracts more people to your photo blog
6. There are many sites on the web that offer free photos. Don't feel in the least bit hesitant about copying the photos from these locations, and putting them on your blog (as long as you don't claim that they are your own - follow the terms of their copyright).

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Making money from photo-blogs - a start

Many of us have some good collections of photos, and they live in obscurity in our computers or in the form of printed albums / collections, just idling there. Photographs are very precious in terms of attracting user attention, as long as you are able to present a good story that keeps the user interest alive. The chance is that if you have a good collection of photos, people will not stop at one, but look at more. So if you have a collection of railway engines, tracks, etc, and enthusiasts find your collection, you will start to get a good reputation with people looking to get more than one.
It is impossible to define everything related to a photo-blog in one post, so this one is a starter, with the essentials. How do you start ?
1. Well, you need to find a template where you can put your photos. So, you can either get a good photo-blog template that can be put on top of Wordpress or Blogger, or if your host (for example, Hostmonster (click to know more)) allows you to insert a photo software such as Gallery 2, you can use that. The advantage of a photo software is that it allows you more photo-centric option, but it requires some additional learning.
I have 2 different photo based sites Gallery (a specialized software), and Photo Blog, a photo blogging template put on Wordpress.
2. Recognize that photos can get stolen, so don't put very high quality, full size photos. They take the user more time to download, and there is no concept of copyright on the net, so use some standard resoulutions such as (1280 X 960) with a watermark.
3. Always make sure that you are attaching the 'Alt' tag to your photos. This helps in ensuring that Google and other search engines can find your photos.
4. Place ads such that they appear to blend in with the photos. If you can find image ads, they look more tasteful and fit better in with existing ads.
5. Mine your data to see which photos attract a bigger audience, and highlight it by a side panel that shows which photo is viewed the most.
6. Look for affiliate opportunity, so if you have travel related photos, put ads from tourist operators of that location.
Take the plunge, it is not very difficult.

Saturday, August 8, 2009

What to do when somebody steals your post ?

There are some blogs that I host, where people can talk about health; including offering tips and advice. This is valuable stuff, and I was looking forward to it getting better indexed in Google, and more widely available to people. This would drive more visitors, and is part of the overall plan to make more money from your blogging.
Then you find a site that seems to have content similar to yours. You look closely, and it is in fact exactly the same content. You get mad, but are unsure of what to do. After all, this is somebody who is free-loading off you, and while you do the effort to add new content, this person just takes your content (and most content remains legally copyrighted unless you explicity sign your rights away). The idea is not to get mad, but to get even. When this happened to me, I started exploring ideas of what to do in order to ensure that this copying of content does not happen. What some of these people who content do is that they add a link back to your site after putting all the content on the site, and then claim that they are giving your credit. This is not permissible, I would be okay if they were to copy a few lines and then claim that the rest of the content is available on the linked site; not okay to copy the whole content.
Here is a summary of the steps that I could find that seemed logical, after doing a scan of the internet for solutions (these are in order in terms of escalation):
- Use tools such as Copyscape to find people who copy your content. This may take a bit of effort, but is worth it
- Contact the owner of the site that is copying your content (could be admin@site name, or if there is a section for comments or an eamil link, use that). This works for a majority of the cases
- If you can't find contact details, do a Whois check to find the contacts for the site; you can get their contact details and send them your message
- Find out who is the hosting infrastructure provider and contact them
- If you are still not getting a response, send off details to the advertisers that this site is actually in copyright violation
- Post details about how your post has been copied, in the hope that getting their name called out publicly would get them to stop and desist
- Various search engines have pages for reporting abuse, do this for the major search engines
- Contact the relevant authorities and report this copyright violation
By now, you should have seen some action, else you will need to start taking legal action

Monday, August 3, 2009

Wordpress Optimization Tool: DB Manager

Part of the process for optimizing your Wordpress account is by checking all your database queries, determining the frequency at which they are called, and whether your database server is getting called too often. But it is not easy to do this unless you have a tool that will provide you this information. One such tool is called WP-DBManager 2.50 (available at this site):

Manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

Wordpress Hack Block: Limit Login Attempts Plugin

Wordpress allows any number of attempts at login, so if somebody is trying to do a brute force dictionary attack onto the admin section of your site, at some point, they may suceed. But the basic issue is, why are you making it easy for hackers to do so; you should set a limit on the number of times a wrong login can be attempted on your site. Here is a plugin called 'Limit Login Attempts' that allows you to do this. Get it from this page (link)

Limit Login Attempts blocks an Internet address from making further attempts after a specified limit on retries is reached, making a brute-force attack difficult or impossible.
Features:
Limit the number of retry attempts when logging in (for each IP). Fully customizable
(WordPress 2.7+) Limit the number of attempts to log in using auth cookies in same way
Informs user about remaining retries or lock out time on login page
Optional logging, optional email notification
Handles server behind reverse proxy

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Optimizing your Wordpress account - 2

A few weeks back, I had written about how to take some basic steps towards optimizing your Wordpress account. Imagine what would happen if more people started promoting your Wordpress Blog, or wonders of wonders, it appears on the front page of Digg or Slashdot. In such cases, unless you have optimized your Wordpress configuration already, you can be pretty much sure that your account will get to a state where the server is not able to handle the load, and will shut down; further if your account is on a shared server, you might have some uncomfortable queries from your host.
So, here are some points on how to optimize your account:
1. Since Wordpress works on a database system, it pulls every bit of content from the server. If there are a large number of requests for your blog, your server has to make that many DB queries to fetch the content. This puts a lot of stress on your server. User a Super Cache plugin to Cache some of the load and serve static HTML files instead of querying the DB (link to plugin, and page).
2. When you serve various files such as binaries, videos, images, scripts, etc from your server, it becomes slow. Place them on other servers, so that the load on your server is reduced. For example, you can get videos from Youtube and Photos from Flickr, and also, you can even hire some hosting space on another server or on a service such as Amazon S3 for this purpose.
3. If you are more advanced, look at your server logs; it may be possible to determine multiple requests from a bot or script that is of no good, blocking these may make your server behave a bit better
4. Look to get stats on how your web page is loading. If it takes a lot of time to load your page, there may be a lot of plugins working, or scripts loading, and so on. Some tools you can use for this purpose are - LiveHTTPHeaders (link, displays the HTTP headers), Firebug (link, Look at loading times for various artifacts on a page),
5. Inside your wp-config.php file, remove some of the DB calls that are not necessary. For example, hard-code your Template Path, Stylesheet path (link to relevant site). You will get some improvements.
6. Review your themes. Some themes call a lot of graphics, and overall call a lot of files. If your CSS files are divided into multiple files, combine them. Replace graphics wherever possible with text.
7. Review the plugins your are using to see whether they are required. Plugins can make your site much slower, especially if they do a lot of DB access and inefficient. If you are advanced technically, monitor the performance of your plugins.
8. Refer to this quick cheat sheet for DB optimization (link to cheat sheet)
9. Reduce the number of posts on the front page of your blog. Typically, Wordpress gives you 10 posts on your front page, you should reduce this to 3-4.
10. Use WP's Built in Object Cache as described on this page (link). From the same site, refer to the MySQL Query Cache.
11. For some detailed technical analysis of what can be done (link)
12. Clean Options (Finds orphaned options and allows for their removal from the wp_ options table) - Get it from this page
13. The combating comment spam page on Wordpress.org (link). If you have a good blog which is getting popular, increase in spam is only to be expected. Akismet filters out most comment spam, but just getting it into the junk spam list also adds some load to your server.
14. Page with 5 tips for making your Blog Digg / Slashdot proof (link)
15. High Traffic Tips For WordPress on Wordpress.org Codex (link)

If you know more ways beyond this, please do let me know.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Adding a 'Digg' button to your Blogger / Wordpress posts

Digg is a very popular site that allows users to vote for the content that they want to make popular, in the sense, the editorial decisions are made by people, not by a separate team. And what is Digg ? If you have not heard of Digg by now, you should have ! Description from the people at Digg !
Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online. How do we do this? Everything on Digg — from news to videos to images — is submitted by our community (that would be you). Once something is submitted, other people see it and Digg what they like best. If your submission rocks and receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of our visitors to see. And as per Alexa, 0.5% of internet users come to Digg (which is a huge absolute number).

So, how do you ensure that your posts are added to Digg ? It's fairly simple now, all you need to do is to read a bit about the options posted on the Digg Tools page (click here). This page gives you the code that needs to be added to your blog (or other web page). However, in a majority of the cases, you would want the code to be added such that it shows up automatically in all your articles / posts. You can do this by adding the code to the template ? You might ask, how do do that ? Well, now it gets a bit complicated whether you use Blogger or Wordpress.

For Blogger, if you are still using the older version of Blogger, then it is fairly easy to step into the code of the older Blogger interface, go to the Template option -> Edit HTML, and then go to the section of code where it says <p class='post-footer'>. Add the code from http://digg.com/tools/integrate below this section, and you are good to go.

If you are using the newer version of Blogger, then you need to update your template, a bit trickier option. Remember, if you update your template, you should take a backup earlier. Here is this excellent post detailing how to modify the template (click here). However, you cannot just use the code as described in the blog, since the Digg code has changed and is much simpler. You need to find the section of template as described in the article, and then use the code for Digg from the http://digg.com/tools/integrate page.

if you using Wordpress (not Wordpress.com hosted blog), then you need to modify the Wordpress template for making this change. Login into wp-admin for your blog, go to the Design -> Theme Editor -> Single Post.
After you reach the line, php the_content('Read the rest of this entry, in the next line, add the code for Digg from the http://digg.com/tools/integrate page.

You should be good to go with this. As to the question of which Digg to use from the http://digg.com/tools/integrate page, I recommend that you go with the first option, where it says "Digg This" with Submit Capability.