Marketing Ninja

Every blogger wants to make a big splash in social media; I think landing on the front page of Digg is the number 1 prized cow for any blogger or website operator in terms of rapid traffic acquisition. I’ve discussed how impactful a massive traffic surge can be on a blog’s readership and traffic before.

AjaxNinja is only a few months old and I’ve been aggressively trying to reach a larger audience by submitting a lot of my own content to social media outlets. I use a combination of niche tools like Sphinn and a few major ones like StumbleUpon and Digg. I’ve been met with varying degrees of success in each instance, especially on the niche portals, which I happen to prefer over Digg.

However I have yet to land a major score with Digg; while I have written about how much its hostile user base annoys me, I don’t think the fact that I wrote that has anything to due with my lack of success on Digg. I had long suspected that Diggers were either not voting on my content or not seeing it because I was submitting my own content and I’m not a “powerful” enough user to make a big splash.

I came across a great interview with Muhammad Saleem, a top Digg and StumbleUpon user, on Blogging Experiment which confirmed my suspicions:

There are several ways, and unfortunately submitting it yourself is not one of them (social media sites have an unnatural hatred for own-submissions). What you can do is reach out to the community leaders (without spamming of course) and see what they think about your content.

I think what Muhammad meant was that Diggers have an irrational hatred for self-submissions, but yes, that’s the bad news.

Bottom line: If you are not a power user on Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon to some extent, then you can actually be damaging the exposure of your blog’s content when you submit an item yourself.

So what can you do?

1. Hope a big fish just happens to come across your blog or website and submits your content.
2. Reach out to a community leader in the social media portal of your choice and hope he or she approves of your content.
3. Submit your content to niche portals to increase exposure, and perhaps a big fish might come across your articles through such a portal.

I prefer to submit my content to niche portals where they will receive at least some traffic, but it should be noted there are a lot of big players on Digg and StumbleUpon who pay notice to small niche sites, Sphinn especially.

Ultimately I think the best approach is simply to do a good job writing your articles once you’ve established a decent size audience (100+ readers), submit content to appropriate niche portals, and perhaps if you write something that catches the eye of a powerful member of the social media, you’ll be fortunate enough to be on the receiving end of a traffic surge.

If you have a lot of spare time on your hands you can always build yourself into a power user on the social media outlet of your choice. Given that this is a technological blog as much as it is a promotional blog, I have to divide my time between writing code and testing promotional techniques.

However, for a lot of other bloggers building up a power account is a good way to drive traffic; Dana Wallert, an up and coming Stumbler, built an audience for her blog almost instantly via her authority as a stumbler. It can be done.

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