Alright, time to vent.
I’m sure happy that I have this blog to let out my frustrations or who knows what kind of trouble I could get myself into.
If you’re like me, you’ve been bombarded with Web2.0, social networking, social bookmarking information in the Internet Marketing space of late. Endless articles tout the virtues of Digg, Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Twitter and other sites where you practice social bookmarking and generate other content such as blogs, profile postings, videos, pictures and so on.
Before you jump all over me, I am suggesting that these sites ** MAY ** work for your business, but certainly there has been so much hype, many examples of mis-information and so much general information without context or proof that you really are at risk here of spending way too much time in unproductive ways.
For those of you still unsure about what social bookmarking really means, sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit and others allow others to submit your content (some people submit their own) and rate it in these large directories. Unlike search engines where content is primarily ranked by relevance to search, on the social bookmarking sites, user ratings, visits and downloads play a critical role in how content gets ranked.
The theory is that you get ranked highly by your readers and peers and you can achieve a top page listing that will drive thousands of visitors to your site from once piece of content.
Inside of our Internet Marketing Training Center, we help our members take full advantage of social networking as a part of their marketing plan without getting involved in the time wasting activities of being involved in dozens of these sites.
Now for the REALITY CHECK!
1. There are hundreds of social bookmarking sites and each has a slightly different mix of followers – by watching the top 100 rankings of any social bookmarking site you can see the topics that tend to do well, and notice those that are absent. For example, topics that do well on Digg include politics, technology, current events, weight loss while content that doesn’t rank that well include money making, marketing, business, etc…
The point here is that you must seek out your social bookmarking choices carefully depending on your niche market – otherwise you are simply wasting your time
2. Watch your conversions. Depending on your topic, you may find that you can drive 1000 or more unique visitors to your site from one or more of these social bookmarking sites, but ask yourself…do they convert?
In other words, do they signup as subscribers, do they buy anything from you?
We track all of our main social networking content and have noticed very clear patterns of action and inaction allowing us to abandon time wasting postings to social bookmarking sites.
Another thing we noticed was very important is your profile. We noticed a good deal of our conversions from social networking sites coming from our profile where we list our interests and websites. It seems that if someone likes your content, they will visit your profile and then perhaps click through to your website and be more receptive to becoming a subscriber or customer.
I had someone try to argue with me that it’s just a numbers game and that IF you were able to get a top posting on a social networking site and IF you could do that once a month and IF that top posting returned 100,000 visitors to your site and IF they converted at something like .1% (likely in the right neighborhood for social networking traffic as they tpyically convert at lower rates than other, more targeted sources of traffic) then you would have 100 new subscribers within a few days.
Assuming that someone is going to bring in 100,000 visitors (the average blogger now) on Digg each month is plain crazy. Even with those excessively imagined numbers, they get a couple hundred subscribers – I can do that with one affiliate mailing or an article or two on ezinearticles.com with far better conversions.
I’m not saying that social networking doesn’t work – I gave examples above of how it works for our business, but I would suggest people keep very close watch on
1) How much time they are putting in
2) How many visitors they are getting
3) How many conversions that is resulting in and
4) Compare that against the other traffic generation techniques that exist out there.
Don’t forget that there are other sources of traffic that should be your first priority – blogging, your own affiliate program, generating quality content, understanding the in’s and out’s of good keyword research, etc…
As far as social bookmarking sites go – pick a few that look promising for your niche, make sure your profile is well set up and enticing, take a few minutes each day and rate/network with someone from your niche and periodically post content to stay active. Make sure to track your results – you can use a tool like Google Analytics or the ad tracker built into 1AutomationWiz to make sure your effort is worthwhile.
