Social Networks like Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit and company command insane amounts of traffic. Users congregate on these sites to cast their votes on particularly newsworthy items and voice their opinions on funny stories and breaking news.
It’s slippery territory as you can end up “wasting” hours a day reading article after article in search of laughs, tech tidbits and trends.
However, that’s not all they’re good for… Marketers and particularly SEO’s are known to expend huge efforts and impressive sums of money (in the thousands of dollars) to create content especially formulated to rise to the top of these community voting engines.
1) What’s in it for Them?
As Greywolf so aptly put it: Social Media: It’s the Backlinks Stupid.2) So it’s All About Masterbaiting?
Yes, for many marketers, it is. The real term here is linkbait, defined by the Wikipedia
as “any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites”.
Quite simply, in niches where you need a boatload of links to compete, a link bait profiteer like Andy Hagans could swoop in out of nowhere and grab top rankings from crusty old affiliate sites in record time.
3) A $50,000 Submission?
A moderately to highly successful piece of linkbait could land you anywhere in the vicinity of 4000 or more permanent, in context links, skyrocketing you domain power in one explosive blow. Is a good Digg submission worth $50,000? Judge for yourself…
Enough Already, Let’s See Some Action!So you want your slice of the Social Media pie? Ok, let’s get crackin’.
Why Falter When You can Stumble?
4) Stumbleupon is Digg’s little cousin. Definitely worthy of your marketing attentions, it may be the right place to start. This Ultimate Guide to Stumbleupon is an amazing piece that takes you from content to traffic to money
Beware of Digg
Actually that’s just a provocative subtitle and we’ll get to that in a minute.
5) Getting your page on the front page of Digg can net you a server meltdown. That’s how much traffic you can expect when you:
Use these extra tips to supercharge your Digg shenanigans.
6) Stare, wide-eyed as you peak over the shoulder of a link bait masterpiece in:
7) And if that’s not enough, you can make your efforts outright contagious with this:
Folks, this is hilarious. If you spend any time reading on Digg, you’re going to laugh out loud. This tool pulls historical data of the most successful Digg article titles and helps you come up with surefire winning headlines. Funny!
9) Before you go getting all excited, know that some jealous fops and self-appointed Digg guardians may try to foil your marketing efforts. Avoid seeing your precious linkbait buried by these fools with:
Is a Title all that Stands Between Fame and Flop?
10) The title of your piece is incredibly important and mean the difference between stardom and stinkdom…
11) And what better than the eagle eyes of Andy Beard to confirm “what’s in a name”?
12) It seems like SEOmoz can already lay claim to being the champion of informative social media content. Just in case anybody had any doubt about that claim, they really hammer the point home with this extremely comprehensive guide to:
Social Marketing Media Tactics
Of course if you prefer to see the Social forest for the proverbial trees, you could always side with Matt Coddington and play the social network game by the rules.
The great dilemma is that the large social networks hold such a great promise of gain that it’s harder to utilize them “properly” from the perspective of an SEO.
If you’re reading Net Frontier Marketing right now, chances are excellent you’re an affiliate or online marketer yourself.
If that’s the case, here is some exciting news: there’s a new social network just for us. It’s called Bumpzee. If you join now, on this, the 8th of March, you can be part of history by being one of the first 500 people to sign up.
A great list of resources Alex, just gave it a stumble
Hi Andy,
Thanks, your latest article on the Digg title is what got me writing…
[...] As I write this, I’m almost experiencing a twinge of remorse. I get massive spam on this blog and it grows daily. I’ve made some “resource oriented posts” lately and I enjoy fraternizing with my more mainstream white hat counterparts. [...]