Marketing Ninja

I’ve spent a lot of time in the Blogging for Business series discussing what blogging is in a nutshell and how to establish your blog as an “authority” within its domain, but in this article I’m going to talk about a few social media sites that you can use to draw large floods of traffic to your blog and get it noticed.

What is “Social Media?”

For those of you who have not heard of social media, it’s simply a technology on the Internet that allows people to explicitly share content and experiences with other online users. YouTube is a great example of a video-sharing social media website.

We’re going to run down a categorized list of social media sites for promoting your blog or website.

A word of caution: there are hundreds of social media websites out there; if I don’t mention one, it’s probably because I’ve never used it or heard of it. Leave a comment on this entry if you feel that I’ve made a critical error.

The Big Players

If you land on the front page of one of these sites, even for a few hours, you’ll be on the receiving end of a tidal wave of traffic. The best part is, once your of your pages makes it big on just one of these sites, you’ll probably end up getting highly ranked on another.

1. Digg – Digg is the ultimate social media site; it’s become notorious for producing traffic waves so massive that they can have a DOS-style impact on smaller hosts. Digg is scrutinized routinely for being an intensely negative community, and it has become difficult to make the front page.

2. Reddit – A popular Digg clone. It has less traffic than Digg does but it may be easier to make the front page; I’ve never used it but I’m going to begin experimenting with it.

3. StumbleUpon – I think StumbleUpon is by far the best service on this list; not only does it send more users over time than making the front page of Digg, but the bounce rate for an article that has been reviewed multiple times is ridiculously low. My average bounce rate is pretty high; my bounce rate on a page that’s doing well on StumbleUpon is usually 35-45%, with 85-95% of those users being first time readers to AjaxNinja.

StumbleUpon is doing a better job marketing my site than I could! StumbleUpon is basically channel surfing for the Internet, and it’s advertising campaigns are very effective in the right hands. By far the most worthwhile service.

4. del.icio.us – del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website; users can mark their favorites with del.icio.us and share them with each other; making it onto the front page of the “recently popular” section on del.icio.us will send a decent amount of traffic so long as the category you’re tagged into is popular. My article on Firefox extensions was tagged approximately 300 times within 24 hours and that was enough to slap it on the front page for a brief period. This is a great service for recurring traffic over time as well, but not as good as StumbleUpon in that regard. I guess del.icio.us’ traffic effects are a bit of a mix between Digg and StumbleUpon.

5. YouTube – I was going to stick this in my “video blogging” category, but honestly, if you do video blogging and you haven’t heard of YouTube then you’ve probably been living in a cave for the past few years.

General & Offbeat News

Here are sites that are similar to Digg and Reddit but aren’t as prominent as those two in the lexicon of the average user.

6. Netscape – Didn’t they used to make a web browser or something?

7. Fark – From Fark’s about page:

[Fark] is a news aggregator and an edited social networking news site. Every day Fark receives 2,000 or so news submissions from its readership.

8. Newsvine – A standard news aggregator complete with comments, voting, etc. Probably the best service if you’re interested in getting real news junkies to visit your site.

Blogosphere Pulse Detectors

While you cannot explicitly “submit” your entries to these services (they can be read automatically via RSS when you publish), you can register your blog and make it easy for your readers to add you as a favorite and make it easy for other bloggers to find you. Definitely register with these two services and publish Technorati Tags along with your entries in order to improve visibility.

Update: You actually can submit articles explicitly to Technorati as “favorites.” I overlooked this; my apologies.

9. Technorati – Every blogger knows about Technorati and the authority ranking it assigns to bloggers based upon how many other blogs link to them. Another prominent feature of Technorati is that it aggregates some of the latest blogosphere buzz on the front page; having never been anywhere near the front page I wouldn’t be able to tell you how much traffic it drives, but it has been alleged that Technorati’s system for determining what appears on the front page is fatally flawed.

10. TailRank – Another service similar to Technorati; TailRank’s front page serves as an indicator for what the blogosphere is talking about. Technorati and TailRank both have explicit voting/tagging systems for determining popularity, but the most important metric they measure is blog responses, i.e. how many blogs are linking to one of your entries.

Marketing and SEO Services

If you’re in the business of writing about marketing, search engine optimization, or some sort of promotional business, then these social media sites are for you.

11. PlugIM (Online Marketing) – Right now all of my blog entries are syndicated to PlugIM for voting, and I don’t think I have even received a single pageview from it. I’m not impressed, but hey, it’s effortless given that you can automatically syndicate your RSS feeds to PlugIM, so why not sign up for it?

12. Sphinn (SEO & Online Marketing) – I’ve never used it but apparently it has a pretty active user community. I can’t say the same for PlugIM!

13. DNHour (Domain Names) – I couldn’t think of an appropriate sub-category for domain names but I figured that domains are pretty pertinent to online marketing; anyways DNHour votes up and down on the latest domain name news.

Programming, Development, & Geek News

14. SlashDot (Technology of all kinds)- The grand daddy of them all; SlashDot was one of the earliest and most successful online communities, although it may be over-shadowed somewhat today by Digg. When you submit a story to SlashDot, it’s evaluated by the editors, and then pushed to the front page; it’s similar to Fark. SlashDot’s audience is primarily techie.

15. DZone (Developement and Programming) – Thus far every time I have used this service I have landed on the front page, and received a decent amount of visits (over 1000 unique visits). Writing a good headline that catches the eye of developers is key, but you don’t really need too many votes to make it to the front page; I also find that the people who comment on DZone are generally very positive and helpful. This is one of my favorite new social media websites.

16. DotNetKicks (.NET Technology) – I made it onto the front page of DotNetKicks today and received a nice wave of traffic (a couple hundred uniques); DotNetKicks is an absolute must for submissions if you blog about ASP.NET at all. In addition their site is all open-source so if you want to start your own social media portal you should check out their code.

17. Tweako (General Computing, Internet) – From Tweako’s about page:

Tweako.com is a place to learn and share information and knowledge about every computer and technology topic out there. We hope to create a website where users can find information and help for all their computing needs that accommodates all levels of skill and difficulty, from programming to cleaning spyware.

Please note that Tweako uses human editors to determine what appears on the front page.

18. Pixel Groovy (Web Design) – Covers a lot of different web development and web design aspects, but really the forte of Pixel Groovy are the slick CSS/AJAX tips, which usually populate the front page regardless. You can still try and submit articles about PHP/ASP.NET design as Pixel Groovy has categories supporting those.

Video

19. Game Diggity (Gaming Videos) – Video voting community for gamers.

20. Video Bomb (Videos) – Social Bookmarking for videos… Seems a bit sketchy to me.

21. Video Sift (Videos) – More social bookmarking for videos… Classier than Video Bomb.

Politics and Political Issues

22. Care2 (Social Action) – The tag line says “green living, health, human rights, and more.” If I ran a non-profit or an interest group this would be a stop in my story submission route.

23. Plant Change (Environmental Issues) – Most of the articles on the front page do not have a very high vote count; I honestly would not be able to tell you how much traffic runs through Plant Change.

24. News Heat (Politics) – Social media outlet for politics, mostly American. The vote counts aren’t very high here either so I’m not sure what the traffic levels are like.

25. Hugg (Environmental Issues) – Higher vote counts than Plant Change, but it’s the same idea.

Deals & Bargain Hunting

Honestly I think these sites are beyond boring, but then again I don’t find much interest in bargain hunting.

26. Dealigg – Social Bargain Hunting

27. AgentB – More social bargain hunting.

28. Judy’s Book – Find what’s on sale near you.

Sports

29. ScoreGuru – Vote up and down on the most interesting sporting news.

30. Ballhype – a much more popular social media outlet for sporting news. Go Chargers.

WHY ISN’T COPYCAT SOCIAL BOOKMARKING SERVICE [ABC] ON THIS LIST?

Because I’ve either never received traffic from it, or because I’ve never heard of it.

Credits to Tropical SEO for a great list of niche social media sites, most of which I put onto this list.

 

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