I was recently asked the question, “How do you market your company on social news / bookmarking sites without appearing like a spammer?” This is a great question — one that has a pretty straightforward answer but which also requires a lot of work. Why? Because it is easy to sign up for a social bookmarking site and simply submit your own “stuff.” Submitting your own stuff does however not guarantee that your efforts will be successful. There is actually a lot more to it.

If I could sum up in two words how to be promote yourself on sites such as Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Twitter and the others without actually promoting yourself, I would say, “Get involved!” And how does one actually get involved in a social news / bookmarking site? By being an active member of the community.

It is really no different than web forums which are still around but are quickly being replaced with social media. Typical profile of a web forum spammer – they join an active forum and do nothing else but toot their own horn. This typically consists on dropping links to their own site(s), promoting their own products or services or even in feeble attempt to help or provide advice, invite other forum members to their own sites for “more information” rather than keeping the conversation going on the forum itself.

I see the same scenario happen over and over again with social news and bookmarking sites. Here are a few indicators that someone is there merely for self promotion and/or gain:

• ONLY submits sites they own or have an interest in

• DOES NOT vote on anything from other sites

• Attempts to FRIEND EVERYBODY even though they may not know them or have any common interests

• Doesn’t know how to FOLLOW THE RULES of the community

• Creates MULTIPLE PROFILES so they can vote their stuff up

While there may be rare occurrences where this type of behavior has some measure of success, most often it fails. That is due to the fact that success with social sites is largely dependent on the community itself.

So how does one promote themselves on these site properly? The essential ingredient is to become involved in the community. Instead of just submitting your own content all the time, submit and vote on other people’s content. Also get involved in the conversation (commenting on submissions), friend those you know or who have similar interests as you and even help combat spam (where applicable).

When these things become your regular practice, it then becomes easy and even perfectly acceptable to “slip” your own content in from time to time. Your content will also have more merit because you yourself are viewed as a respectable member of the community.

I would also advise one to pick and choose which social news / bookmarking sites you want to spend your time on. Sure there are tools a plenty that will allow you to submit content to multiple social sites, all with the click of a button. However, rather than quantity you should concern yourself over quality. In other words  focus your efforts on the social sites you are going to be involved in and sites that going to be related to the content you are submitting (i.e. don’t submit an article on power tools to social site geared towards women).

Bottom line to to actually use social sites for what they were intended for. Add value to the community and the community will pay you back.

Most bloggers recognize the incredible potential that exists with social media marketing. Many want to maximize the traffic they receive from social media, so they add a Digg button to their posts or sign up for an account at StumbleUpon. What too many bloggers overlook is that Digg and StumbleUpon are just two of the hundreds of available options, and they may not be the best fit for every blogger.

In order to get the most out of social media traffic you’ll need to put some thought into choosing the social media sites that are the most appropriate for your blog and your audience. Unfortunately, none of us have the time to be an active member on more than just a few social media sites, and trying to target too many of them by adding countless buttons and widgets to your blog will only make it cluttered and ineffective.

Among social media sites there is a huge variety of audiences, types of content that is popular, amount of traffic that is sent to popular links, etc. I think most of us would agree that quality traffic is more important than quantity of traffic. The quality of traffic that you receive from social media will be largely dependent upon finding the right fit for your blog. You’ve probably read that social media traffic is very low quality. From my experience, this is not always the case. Traffic from poorly-targeted social media sites will be low quality.

When you are evaluating social media sites pay attention to these factors. Find 2 or 3 that are a good fit for you and get the most you can out of them.

What type of audience? General or niche?

With so many different social media sites out there, the audience will vary greatly from one to another. Obviously, there are a number of general news sites, like Digg, but there are a growing number of excellent sites that focus on a specific niche. These sites typically will not send as much traffic as the major players, but the traffic will generally be of much higher quality and greater networking opportunities may be possible. If you’re looking for niche social media sites in your industry, check the categorized list of social media sites that I compiled.

What type of content does well?

One of the main things you’re going to want to study is the results of different types of content. Visit the front page every day for several days and look for patterns or habits that you can identify. Most social media sites will have an audience that generally prefers a few specific types of content. Learn whatever you can from the popular items, and try to create your own content that will have some of the same appeal to users. For example, if you see resource lists constantly on the front page, you may want to create your own resource list. Or, if you see controversial articles covering current news topics, try to go that route. Of course, whatever content you create should also appeal to your regular readers and subscribers.

What type of content does not do well?

At the same time you are looking for types of content that routinely draw results, also pay attention to what types of content you are not seeing on the front page, or what is drawing a negative response from readers. Just like each audience has its own likes, each will also have its own dislikes. Trying to promote the wrong type of content at a specific social media site is a waste of time.

Do users submit their own content?

If you are planning to target a specific social media site you will definitely want to know if there are any written or unwritten rules about submitting your own content. If so, you’ll need to rely on your readers to submit it, or ask friends to do so.

How many votes does it take to be popular?

Some sites, like Digg, can take over 100 votes (and more in recent months) to make it to the front page, whereas smaller social media sites may only require a few votes. Obviously, the larger sites also tend to have more users, so in some ways it can be easier to get votes. Still, this is something that you should consider. For my primary blog I target Design Float, a niche site for designers. One of the great things about promoting content at Design Float is that it only takes about 3 votes to get to the front page. Although it takes just 3 votes, popular submissions can easily receive a few hundred visitors in a day.

Are there tools/widgets that you can use on your site

I’m sure you’re familiar with voting buttons and widgets. The Digg button is very popular, and several others are also common. There are some widgets and plugins that allow users to vote at just about any site they want, and there are others that are specific to a particular site. If available, consider whether or not you should use voting buttons on your site. My opinion is that voting buttons can be very effective if you don’t use too many of them and if you choose social media sites that a decent number of your regular readers use themselves.

How much traffic do popular submissions typically receive?

Of course, you will want to have an idea of what type of traffic you can expect if your content becomes popular. There are so many social media sites out there that many of them send next to no traffic at all. Don’t necessarily write off a particular site because it doesn’t send thousands of visitors, but you also don’t want to waste your time chasing after 10 visitors.

Is the profile of the submitter important?

Some social media sites, especially Digg, will be impacted by who submits the link. Certain “power users” have hundreds or thousands of friends that follow their submissions and vote them up. On other sites the profile of the submitter has very little or no impact. This is important for a few reasons. First, if the profile of the submitter does play a large role in the success of the submission, you’ll need to either find influential users to submit your content or build a strong profile yourself to submit your own content (which can be frowned upon). Second, sites that don’t favor particular users will place more value on the quality of the content rather than the network of the user.

What are the demographics of the users?

Ideally, you’ll want to find a social media site that has similar demographics to your target audience. For obvious reasons this will improve the quality of traffic that you receive. Some social media sites tend to have users that are in a particular age bracket, a specific sex, or from a specific geographical location. To determine these items you may have to spend some time on the site and visit the profiles of a lot of users. See what you can find out about them.

What views prevail?

The audience of different social media sites tend to have varying views on different issues, and some audiences can be very passionate about certain things. This can either help or hurt you. Cater your content to fit in with popular opinions and you could see impressive results. Write a post that goes against the majority view and you could see some backlash, depending on the site. This really can apply to just about any topic. For example, Apple vs. Microsoft, or conservative vs. liberal views.

What formats are accepted?

Many of the major social media sites are accepting pictures and video in addition to just standard links. Some social media sites even have specific sections or categories for different types of content (Mixx does this very well). As video continues to become more and more common, more social media sites will add specific elements to accommodate video submissions. For now, you’ll want to take this into consideration to determine if your content would be a good fit for a specific site.

How can you network with other users?

One of the basic elements of social media is networking with other users. Regardless of what site you are targeting, having a strong network of other active users will be extremely valuable. Not only will it improve your chances of getting traffic, but you can also make some great connections and help others along the way. Some social media sites offer much better networking opportunities than others. StumbleUpon is one of my favorites for networking. Being able to send messages, share links, and review other users all right from the toolbar make the networking on StumbleUpon hard to beat. If one of your goals is to improve your network through social media, make sure that you spend your time on sites that will make networking easy.

Are there specific sub-groups?

Social media sites that allow you to start your own group can improve your ability to meet others that share your interests. Again, this is something that Mixx does very well. Users can start a group or join and existing one, and group members can invite other users to join. If you’re looking to do some networking with others that fit into a specific niche, this may be something to consider.

Are the users connected to other social media sites?

Almost all social media users are active at more than just one social media site. If you can identify the relationships between various social media sites you may be able to use this to your advantage. For example, many popular submissions at Digg wind up on the front page of Delicious after a bunch of Digg users have bookmarked the page. Maybe you would like to target Delicious, but only a small percentage of your readers use Delicious. If it’s easier for you to get to the Digg front page, you may be able to create something worth bookmarking and transfer that Digg traffic into a spot on the Delicious front page.

Another effective approach is to use smaller, niche sites to send a smaller rush of traffic and try to convert that traffic into Diggs, Stumbles or Delicious bookmarks. Making the front page of a niche site is typically easier than hitting the front page of the major sites. Maybe you can take a small step towards a popular submission at a niche site that will allow you to take a bigger step towards success at a major social media site. Several months ago I wrote a more detailed explanation of this approach, How to Set Up a Domino Effect of Traffic.

How long does the traffic last?

Social media sites are notorious for sending a quick rush of traffic, and then nothing at all. With most social media sites, popularity doesn’t last long. StumbleUpon is one of the few exceptions. With SU you can still be getting trickles of traffic for several months or longer. You should consider whether or not sustained traffic to your submissions is important to you. In order to get a consistently high level of traffic from most social media sites you’ll need to be hitting the front page every couple of days, which in most cases isn’t realistic.

How many links can be generated?

Link building is a priority for many social media marketers. If you fall into this category, take some time to research how many links popular items are getting from different social media sites. You can do this by going back through items that were popular a few days ago and do a Technorati search for the specific URL of the page. This will allow you to see all of the links that Technorati is tracking to that page. One thing to remember here is that not all of the links you see will have been a result of popularity on a specific social media site. If an item was popular in one place, chances are it was popular somewhere else too. Still, if you check several different items you can get a good idea of the link building power this way.

Is there a feature/option to share submissions with friends?

If you have an established network of friends, you may want to ocassionally share some of your links with them. Each social media site has its own way of allowing this. StumbleUpon’s can be done straight from the toolbar without ever leaving the page. Digg uses the shout system to send email notifications, and many other sites have their own versions. If you want to be able to share your links and ask your friends for votes, this is important to consider. If you don’t want to share your links and you don’t want to be bothered by other users sharing links with you, these features may be more of a negative (although you can turn them off on many networks).

Is having friends important?

Social networking obviously involves being social. Most social media sites have a system that allows you to add other users as your friends, and for other users to add you as a friend. At some social media sites this is more critical than at others. The number and quality of friends can sometimes have a significant effect on the traffic that you receive. This is important to know before targeting a specific site, because it may mean that you’ll need to spend a lot of time networking and gaining friends.

Conclusion:

My opinion is that the ideal strategy will involve targeting 2 or 3 different social media sites. That is enough to get some results, but not too many to spread yourself thin. If possible, be an active user of at least one major social media site and at least one niche site, although not every niche will have an effective social media site. If you have other things that you look for, please leave a comment.

About Darren Rowse

Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips – Digital Photography School – TwiTip Twitter Tips – FeelGooder. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter at , Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.

We’ve been asked over and over again by small business owners whether or not they should get involved with this recent social media marketing frenzy. The answer is always the same: Yes, and for several important reasons.

Let me begin by stating that social media marketing is becoming a necessity for all types of businesses. It’s no longer a question of whether or not to get involved with the game, but “how” to get involved.  The University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business tracked the relationship between social media and small businesses and found that the technology adoption rates in the U.S. have doubled in the past year from 12% to 24%. The study further discovered that one in five small business owners are incorporating social media into their business plans moving
forward.

In fact, there is a positive impression surrounding social media, as 45% of surveyed respondents believe their social media initiatives will pay off financially in 12 months or less.

Businesses are primarily engaging in social media through company pages (75%) on Facebook and LinkedIn, with about 69% of them going beyond just establishing pages, but also posting status updates. What’s especially intriguing is that a much smaller percentage of respondents — just 16% — are using Twitter as a customer service channel. However, Twitter should not be negatively portrayed with this lone statistic. Twitter offers several other benefits that make it an essential part of online marketing. It is a great way to interact more directly with followers and get into the minds of your target audience, along with countless other advantages.

Why is social media so important to small businesses?

First and foremost, today’s small business owners need to use every avenue available to drive sales, and that includes social media marketing.

It helps level the playing field between small businesses and giant corporations. Although, keeping up with social media at its rapid pace can be a challenge. Small companies often don’t have the staff or strategy to efficiently implement social media. Jenny Stephenson, a social networking specialist at Paramore Redd Online Marketing in Nashville, Tenseness states, “It’s better not to participate in social media than to participate but do a terrible job.”   Though with the right approach, even a lone individual can become a dominant player in the social media game.

If you’re a small business owner looking to get started, shoot us an email and tell us about your business! We are working on projects with small and medium-sized businesses from coast to coast.

I don’t talk about social media tools very much anymore. Before I started my own agency, I had a lot more time to read about shiny new objects, but it was one of the things that I cut out very quickly when my time suddenly became much more valuable than it once was. I don’t think I’m alone there.

It’s not that I totally ignore the space now. I’m just much more judicious about what tools I try, use, review or even talk about. The litmus test is that they have to make my life easier. Otherwise, they’re just more noise.

A few months back, a guy named Mike Potter emailed me out of the blue and asked if he could show me a new social media tool that he was working on. He was a friend of a friend, so I met for a coffee, and he told me about Arkli, which he described as a “social campaign manager”.  Essentially, a tool that allows you to schedule entire social media campaigns, including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube, in advance, and the invite others to schedule retweets, reposts and comments on that content – also in advance.

This is a thing that would make my life easier.

Since then, Arkli has grown and expanded, and just today announced that it now integrates with Mailchimp, so email marketing can be part of your pre-scheduled integrated campaigns.

Think about this. If you have an announcement, you can schedule an email campaign to your customers, set video explaining the announcement to launch at the same time as a blog post, followed by announcements to your personal and brand Facebook pages, Tweet it at various points during the day. Then, you can invite employees, friends, supporters or pre-briefed bloggers to add their tweets, blog posts, comments, and “likes” to the campaign before it launches.

For instance, Mike asked me if I could help him spread the word on this announcement last week, and all of my tweets and posts were set up then and just launched today so I could respect his embargo and have everything launch at the right time.  He set up all of the dominoes, and set a timer to knock them down.

There are no shortage of shiny new objects, but social media tools that actually save you time and make your job easier are few and far between. That fact is going to separate a lot of startups from the rest of the field in the coming years.

You can try out the Arkli Social Campaign Manager at www.arkli.com.

At a local business conference, I made some predictions on how companies will change their view on social media in 2011.

1) Websites will begin to integrate social media functionality back onto their own domains.

2) Businesses will hire more mature social media specialists

3) Executives will demand better measurement on their Some investments

4) Word of Mouth marketing will be the key channel, innovations around WOM will occur

5) Video reaches it’s tipping point and every small business will invest some capital in production

View the slides:

If you want to be more effective with driving traffic to  your website or blog with social media, here are five steps that are sure to  improve your results.

1. Targeting the Right Sites

There are hundreds or maybe even thousands of social  media sites that you could be using. Obviously no one has the time to use them  all effectively, and some of them aren’t worth your time anyway.

One of the first things you will need to do is find a  few sites that will work well for you. Of course the larger sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are popular choices because of  the large traffic volumes that they send. But if you are looking for sites that  can send high quality traffic, first look for niche-specific  social media sites.

Also targeting a general news website like Digg or Reddit can be helpful because once you have  developed a strong profile you can promote all types of content, not just stuff  that fits into one specific niche.

2. Consistent Use

If you hope to ever become a true authority on social  media, you’ll have to implement consistent use. As you use the sites that you  have targeted every day you’ll become familiar with what works and what doesn’t,  and you’ll get to know some of the other consistent users.

3. Development of Content that Appeals to the Audience

Driving traffic to your website through social media  will require content development that meets the expectations of social media  users. Creating blog content that targets social media users doesn’t mean that  you have to alienate your subscribers, contrary to the opinion of some people.  What it does mean is that you will have to dedicate the time and effort to find  a topic that is of particular interest to your readers and present it in a way  that also appeals to social media users. For example, social media users like  lists, breaking news, photos, controversy, and informative topics.

4. Networking and Helping Others

Content creation and networking are the two most  important aspects of social media marketing. Great content without a network  will have a harder time becoming popular and a strong network is an asset, but  its value will not be realized without great content.

Networking on social media sites involves voting for the  submissions of others, leaving comments, adding friends, and generally getting  to know other users. With a strong network your submissions and votes will get  more attention and you’ll have some friends to call on when you need help  getting those extra votes needed to get over the hump.

5. Conversion

In most cases just getting traffic to a website will not  be your ultimate goal. Social media traffic is pretty much useless if you are  not able to convert some of it into what you want. Maybe you want to convert the  traffic into links, or maybe subscribers. The conversion rate of social media  traffic will usually be lower than the rates of other types of traffic, but the  huge volumes sent by social media can offset a lower conversion rate and make it  very valuable traffic.

While these steps will all help you to reach your goals of promoting your site with social media, they all require one very important step – taking action. So go get started today and build some momentum with social media.

Pay Per Click For Local Business Only.  This is Very BIG and Coming Soon.

Google is testing a new pay per click advertising program tailored only for local businesses.  It is a PPC system giving businesses the ability to advertise their Google Places (Maps) position.  You have probably noticed lately that when you do a local search and the map comes up, that the map is on the top right corner of the page, and instead of the top 7 listings being inside the map, they are now each featured individually all along the main section of the page, where the top 10 “organic listings” were previously placed.

The organic (natural, unpaid results) are still showed on the first page, but as of this writing, they are split with a few being on top of the “Places” results and a few below the Places results.  (It is now more like a top 3 organic results with the Places results below, or possibly above that)

Even if you are not interested in spending money on Google Boost it is even more critical to make sure your Google Places listing is claimed, and continually optimized for the greatest results.

Chris Brogan, who continues to dazzle us with his thoughtful and helpful social media blog posts (I recommend subscribing to him) lists out “50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing“.

In twitter, Jon Burg suggests the lists could be segmented to further help understanding, I recommenced doing this by the 5 social computing objectives we’ve found at Forrester.

I’ve taken Chris’s exact list, but have segmented it into the five objectives.  This way, you’re not randomly choosing tactics without first having a goal in mind.  Of course, the first thing to do is to first understand how your community uses social technologies, start by using this free social technographics profile generator.

1) Listening: Gleaning market and customer insight and intelligence

10. Build sentiment measurements, and listen to the larger web for how people are talking about your customer.
11. Learn which bloggers might care about your customer. Learn how to measure their influence.
14. Build conversation maps for your customers using Technorati.com , Google Blogsearch, Summize, and FriendFeed.
21. Collect case studies of social media success. Tag them “socialmediacasestudy” in del.icio.us.
25. Search Summize.com for as much data as you can find in Twitter on your product, your competitors, your space.
32. Make WebsiteGrader.com your first stop for understanding the technical quality of a website.
33. Make Compete.com your next stop for understanding a site’s traffic. Then, mash it against competitors’ sites.
34. Learn how not to ask for 40 pieces of demographic data when giving something away for free. Instead, collect little bits over time. Gently.
38. Track your inbound links and when they come from blogs, be sure to comment on a few posts and build a relationship with the blogger.
39. Find a bunch of bloggers and podcasters whose work you admire, and ask them for opinions on your social media projects. See if you can give them a free sneak peek at something, or some other “you’re special” reward for their time and effort (if it’s material, ask them to disclose it).

2) Talking: Engaging in a two way discussion to get your message out (and get messages in)

2. Build blogs and teach conversational marketing and business relationship building techniques.
5. Create informational podcasts about a product’s overall space, not just the product.
8. Check out Twitter as a way to show a company’s personality. (Don’t fabricate this).
9. Couple your email newsletter content with additional website content on a blog for improved commenting.
13. Try out a short series of audio podcasts or video podcasts as content marketing and see how they draw.
19. Experiment with the value of live video like uStream.tv and Mogulus, or Qik on a cell phone.
23. Explore distribution. Can you reach more potential buyers/users/customers on social networks.
24. Don’t forget early social sites like Yahoogroups and Craigslist. They still work remarkably well.
26. Practice delivering quality content on your blogs, such that customers feel educated / equipped / informed.
28. Turn your blog into a mobile blog site with Mofuse. Free.
30. Ensure you offer the basics on your site, like an email alternative to an RSS subscription. In fact, the more ways you can spread and distribute your content, the better.
40. Learn all you can about how NOT to pitch bloggers. Excellent resource: Susan Getgood.
41. Try out shooting video interviews and video press releases and other bits of video to build more personable relationships. Don’t throw out text, but try adding video.
44. Experiment with different lengths and forms of video. Is entertaining and funny but brief better than longer but more informative? Don’t stop with one attempt. And try more than one hosting platform to test out features.

3) Energizing: Letting your customers tell your prospects on your behalf (viral, word of mouth)

1.  Add social bookmark links to your most important web pages and/or blog posts to improve sharing.
3. For every video project purchased, ensure there’s an embeddable web version for improved sharing.
4. Learn how tagging and other metadata improve your ability to search and measure the spread of information.
12. Download the Social Media Press Release (pdf) and at least see what parts you want to take into your traditional press releases.
36. Help customers and prospects connect with you simply on your various networks. Consider a Lijit Wijit or other aggregator widget.
47. Spread good ideas far. Reblog them. Bookmark them. Vote them up at social sites. Be a good citizen.

4) Supporting: Getting your customers to self-support each other

6. Build community platforms around real communities of shared interest.
7. Help companies participate in existing social networks, and build relationships on their turf.
15. Experiment with Flickr and/or YouTube groups to build media for specific events. (Marvel Comics raised my impression of this with their Hulk statue Flickr group).
18. Start a community group on Facebook or Ning or MySpace or LinkedIn around the space where your customer does business. Example: what Jeremiah Owyang did for Hitachi Data Systems.
29. Learn what other free tools might work for community building, like MyBlogLog.
35. Remember that the people on social networks are all people, have likely been there a while, might know each other, and know that you’re new. Tread gently into new territories. Don’t NOT go. Just go gently.
37. Voting mechanisms like those used on Digg.com show your customers you care about which information is useful to them.

5) Embracing: Building better products and services through collaboration with clients

31. Investigate whether your product sells better by recommendation versus education, and use either wikis and widgets to help recommend, or videos and podcasts for education.
50. Use the same tools you’re trying out externally for internal uses, if that makes sense, and learn about how this technology empowers your business collaboration, too.

Strategy, Training, and Planning
While not one of the 5 objectives, many of these aren’t directly social media tactics, but they are great rules of thumb.

  16. Recommend that your staff start personal blogs on their personal interests, and learn first hand what it feels like, including managing comments, wanting promotion, etc.
17. Map out an integrated project that incorporates a blog, use of commercial social networks, and a face-to-face event to build leads and drive awareness of a product.
20. Attend a conference dealing with social media like New Media Expo, BlogWorld Expo, New Marketing Summit (disclosure: I run this one with CrossTech), and dozens and dozens more. (Email Chris for a calendar).
22. Interview current social media practitioners. Look for bridges between your methods and theirs.
27. Consider the value of hiring a community manager. Could this role improve customer service? Improve customer retention? Promote through word of mouth?
42. Explore several viewpoints about social media marketing.
43. Women are adding lots of value to social media. Get to know the ones making a difference. (And check out BlogHer as an event to explore).
45. Work with practitioners and media makers to see how they can use their skills to solve your problems. Don’t be afraid to set up pilot programs, instead of diving in head first.
46. People power social media. Learn to believe in the value of people. Sounds hippie, but it’s the key.
48. Don’t be afraid to fail. Be ready to apologize. Admit when you’ve made a mistake.
49. Re-examine who in the organization might benefit from your social media efforts. Help equip them to learn from your project.

One of Chris’s recommendations was to check out Website Grader, I found that to be very interesting, try that free service.

If this were an official Forrester report, I’d segment even further by prioritizing by usage (polling marketers), cost, effectiveness, and then deliver specific recommendations.  At some point in the future, I will probably get that chance to that research.

I could double this list with additional tactics, but I think it’s enough to get started, hopefully Chris’s initial list and my mind meld should help you to improve your objective based social media strategies.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 4:49 am and is filed under Social Media, Web Marketing. 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.

Do you think your blog doesn’t have enough traffic to become popular with major social media sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and del.icio.us? I don’t normally have a huge amount of traffic either, but I’ll show you how I was able to get over 34,000 unique visitors in two days without submitting the page to any of the sites mentioned above. And best of all, I think it is a strategy that many of you can duplicate.

With dominoes, before the fun begins you have to strategically set up the pieces. You set them up to flow from one to the next, and to multiply from one into two. As the dominoes spread, those small multiplications add up and suddenly you’ve got a whole mess of them knocked over.

With website traffic, if you’re lucky, the domino effect can happen on its own. But to have the best chance of success you’ll need to strategically put the pieces in place and push the first one to get things started.

With the right strategy even small blogs can maximize social media marketing and create more traffic than ever before. After somewhat accidentally coming across this concept, I’ve attempted the strategy three times, and twice it has resulted in new traffic highs.

How Does it Work?

Social media marketing is used by most bloggers, because if successful it can bring thousands of visitors, new links, and new subscribers in a very short period of time. Contrary to the opinion of some bloggers, having success with major social media sites does not require you to already have a popular, highly-trafficked blog (although that certainly doesn’t hurt).

Many social media sites share users. For example, a del.icio.us user may come across a blog post and submit it to StumbleUpon. Likewise, another user may come across that blog post on StumbleUpon and submit it to Digg. This is one of the keys to the domino effect.

Some social media sites, like StumbleUpon, are easier to have success with, and others are more likely to require a large list of “friends”, like Digg. With StumbleUpon, one person submitting your blog post can lead to thousands of visitors. With Digg, the post is very unlikely to generate much traffic unless it is submitted by a user with a lot of friends (or more accurately, a user who has been be-friended by a lot of other users).

The Importance of 2nd – Tier Social Media Sites

If you’ve done much reading on social media marketing, these statements are probably not new to you. But what many people overlook is the power of 2nd – tier social media sites. There are a number of smaller social media sites that send a significant number of visitors and are easier to have success with than the major sites. Many of these sites focus on specific niches, which can bring even higher quality traffic than say Digg or StumbleUpon.

These 2nd-Tier social media sites are essential to the strategy that I have used to produce the domino effect of traffic. As mentioned earlier, many of these sites share users, and 2nd – tier sites are no exception.

In order to set off the domino effect, I’ve been able to have blog posts become popular with 2nd – tier sites and then have the traffic that is generated from that popularity carry over and result in popularity with major social media sites.

To best explain this, I’ll lay out the strategy that I used. Back in July I started using a 2nd – tier social media site, Dzone, which is a niche site for web designers and software developers. If your post gets to the front page of Dzone it can send about 300 – 600 visitors in a day. (Note: Dzone very strictly enforces that content be on topic. Anything off topic will get nowhere and will probably be deleted. Trust me, I found this out on my own.)

In July I had two posts that became popular on Dzone that also immediately began to rack up a lot of bookmarks, and wound up on the front page of del.icio.us. It didn’t take a genius to realize that a large percentage of Dzone users are also del.icio.us users.

While Dzone sends a few hundred visitors in a day, del.icio.us sends a few thousand visitors in the same amount of time. The del.icio.us numbers are obviously higher, but for me the traffic from Dzone was essential and it actually provided a springboard to the traffic from del.icio.us. Without the popularity on Dzone, the popularity on del.icio.us would have never occurred.

After I realized the connection between the users of the two sites I started to think of how I could maximize this traffic. To start with, I needed to have a post become popular on Dzone. After using Dzone for a little while I’ve realized certain types of blog posts that are likely to have success.  So creating the right kind of content is obviously important.

Setting Up the Domino Effect

In order to benefit from the connection between Dzone and del.icio.us I decided that I needed to optimize my blog posts for del.icio.us users.  I did this by adding a large link at the bottom of each post that says “bookmark this on del.icio.us”, and it also shows the number of people who have bookmarked the page.  My experience is that this tool is very effective. As Dzone sends a few hundred visitors in a short period of time those visitors will be seeing increasing numbers in terms of how many people are bookmarking with del.icio.us. As the number grows, it of course looks more tempting for them to bookmark it as well.

About a month ago I also discovered another site that seemed to have a similar audience to Dzone. CSS Globe (web design related) is a little bit different from most social media sites. There is no voting up or down, but members are able to share their links with subscribers. Adding your link will easily bring 100 – 200 visitors in a day. The audience of CSS Globe also seems to include a high percentage of del.icio.us users.

Now that I feel like it is very possible to get a few hundred visitors from Dzone and 100 – 200 visitors from CSS Globe, I wanted to make sure that the content of the blog post was attractive to those users who also keep their bookmarks with del.icio.us.  If you spend time on del.icio.us you’ll notice that lists are very popular and draw more bookmarks than the average article. Using numbers in titles also tends to help.

With that in mind, I created a list post that I felt was unique and would appeal to the audience of CSS Globe, Dzone and del.icio.us. This part of the plan worked extremely well as 77 Resources to Simplify Your Life as a Web Designer was published late Monday September, 10 and I immediately submitted it to Dzone and CSS Globe (it’s important to get the traffic all at the same time because sites like Digg and del.icio.us factor in how quickly people and digging or bookmarking the page).

It reached the front page of Dzone on Tuesday September, 11. That day Dzone sent 577 visitors to the page and CSS Globe sent 280 visitors. Many of these visitors bookmarked the page with del.icio.us, as I had hoped, and it quickly appeared on the front page of del.icio.us.

A decent percentage of visitors who come to the page through all of the sites listed above are also StumbleUpon users, so part of my strategy is to also include a reminder on blog posts for readers to Stumble the page. This is easily done with a button at the end of the post. I’ve chosen to only include links for users to del.icio.us and StumbleUpon because I feel that providing too many links, buttons, and widgets causes all of them to loose effectiveness. Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon are the best fit for my audience and I don’t want other buttons to take away from these two.

I knew that if I was able to create a rush of traffic from Dzone, CSS Globe and del.icio.us, someone was bound to submit the page to StumbleUpon and the domino effect would spread again. This also happened like I had hoped, and StumbleUpon sent 9,228 visitors to the page that day.

The final piece of the strategy involved Digg. I use Digg a little bit, but I’m far from a “power user”, so I chose the highly complex strategy to do nothing and hope that someone with a better profile and more friends would submit the post to Digg. If I submitted the post myself there is no way it would have gone anywhere, but fortunately for me someone else with a lot of friends submitted it (thanks Lyndoman, if you’re reading). Digg sent 13,997 visitors that day.

The last part of the domino effect involves what happens after popularity on these sites. Yahoo Site Explorer is currently showing 2,656 links to this page (Technorati is showing 82 links). Some of the links have also brought significant traffic, and many of the sites are not even in English (which I think is an advantage of a list post rather than a long article, although this traffic is probably not the most targeted). PresseCitron has sent 1,346 visitors to date. Infected-FX has sent 1,331.  PopURLs has sent 1,243. Many others have sent smaller amounts.

The Results

In total, the post has had 69,000 pageviews in about 5 days, 25,000 visitors from Digg, 19,000 from StumbleUpon, 4,000 from Del.icio.us, 990 from Dzone, and 436 from CSS Globe.

Conclusion:

• My blog doesn’t normally draw enough traffic to have success with major social media sites, and I don’t have enough friends on Digg.
• Instead of going directly to these sources in hope of thousands of visitors I used smaller, targeted social media sites to quickly send a few hundred visitors.
• I choose those sites strategically and optimized my blog post to have success with del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.
• I got lucky with Digg.
• Lots of other links came as a result of the exposure to this post, and those links together sent a substantial amount of traffic.

How Does this Affect You?

While Dzone and CSS Globe are not applicable to bloggers in other niches, there are likely some other sites that can accomplish the same thing. All you need to do is find sites in your niche that can send a quick rush of visitors, and try to direct them to submit your page to another, larger social media site. Have a strategy targeting specific sites and you’re more likely to have success.