Posts Tagged ‘Delicious’

Allow me to introduce my friend Jordan Kasteler also known as Utah SEO Pro. His background is in organic search engine optimization, which has been doing professionally for 4 years now, and has stayed pretty focused on that and has’t delved much into paid search at all. But as of late, he told me he has been playing a lot lately in social media and there are quite a few things he has learned. He also told me that there were quite a few things historically done he wishes he could erase. He doesn’t want to look like an idiot, especially to the SMOs, but what he wants to do is save a few headaches for people getting into social media. Today I am going to take what Jordan has taught me and I’m going to focus primarily on Digg because, it seems to be the most complex social media site out there due to its sophisticated algorithm. I am going to write his exact words, of course with his permission. So everything below will be straight from Jordan, which is some great insights on Social Marketing.

Mistake #1: Abusing self-promotion

For the past year and a half to two years I’ve had social media accounts but I never used them. If I did ever use them it was just to submit some of my own blog posts or my company’s blog posts too.

Let me note that self-promotion isn’t bad all the time. If you’ve established an authoritative status in a community or are a power-user then you are more likely to get away with it if you do so sparingly. Nobody likes a self-promoter or person who is greedy. It is essential to contribute to other people and help them promote their stories. Karma comes full-circle when it comes to social networking.

Mistake #2: Not understanding the scope of the site or the community in its entirety

I’ve heard a lot of social media experts suggesting to take a look at the site and community before you register to understand what it’s about. That advice is half the battle but before you can really understand what it’s about you have to observe, participate, and test significantly. My mistake was not knowing that the one community perceives things differently than other communities.

For example, Digg.com hates SEOs. I learned this by my low response on SEO articles submitted. Good thing I was currently operating under the name “jordankasteler” instead of “UtahSEOpro”. This could have been bad had I started participating with the name “UtahSEOpro” and then realized, after much wasted time and effort, that none of my stuff will ever get promoted because nobody likes me.

Another example happened lately on Mixx.com. I submitted one of my own articles to a group on Mixx that had a rule strictly against self-promotion. Needless to say that didn’t go over well.

Moral of the story here is know the community, know the rules, know that goes hot and what doesn’t, know who’s hot and who’s not and imitate them.

Another tip is to seek out niche communities that aren’t as big as say Reddit, Digg, Delicious, or StumbleUpon. There are niche sites like sphinn.com for Internet marketers, Sk-rt.com for woman, and Hugg.com for nature lovers. Relevant content in niche communities can drive more traffic and links than broader communities sometimes.

Mistake #3: Not having goals When I very first started using Digg used it almost as a bookmarking service.

At the time, I probably didn’t even know the difference between Digg and Delicious. When I found a site I liked, I submitted it to Digg not considering or caring if the community would like it or not or if it was news worthy. What a horrible waste, I now have 70+ submissions and only a small percentage of them are actual quality content that I’ve submitted with intentions of promoting news worthy or remarkable article, video, or image.

Start by creating goals for every piece you submit. Your goals should be to promote everything you submit and do so with pride. If you submit low-quality content then you’re a low-quality contributor and the community will recognize it quickly. Don’t just submit and forget. Use a tool like Digg Alerter to watch your submitted content. If someone comments on a post then respond back to them whether the comment was positive or negative. The key here is to engage with the community and try to start a conversation. Comments are a good quality indicator of a post so this is an important part detail. If you don’t have a good response for the comment at least vote it up or down depending on the quality of the comment.

Mistake #4: Choosing quantity over quality when it comes to friends

Initial thinking of a newbie would be the more friends the better, right? WRONG! I’m not sure if this is recent with Digg’s new algorithm change or what but what I’ve found out is that the more friend you have the higher the threshold is for a story to go popular. My mistake was adding too many friends and not monitoring if they were voting for my content or not. After decreasing my friend count on Digg from nearly 500 friends to about 65 friends I’ve seen the threshold drop dramatically. For most social media sites you want to keep your friends very relevant to your interests and make sure that they are active users. Having non-active users, people who don’t appreciate your submissions, and people who don’t help you promote your submitted content is useless. I’ll go back to Karma here, if you’re not being active and helping others yourself then don’t expect your friends to do the same.

A wise thing is to constantly monitor your friend activity and trim down friends who aren’t beneficial to your success or not. This isn’t to hurt anyone’s feelings but if they aren’t going to play they need to get off the field.

Mistake #5: Not using RSS

I hate RSS when it comes to reading my news so I’ve stayed clear from it but I discovered that RSS is my best friend for social media. There are a couple reasons why. The first reason is if you’re contributing a lot of content, especially news worthy items, then timing is everything. It’s wise to subscribe to news sites like CNN.com or NYTimes.com so you can catch hot stories as soon as they are posted.

The second reason is that you can subscribe to what your friends are posting so you can help them promote their content without having to go to each profile and check up on them daily. It’s a huge timesaver and an easy way to keep tabs on your friend’s activity.

*BONUS Mistake* Not considering submission timing

There are certain times in each community where there are more eyes on the site or certain categories than others. Knowing those times and submitting during them is important. Generally, most people surf social sites in the morning or around lunch time during their break at work. It’s a good time to submit around then to capture people’s attention. It can make the different of whether your story goes popular or not.

If you’re up at 3:00 a.m. and you see a hot story pop up on your RSS reader from CNN then it’s probably not wise to save that until lunch-time the next day to submit because then you run the risk of someone else submitting it first. So be wise and use common sense.

Summary

Hopefully learning from my mistakes will help you avoid them in the future. I like to teach people the correct way of doing things based on my experience and hopefully you can take what you’ve learned and do the same.

We all know how important it is to have a content-rich website. Promoting these sites across the internet has in the past involved everything from search engine optimization to paid keyword referrals to link popularity campaigns. However, one of the most effective and relatively new methods to promote content-rich web sites these days, is through social media promotion.
What is “social media promotion” you ask? Simply, as defined by Wikipedia, social media:
“describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other.”
Part of the Web 2.0 revolution; another catchphrase describing the new generation of web sites that have users that submit their own text, video and picture content; social media promotion can take many forms.
Usually, these technologies and practices take non-search engine forms and can involve such technologies as chat forums, message boards, blogs, podcasts, and wikis. Simply, social media can be considered ANYTHING that you can use to build a community to rally around. A well-run social media campaign can drive huge amounts of traffic to a website and can determine whether a new idea, website or startup ultimately takes off or not.
There are literally dozens of social media sites active across the internet today. Below are brief overviews of what I would consider the five most popular:
Digg (http://www.digg.com) the big boy of social media sites. Digg was formed initially with a tech focus and is still the end all for all tech or computer specific content items that you wish to pull across to the masses. Digg has however become so popular that its scope has now expanded to cover most any item of interest.
del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/) a close second to Digg in the area of backlink generation. The primary purpose of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online; in that regard, it’s actually more community-focused then Digg. The ability to store your bookmarks online and add more from anyplace in the world, actually encourages cross-linking among site members who share similar interests. This in turn allows you to promote your own content to a shared community with similar interests, generating those much needed backlinks for site promotional purposes.
Technorati (http://www.technorati.com) the recognized authority on what is going in the world of weblogs. The main strength of Technocrati is the ability to keep tabs on your online visibility. The site allows you to keep tabs on who is linking to you, where you are being mentioned online, what kind of progress your site is making, and how your competitors are doing in comparison. The site can be indispensible if you routinely visit a lot of blogs and want to be updated on them when their content changes.
Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) online only since 2001, Wikipedia is now the world’s largest reference website on the planet. The content of Wikipedia is free and collaboratively written by people all around the world. This site is so popular that a search of most terms will display a Top 5 Wikipedia result in Google. It is worth noting that if your website is not already one of the strongest entries on the web, a listing on Wikipedia could actually “outrank” your own website. Therefore, make sure this result is actually truthful and complimentary, whenever possible.
Facebook (http://www.facebook.com) primarily driven by young adults, this social media site now numbers over nine million users and is still growing. Facebook helps you keep tabs on member profiles, at least those you can access. Recent changes to the site have made it very marketing friendly and a must-use if you have a college friendly product you wish to publicize. Members can purchase “facebook flyers,” which starting at $5, can be displayed 10,000 times a pop. Pricing increases based on frequency and number of days shown. Facebook groups are also very popular and very loyal, find something that connects with your group or the site and the results can be highly viral.
Getting your content noticed on these sites isn’t easy, but there are ways to prepare your content in such a way as to be considered “social media optimized.” This SMO approach is becoming a new concentration area for current SEO firms and can involve any of dozens of different approaches.
Here are five effective SMO rules that you can implement immediately when preparing your content for future social media campaigns:
1. Make your site linkable – also known as increasing your linkability, make it easy for outside parties and social media sites to link to your content. This can be done in a variety of ways, the easiest being to establish a blog on your site. If blogs aren’t your thing, maintaining free white papers, content-rich articles and resource pages that contain lots of useful links in one place, are great ways of increasing the linkable nature of your website.
2. Make bookmarking or social tagging easy – adding bookmarking buttons has been around for awhile. Go beyond this, though, by including a “delicious this” text link at the bottom of a post, and a Digg button near the top of the article. This format has been shown to be the most effective for generating votes for your content.
3. Start participating today – join the conversation on your site or in your site niche today. Start blogging on your own or make it a point to visit leading forums that target your audience and join the discussion . Answer some questions, provide some needed advice, and drop some “buzz” about your site at the same time; you won’t be sorry.
4. Reward helpful users – helpful or valuable users to your site that contribute noticeably to the site’s content and audience should be recognized and rewarded. This can take the form of a simple PM thank-you or a note on the forums themselves. The result of this is two-fold: you keep these valuable community members on your site, and you gain vocal champions of your site to outside members and sites they in turn visit.
5. Reward inbound site links – obviously the more inbound links your blog and site can generate, the better. This is still the singular method by which a site rises in the search rankings. Reward linking sites by providing them a permalink to use and listing them on your site in return. This simple act of acknowledgement provides the return gift of visibility and is never a bad thing.
The role of social media promotion to drive content is a continually expanding field. Even an examination of the main sites referenced above doesn’t begin to cover the viral social content impact of such popular social media mechanisms as YouTube videos or Flickr photo slides and galleries.
If planned and implemented correctly, social media promotion can be invaluable. The site visitor is in command, so why not start building a relationship with them, even if it’s on their terms?