Tips for Boosting Your Traffic on Social Networking & Bookmarking Sites
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There’s a good chance that you’re already on one of the major social networking sites. You reconnect with former school friends on Classmates.com. You keep track of all your social contacts on MySpace. Or maybe you have a networking of professional contacts on a site such as LinkedIn. But are you harnessing the power of those social networking sites? Are you using them to direct traffic to your own site? If not, you could be missing out on a big opportunity for increasing your site traffic and generating attention to your site. Here is an article introducing you to the basics of social networking and what it is.
So What Are Some Ways That I Can Utilize Social Networking and Social Bookmarking Sites For Traffic?
(1) Utilize Your Existing ‘Real’ Friends
One great way to use social networking to increase traffic is to get all of your friends on a particular network to support your content on other sites. For example, you might post an article to a major social bookmarking site such as Digg or Del.icio.us. Then you can send a message to everyone that you know on your social networking sites asking them to take a minute to support your post on the bookmarking site. You can even encourage them to have their network support you as well. This increases your credibility on the social bookmarking site (because you’re getting a lot of Diggs on Digg for example) which will draw attention to your content there and send traffic to your site. **tip** If you are able to, organize an article post time so that your friends can digg, tag, or stumble your article within a 24 hour period (preferably within the hour). A site called exchangemytags.com will be useful for this task. Keep your eyes on exchangemytags.com which will be launching very soon.
(2) Make Friends with Strangers to Make a Large Network of Connections
Of course, you can also use social networking sites to make connections with complete strangers. This only works for some people because users tend to be wary of networking with complete strangers. However, if you develop a strong profile and a pitch to users of the networking sites, it can work. This is best for people who have a niche market that they want to work with. For example, if you work in the music industry, you can make friends with bands on a site like MySpace music; they’ll be interested in networking with you because it can be a mutually beneficial situation. Then you can use your increased network to drive traffic to your site.
(3) Bookmarks on Social Bookmarking Sites
Yesterday I published a blog entry with a few hundred social bookmarking sites. You need to utilize this list in order to submit your links and articles to these sites in order to utilize the strongest source of potential incoming links. Believe me when I say that it works. If you work hard enough at it, you can get more people coming to your site than from Google. At the minimum, you need to utilize the most popular social bookmarking sites which are:
(4) Picture Perfect
You may not realize it, but by passing on uploading your picture, you are also passing on an opportunity to get more people clicking on your articles. Why? Well, for one, it is known that spammers never take the time to upload a picture. Second, it is called ’social’ networking and ’social’ bookmarking sites. If you are trying to be ’social’ then you should put a face to your name.
(4a) Get a Funny or Extremely Cool Avatar for Your Picture
A great way to get pictures to click on your articles is by using a funny or extremely interesting picture as your avatar. You are trying to get people talking about you and your avatar so take this seriously. Find or create an avatar that matches your personality and one that is either very humorous, super weird, or just really cool. I found a lot of funny avatars and avatar tools on the following sites:
A Parody Image Generator (really cool for avatars)
Gizmos (You can animate yourself talking)
Create My Picture (You can create a picture a cartoon face for an avatar)
27 Avatar Makers from Mashable
(5) Dress Up Your Profile
Think of your social networking profile pages as ‘real’ web pages … because really they are. Profile pages get spidered by search engines and they have links to other pages on the net, just like any other web page. You can utilize this profile to promote your web sites as well as your profiles on other social networking sites. For example, if I have a profile on MySpace, StumbleUpon, and LinkedIn, then I will want to link to:
- StumbleUpon and LinkedIn from MySpace
- StumbleUpon and MySpace from LinkedIn
- MySpace and LinkedIn from StumbleUpon
Not only will this increase the number of hits that I get on my profile pages via search engines and direct clicks, but it will also increase the number of friends that I have. The more friends that I have in my network, the more popular my profile and articles can become.
You should also add content and fill out information on your profile to show that you are an avid member. Add keyword relevant content on your profile page without being ’spammy’ about it. This will help with internal searches and possibly also with Google and other search engines. You can add content relevant feeds to some profiles with rss2image and other services.
(6) Add Social Bookmarking Buttons / Widgets / Chicklets
You might not like the way that they look, but I have to admit that social bookmarking buttons are what get me the most traffic. I use a service called AddThis, and it works great for me. Here are more social bookmarking widgets and tutorials that might help you:
Apostolos Dountsis Social Bookmarks Plugin for WordPress
Beautiful Beta: Dynamic Rollover DHTML Social Bookmark Buttons
Blogger Social Bookmarking Tool
Darxr.net: Social Bookmarks Sidebar Widget for WordPress
Easy Wordpress Widget for Social Bookmarking Sites
Ekstreme: Social Bookmarking Submission Code
Gath Adams: Build Your Own Social Bookmark Widget
GrayWolf’s Social Bookmark Scripts & Widgets
Oscandy: The Multiple Social Bookmarking Widget
Manhattan Service: Social Bookmark Tool
Social Bookmark Script: Web 2.0 Optimierung
Tips n Tricks Social Bookmarking Buttons
Top Ranks Social Bookmarks Creator
WidgetBox: Ultimate Social Bookmark
YouFame.net: Social Bookmarking Widget Generator
(7) Leave Valuable Comments and Reviews
You might not like taking the time to leave thoughtful reviews and comments, but this is what needs to be done to be a successful social networker. Think about it, don’t you like people more when they are nice to you? I know that I like someone much better when they say nice things to me, especially when they are saying nice things about the articles I wrote or the site that I designed. Try only writing comments that you really mean, don’t be insincere, people will see right through the smoke.
(8) Tag Effectively
Make sure to take your time and tag your articles and sites effectively. These tags / keywords are how people find you. Take some time out to see how other people are tagging and copy methodology that seems to work.
(9) Titles That Catch the Reader’s Eyes
Unless people find your article’s title titillating , they won’t click on it. Even if your article is just so-so, if you spin the title in a way that makes it sound exciting, you will get people to click through to read it.
(10) Content is King
Nothing is more important than content. If you are a good writer and you write about interesting topics, you are going to do well on the social networking sites. People seem to like top 10 lists, top 20 lists, etc. I suggest that you look at digg.com to see what gets the most diggs. I have failed multiple times on getting a post digged or stumbled, even when I thought that it was the best article ever. You don’t always win.
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS THAT YOU KEEP AT IT AND DON’T GIVE UP … YOU WILL SUCCEED!
Technorati Tags: social networking, social bookmarking, increase traffic, social networking traffic, social bookmarking traffic, traffic strategies, social networking strategies, social bookmarking strategies, social media, web 2.0, stumbleupon, digg, de.licio.us, networking, linkedin, myspace
October 27th, 2007 at 12:13 am
Awesome article. All very great advice. For social bookmarking sites, there’s a website called onlywire that allows you to submit to a ton of sites at once. It’s pretty useful. Cuts down on the tedium of submitting to so many manually.
I’ll have to check out stumbleupon.
As far as leaving comments/reviews. I actually use my own blogrush widget to find somewhat related articles. Works pretty well.
Thanks for the comments on my blog. This is some cool stuff you’ve got here, I’ll have to keep checking back.
October 27th, 2007 at 12:26 am
Hi Nathaniel. Thank you very much for your nice comments. It is funny that you mentioned Onlywire…I just read about it a minute ago. Isn’t that weird. I will write a blog soon about different services like that…in fact I have one being developed right now…but it is better…I just can’t talk about it yet. Just keep your eyes out on http://exchangemytags.com/
I use the blogrush widget on one of my blogs…I like it, but do you get much traffic from it? I am a bit disappointed with it. What are your thoughts on it?
I like your artwork by the way.
Thanks for your email.
Rachel
October 27th, 2007 at 2:02 am
WOW! This is a complete listing and very well laid out. I have used many of the social bookmarking sites like Stumble, Digg, and other to help gain readers and traffic and they do help. I will definitely have to Stumble this article for others to see.
Kind Regards,
Jeff
October 27th, 2007 at 5:46 am
Wow! This is a great resource! #10 is wrong though. That’s why social medie optimization is there. I’m in online publishing for ten years now and I can tell you that content is not a king without power user generals and an army of social media users who promote it.
Thus your content must be popular content. Write about Apple to get on Digg for instance. Eat your iPhone or something and people will love it. Write a great SEO resource and they will bury you.
October 27th, 2007 at 9:15 am
Hi Tad. Thanks for your comment. I really appreciate it. I do agree with you completely. I guess I used a cliche…but I still can’t get myself to say that content isn’t important. If people like your articles, they will continue to keep coming back to your blog or site and continuously digg or stumble etc your articles. So I do think it is important, but you are right, you really do need the army of social media users to promote your content.
I like your example. LOL
Rachel
October 27th, 2007 at 9:16 am
Hi Jeff. Thanks for your comments…I really am happy that you like it. Thanks!!!!
Rachel
October 27th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
Great article. There is so much valuable information in there. This will become a reference post.
October 27th, 2007 at 11:17 pm
Hi Fred. Than you so much for the great comment. I am glad that you like my new blog.
Thanks.
Rachel
October 28th, 2007 at 7:33 pm
[…] through these tools, you can see viral success just from this alone. I wrote an article on ‘Boosting Your Traffic Through Social Networking Sites’ that should help you if you want further help on this […]