Blog Building: Using Social Media Sites to Increase Blog Traffic
First, a confession: I’m intimidated by the words “social media sites.” The idea that I have in my head of these things is of a complex system involving lots of time spent putting comments out there, and lots of time spent figuring out how to interact on these sites.
You know what, though? I don’t think it’s as hard as I think.
We’ll get to why I now think that, but first some background.
Social media sites – in general – let you post links, Web site descriptions, blog entries, opinions, news stories, and pretty much anything else onto a site where other people can see what you’ve posted. These postings can be things you’ve created or just things you’ve noticed online. Other people see what you’ve posted, and can choose to visit those sites/news stories/videos/whatever and then post those posts on their own account if they like what they see. If it works, it’s a kind of domino effect. Your post leads to some people looking at whatever you posted about, and maybe some of those people post about it themselves. A bunch more people see those new posts, and maybe they post it themselves, too. As more people post, more people see, and it all gets snowballed. If the original post was one of your blog entries, each of those new social media posts means more traffic to your blog. Make sense?
Here are the big social media sites:
Digg – post something and if others like it they’ll “digg” it. If your post gets enough diggs, it’ll be moved to the front page of the site, where “millions” of people can see it.
Delicious – this is a social bookmarking tool. Post something to your account and give it some descriptive keywords, or tags. Other people can browse by keyword tags to find posts, and may find yours. Maybe they’ll post it to their account, too, and the snowball grows.
StumbleUpon – this site lets you post links, or “stumbles,” and then shows you similar postings on the site. So if a site user posts a site similar to one you’ve stumbled, that user will see your post.
Reddit – post links and have them voted on by reddit readers. The more popular ones get pushed to the front page. Similar to digg.
Here are a couple of focused social media sites:
Sphinn – this is focused on the Internet marketing industry, with stories on search engine optimization, google search tips, etc. Post an article or link or blog post into the New Topics section – if enough people “sphinn” it, your post will make it to the front page.
Small Business Briefs – this site for small business covers a lot of ground. Post a story, others rate it, and maybe it gets to the main page.
You can find out more about using these social media sites where I did: this blog post, called Beginners’ Guide to Social News Sites. In addition to offering some random pictures, it covers the basics of social media and offers tips for choosing the best sites to use.
For our purposes, we’re going to use the two focused social media sites above, Sphinn and Small Business Briefs, as well as Delicious and StumbleUpon. We’re leaving out Digg and Reddit because we don’t think our posts will have a broad-enough appeal to make it to the front page of these sites.
So here’s why I don’t think social media marketing is hard anymore: I’m just going to put our blog posts up on these sites – and we’ll see what happens. What could possibly go wrong, right?
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