I'm not saying this has happened to you, but if you spend much time at all promoting your site in social media, eventually you're going to need a new ip address. Maybe the 20-something sysadmin was in a bad mood and was feeling the need for a power trip, or maybe you made a mistake and pushed the envelope just a little too far. But getting banned on most social networks means that they'll ban any further signups from your IP address.

Digg has an Odd Policy

This policy has really never made much sense to me. They've banned your account, so you've lost all the work you put into their site and the prestige you've built up. You'd think they'd just let you have a reset and say "Go forth and sin no more." But many sites, especially Digg, have the strange idea that if they ban your account, you're banned for life. You can never come back.

That's odd in Digg's case, because that's not what their TOS says. In fact, their TOS says nothing about multiple accounts at all. The closest anything on their site comes to saying this is in their FAQ:

To protect the integrity of the system, our policy is one person, one account. This is to help prevent users from artificially inflating Digg counters, which is explicitly against our Terms of Use.

So even the FAQ answer doesn't support their policy. As long as you have only one account, you're completely within the terms of the TOS and even their interpretation in the FAQ. Their claim that once you've been banned you can never come back just isn't supported in the agreement you made when you joined the site.

One also has to wonder how many thousands of people are cut off when one of these social sites demonstrates their lack of understanding of the architecture of the internet and heavy handedly bans an IP address for the router that stands between the internet and an entire Fortune 500 company or a university. If you're going through a firewall, it can appear that there are thousands of machines all with the same IP address.

Getting a New IP Address

Many people think their IP address is 192.168.0.1. Sorry, but that's a subnet reserved for local area networks. If you run "ipconfig /all" from a DOS prompt you'll see a number like that if you're behind a firewall. What you really want to know is the IP address of the device that the outside world sees. You can easily see this by going to http://whatismyip.com/. That's the address that the social networks see from you.

For most people, getting a new IP address consists of unplugging their connection to the internet and plugging it back in. Power cycling your DSL or Cable modem is usually enough to get a new DHCP assigned address. Very few people have real static IP addresses since that requires a special set up on the part of the ISP. What many people do run into is what Road Runner does: the IP address is stored on the cablemodem, so the modem keeps the same IP address between power cycles. There's an easy way around this.

With Road Runner, the cablemodem is storing the MAC address (Media Access Control) of the device connected to it on your side of the firewall. So if you've got the standard setup of PC -> Router -> CableModem, it's the MAC address of the router that the cablemodem is tracking. As long as the same device is connected, you can power cycle the cablemodem all day and the IP address is not going to change. So what you want to do is change the MAC address of the router. With a Linksys router, just go to setup -> MAC Address Clone and change one of the numbers. Click "Save Settings" and then power cycle your cablemodem. When it wakes back up, it will see a different device attached to it and it will require a new IP address on its site. Tada! New IP address for you. It's about a 5 minute operation.

At first glance you'd think changing the MAC Address would be dangerous, but it's not. The MAC address of your router is only being seen by the cablemodem. You don't have to worry about someone else on the internet duplicating your MAC Address because your cablemodem can't see anything but your router anyway. If you're really worried about this then you could always plug a different PC into the router and click "Clone My PC" and it will copy the MAC address from your PC to the router, but there's really no point. MAC address spoofing only takes place on the local network, so no harm done.

Clean Up After Yourself

Don't make the mistake of then immediately logging into the social network and creating a new account, because there's still a way they can spot you. You've still got the cookies in your browser from your last session, and in the case of Digg those are long term and point back to your previous id. If you don't want to lose all your cookies across all sites, then instead of clearing all cookies, in Firefox you can go to Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Show Cookies. Scroll down to the name of the site and click "Remove Cookies".

Another thing to keep in mind are alliances, such as Digg and Facebook. Digg can't see your Facebook cookies (think about that, it would be a huge security violation of a browser allowed cross site cookie viewing), but if you click on a link to a Digg page from your Facebook account they'll see your Facebook id, and they know how to match that up with your previous Digg ids. I know someone that claims to have been busted that way, so just be aware.

I'm going to propose something rather radical. You should get rid of most of your friends on social media sites that you're targeting to promote your site.

We've talked about how you should stop shouting on Digg. But you can take it one step further. Most social media sites now discount the value of a vote from a friend. While they encouraged everybody to build up friend lists through the features of their sites, at the same time they devalued the votes on your submissions from your friends. The social sites can't make up their mind, but you can.

What if your account on a site such as Digg had just enough friends to have a footprint that looks reasonable, but mostly got votes from people completely unrelated to you? That would be the ultimate power user. So how do you go about doing that?

The "Normal" Digg Strategy

Most gurus will tell you that you should follow the strategy of friending the top users on a site and vote for their submissions. We've promoted that strategy quite a bit in these pages too. You get the attention of the top users by giving them vote love, and in return they'll start to vote for your submissions. This strategy works particularly well on Digg.

The problem is that it takes a few hundred votes to get to the first page if you're mainly getting support from friends, and there are only at best a few hundred users on Digg that understand how the game is played that will reciprocate. But once in a while a story hits the front page with < 100 votes. How can that happen?

In those cases, the stories are getting votes from such a wide variety of unrelated yet strong profiles that the algorithm flags them as hot. So your strategy should clearly be to get the attention of those top users, but without actually making them a friend on the site.

You could just create an account and start sending emails and IMs to the top 100 Diggers, but you'd get flicked away as a social flea since you haven't shown them any support. Unless you're someone everybody knows that strategy isn't going to work that well. But what if you could easily vote the submissions of the top 100 without ever friending them in the first place?

It's Staring You Right in the Face

One of the main reasons that people build a large friend list on Digg is that the site makes it very easy to view the queue of submissions of your friends. When MrBabyMan wants to "support his friends" (known to the rest of us as blind voting people he has "vetted"), he just goes to his friend's submission page, opens every link, and clicks the Digg button. Or perhaps he just loads the RSS feed of his friends submissions (see the little feed icon in the top right corner of the "all recent activity" tab on that page?) and votes them from a reader. If you want to be one of the people that he does that for, you need to start digging all his submissions until he notices you and makes you a friend. You'll also need to submit content that he feels that he can trust. Lather, rinse, repeat for the Top 100 Diggers and some percentage of them will friend you back and you'll have a stable of votes you can call upon when you're in need.

But you don't have to friend him to get his attention. There's also an RSS feed for his submissions page. Just load the rss feeds for the submissions of the top 100 Diggers into an rss reader and you'll have a steady stream of content that you should digg in order to get attention. And you didn't have to friend anyone!

Making This Easier

Since this is Promote My Site, we're obviously going to show you a technical solution to make this process easier. Instead of maintaining 100 different RSS feeds, you could just use the Yahoo Pipes mashup of the top 100 Diggers submissions. This pipe reads the SocialBlade Top 100 list to pull out the top diggers and then combines the feeds of all of their submissions into a single feed.

Instead of going through the pipe, you can just go directly to the RSS feed: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=qtyf1ery3RGVaDdodfQQIA&_render=rss. Yes, it takes a little bit of time to run, but you won't notice that if you're accessing it from your reader. And you'll always have a steady supply of articles from the Top 100 to Digg.

If you were smart you'd be jumping on those articles and digging and commenting on them as soon as they became available.

If you were really smart you'd consider posting the good ones to other social media. People often complain that a lot of what MrBabyMan submits is from Reddit, so turnabout is fair play, right?