Social Media Marketing

What’s one of the easiest ways to generate buzz and consistently get massive amounts of traffic from social media websites?

The answer is simple: Control distribution of your content by leveraging the clout of popular and powerful individuals within the social media community. In other words, influence the influencers.

When these prominent individuals talk, others will listen. They are respected or liked by others in the same community. They have the ability easily initiate and popularize discussions on a specific topic.

StumbleUpon is a great way to not only share interesting content you come across, but also your opinions on various websites or issues. By thumbing up and reviewing a website, you give it more exposure by increasing the possibility that others will view it as well.

But that’s not the only way to share a website that you like; you can also use the toolbar to send any webpage directly to both your StumbleUpon friends and other non users as well.

In fact, there are some very good reasons why you should do so.

Link baits can come in all sorts of flavors and styles. Upon completion of a link bait, you usually have two main options:

You can either put the link bait on a page whereby it is displayed to all visitors or place it on a secondary page that is only visible or available to visitors coming directly from social media sites.

Where you choose to place your link bait matters. Do you want your regular site visitors or readers to see it among other content? Or would you prefer to only get the attention of a specific social media audience?

Just exactly how do you actually become a top StumbleUpon user? Instead of writing out another generic how-to post which struggles to crack StumbleUpon’s algorithm, let’s take a step back to see if all this focus on being a top stumbler really matters in the first place.

Many people have already written in detail about the steps needed to build a power StumbleUpon profile and the ways to get on StumbleUpon’s list of the top stumblers.

Most of these marketing-oriented articles focus primarily on the building a strong StumbleUpon account as a means to get more traffic for one’s specific websites.

As you might already know, link baits are content, tools or webpages specifically created to pull in links and traffic from other websites and popular social media websites like Digg or Reddit.

Creating an effective link bait can take a lot of time and effort and I think initial control over the distribution process is very important. You want someone who has influence or connections to submit or promote your link bait to the social community you are targeting.

del.icio.us is a popular online social bookmarking website which allows you to create web bookmarks of any websites you come across while surfing the web. You’ll also have the option of sharing these bookmarks with other del.icio.us users, friends and the general public.

One of the most widely used social bookmarking services on the internet, del.icio.us has a very large member base which actively tags and bookmarks a wide variety of websites.

I previously wrote an extensive guide to StumbleUpon, which gave a thorough introduction to using StumbleUpon as a means to direct massive traffic towards your website.

The article was pretty well received and I’ve gotten several questions from bloggers over the past two months.

The question I was asked the most often, was how to build up your own StumbleUpon network of friends, who might help to stumble your blog posts or webpages whenever interesting articles were to appear.

Not all websites are made equal. The value of a website and its ability to attract natural votes from social websites depends a great deal on its overall niche and content.

For example, if your corporate website focuses on topics such as real estate, auto insurance or financial products like credit cards, it might be difficult in making an article on it popular in social websites like Digg, Reddit or Netscape.

The general lack of popular interest in the content of your website is usually the main problem. You can create an interesting press release and seed it with friendly votes but it remains unlikely that it will be very well-received.

Built on the backbone of the largest blog index and search engine in the world, Technorati’s Where’s The Fire (WTF) seems to be an anomaly that doesn’t fit in any preconceived model. Is it primarily a social news website (ala Reddit/Digg) that focuses on each user’s editorial power? Or is it simply a meme-tracker which groups and connects search topics on a deeper level with Technorati-indexed blogs?

My initial experiment on WTF was aimed at uncovering the potential of WTF as a marketing/promotional tool because no one had ever done so in detail until now. The lack of statistical information or analysis on WTF makes understanding WTF’s role in social media/blogging harder to discern.