Entries Tagged 'Link Baiting & SMM' ↓
January 24th, 2008 — Link Baiting & SMM
If you’re a n00b in the SEO world, you may not know about the Florida Update–basically, it was the single day in history when Google rolled out a new algo and thousands of SEOs said to each other, “Dammit, Google finally got smart.”
Well, as the latest Digg update rolled out, thousands of SMOs/linkbaiters reacted by saying–angrily, long-windedly, and periphrastically–”Dammit, Digg finally got smart.” (See a concise summary of the new changes at SEL.)
The good news is, we SMOs & linkbaiters still have dozens of other social media traffic sources, which, as long as they stay “medium size”, won’t roll out anything like Digg’s Florida Update. Meanwhile, a lot of the heavy users leaving Digg will juice the membership at alternatives like Mixx and Tweako. No need to cry or get angry. Come up with a Plan B, move on, evolve. Digg had peaked anyway.
January 10th, 2008 — Link Baiting & SMM
I hope all you readers had a good Festivus this year. The Airing of Grievings was pretty brutal to me, apparently I’ve been a real dick to a lot of people this year. But all ended well as I crushed T-bo in the Feats of Strength ceremony.
Meanwhile Tropical SEO is once again bringing you the good stuff–9 new niche social media sites that actually send traffic. I have to credit Improvetheweb for pointing me to some links where I found (and tested) these new sites. (p.s. those other lists have a TON of abandoned sites in them. All the more reason to bookmark the Tropical SEO list which I actually try to maintain.)
I have held off on including some sites which are TOO niche (Firefox only news?). And as usual I don’t include any which I’m not sure have sustainable communities, which are abandoned (or too new), or which don’t seem to send significant real traffic. Paraphrasing Jane Copeland, most of these web 2.0 sites are flaming piles of sh*t. The ones on my list aren’t.
Today’s additions:
You can check out the entire updated list here. Happy linkbaiting!
November 13th, 2007 — Domaining, Link Baiting & SMM
Mr. Tropical is back after a short blogging hiatus. After I convincingly won the bet with Scoreboard (first man to 350 bloglines subs got $500 Cleveland Browns tickets), I was uninspired to write for a while. But you know what? I miss your guys’ snarky comments. I miss the glamour. And I miss all the action I get every time I post. So here’s an update with a little bit of everything!
1. I’ve update my niche social media site list. 5 new sites have shown me enough to join the exclusive club:
Check out the whole updated list here and remember to make submitting to niche social media sites part of your regular link baiting flow!
2. I have to say I’m a bit hurt no one has joined the Scoreboard Media Vegas Contest. I was promised that when I became a successful SEO I’d have groupies. So where are the groupies, I ask you? Where are my godd*mn groupies!?
3. The Domainersphere was rocked with scandal the past few days. I don’t fully understand all what went on or understand who’s at fault, but one thing I do know is every time I get really emotional about business I usually regret it afterwards.
4. Along with a few other smart folks, I’ve started a new company: DomainDev. Come check us out if you’re in Houston. We have a Ms Pac-man machine in our office.
August 28th, 2007 — Link Baiting & SMM
“Top 2 Windows Applications
#1. MS Office
#2. Internet Explorer”
“Charlie Weis Nip-Slip [PICS]”
“Top 11 Reasons Digg, Reddit and Delicious Users Are a Bunch of Stupid Wankers with No Social Lives”
“The Ultimate Guide to Smegma: 101 Fun Facts, Tutorials, and Pics”
“33 Reasons Why Blockbuster Is Better than Netflix”
“10 Reasons Why George Bush Is Smarter Than You”
“Top 0 Digg Power Users Who Aren’t Virgins“
August 22nd, 2007 — Link Baiting & SMM
My list of “niche social media sites that actually send traffic” is one of the most popular pages on this blog. I know I visit it at least twice a week (whenever I do a link bait launch), so no surprises there.
I already updated it once, and I am happy to say, today I have four more new sites to add:
- Sphinn (Search Engines & Online Marketing)
- PlugIM (Online Marketing)
- Sk-rt (Lifestyle)
- DNHour (Domaining)
Some of these have more traction than others (Sphinn already has a very active community), but I’m willing to add some smaller ones–like DNHour–if they’re getting submissions every day (from more than one submitter) and are sending some referrals (hey, you gotta bring home the bacon).
I highly recommend bookmarking my list and submitting every new baity piece of content to at least a few of them. Just like you shouldn’t build an entire business off of organic Google traffic, you shouldn’t build a social media strategy entirely around Digg (or StumbleUpon/Netscape/Reddit/Delicious). Instead, build the strategy around niche social media sites and blog coverage, and treat any success on The Big 5 as gravy. Depending on your niche, the traffic from these niche sites could surprise you (Tweako and DZone, for instance, can send a few hundred uniques if you hit the right angle.)
As always, if you know of any successful niche social media sites I’m not listing, leave a comment. Don’t bother telling me about a new one that lacks a decent-sized core community and doesn’t send any referrers… for each of the 29 sites in my list, there are a hundred abandoned or soon-to-be-abandoned attempts.
August 2nd, 2007 — Link Baiting & SMM
Maybe it’s just the crazy pills I take every morning, but lately it seems that eBizMBA.com appears on Delicious/Popular or another big social media site at least twice a week. I hadn’t even heard of them a month ago, and now they’ve thoroughly branded themselves in my mind (and they’ve gotten a crapload of traffic and links recently too). Now today I’m seeing 20 Most Popular Sites for Bargain Hunters referenced everywhere, and that’s the last straw, I have to post about their genius now. 
Here are four lessons you can take from the recent success of eBizMBA:
1. Make your content pretty. Check out any page there: the content is generally in a bulleted list format, with clean thumbnail images next to each bullet point. People like pretty pictures. People like to scan. People vote for, and link to, what they like.
2. People love rankings. The eBizMBA posts I see reaching Delicious/Popular are usually of the Top 30 Social Bookmarking Sites or 25 Largest Web 2.0 Sites variety. The beautiful part about stats and rankings is that you can take a stale-as-hell niche and come out with a baity, useful, and successful hook simply be remixing existing public stats and ranking the recognizable players. (The players that rank at the top will probably even help you spread the meme. 
)
3. If you’re an industrial strength link baiter, make sure you have a good Web host. Right now the site is loading slowly, and I think I had this problem last time I visited. (Granted, I usually visit them when I see them via the frontpage of a social media site.) Likely the spike of traffic from social media, combined with the fact that they use a lot of image files, contributes to this problem. But it’s pretty self-defeating to be slow or down when the spike happens. If you’re link baiting regularly, spend a little bit more money to get a better hosting solution. (Sorry, guys, I didn’t say all the lessons would be positive!)
4. Once you find a hook, milk it for all it’s worth. When you realize the Top-25-Ranking-with-thumbnails format is a winner, you can a) pat yourself on the back, and try to find some other hooks, or b) take the successful hook and apply it to every other niche–or even sub-niche, if your site is narrow–that you can think of. I believe it was DaveN who said, “SEO is knowing what the search engines want and giving it to them… so hard they f*cking bleed.” Well, you can quote me: successful blogging is figuring out what your readers want, and giving it to them so often they *izz their pants!
June 8th, 2007 — Link Baiting & SMM
I have noticed several signs in the past few months that Digg has jumped the shark. Any one of these signs alone might be an aberration, but taken together I think they signify that Digg has peaked, and is now beginning a slow, gradual decline.
- First we had a mass exodus of many of the best users when the ‘top users’ function was removed.
- A user revolt (on account of a hand job) brought the Digg administration to its knees. Their credibility could now be questioned from multiple angles.
- The ‘bury rate’ continues to rise (it now appears the majority of stories on upcoming/most get buried rather than making it to the homepage); I understand they want to prevent commercial content getting to the homepage but in the process they are also preventing anything remotely controversial from gaining traction, and what good is a social media site without controversial content?
- The Digg Effect isn’t what it used to be. Rand Fishkin noticed that Digg sends less traffic these days and I can confirm this from stats on my own sites.
- Aaron Wall notes that after training its user base to be highly hostile to commercial content, Digg now plans to extend its platform to restaurant and product reviews. Somehow I don’t see this being well-received.
Now let me repeat, I am not saying ‘Digg is dead’, only that after an initial highly accelerated growth path, it has peaked and will now slowly decline. The guys over there built a really killer app but then squandered much of is business potential because of bad decisions (and a lack of common business sense). As a marketer I believe this is a good thing, with social media we don’t want a situation like in search where one player controls 70% of the market. I would rather depend on getting my traffic from 25 niche social media sites instead!
p.s. Digg thanks for the memories (a few hundred homepage stories, a few million visitors and half a million inbound links to various sites when the going was good)
May 27th, 2007 — Link Baiting & SMM
With the recent launch of CoRank it seems like everyone and their cousin is starting a niche social media site. Just like with a blog though, many will never reach critical mass (and most, in fact, will get abandoned).
However in my lifelong quest to acquire traffic and links cost-effectively, I’m seeking out those niche social media sites that appear to be gaining a user base and actually sending websites real visitors. Here are eight newer ones I’ve discovered… a few of these I’ve actually found through my referrals, which is a good indication they “actually send traffic”.
- Babblz (Parenting)
- Ballhype (Sports)
- blogs4God (Christian)
- Meme or Lame (Gadgets)
- News Heat (Politics)
- Plant Change (Environment)
- TTiqq (Tips & Tutorials)
- Tweako (Computers & Technology)
Note: Since a lot of folks bookmarked the original post I’m going to go ahead and update it with these new ones: Top 17 25 Niche Social Media Sites (That Actually Send Traffic)
May 14th, 2007 — Link Baiting & SMM
Pronet Advertising is running a story about the mounting evidence that shows the Digg staff is manually pulling stories before they make the homepage. As I reported earlier, the ‘bury rate’ at Digg is at an all-time high, and lately I’ve been wondering if the Bury Brigade weren’t the only ones to blame, so this doesn’t surprise me.
This same phenomenom has been observed by several of my acquaintances over the past week. One of my contacts watched his story inexplicably get buried (after getting several dozen Diggs in one hour!), and actually emailed his Digg contact on the staff, who told him “it was buried as lame by too many users”. OK, if that were true, that would make sense. But the evidence shows that it was pulled manually by the Digg staff, based on a search of 10,000 buries from that day where the buried story didn’t appear.
The same exact thing just happened to me today. Twice. Two stories which made it to upcoming/most in near record time, then disappeared, and do not show up even once in the last 10,000 buries.
Now, let me state for the record, Digg is a privately owned business, and if they want to manually pull stories and not own up to it, that’s well within their rights. (Though I would argue, it is bad for business.) I also don’t have a “right” to be on their homepage (even if the users like the stuff I submit). This is business. I evolve and move on.
I also however want to state for the record: it appears from the evidence that the Digg staff are big fat hairy liars.
April 23rd, 2007 — Link Baiting & SMM
Update, January 10, 2008: 9 more sites have been added.
Update, November 13, 2007: 5 more sites join the club.
Update, October 17, 2007: I’ve cleaned up the list a bit… I removed Newsheat (now just someone’s blog), AdvertLover (down for now), JudysBook (no longer a social media site), PickStation (down for now), and VideoBomb (now a porn site).
Update, August 22, 2007: I’ve added 4 new sites to the list.
Update, May 27, 2007: I’ve added 8 new sites to the list.
With Digg getting more and more hostile–and with my baiting habit getting a bit out-of-control–I’ve lately been forced to look elsewhere to get my beloved jolts of social media traffic.
No matter. Evolve or die! They won’t send you 5,000 uniques in an hour, but the traffic they do send is more likely to subscribe to your RSS feed, because their members have already identified themselves as part of your niche’s tribe. (And it’s a more targeted tribe than the “gamer wanker” at Digg, or “Politico smartass” at Reddit.)
Without further adieu, here are 17 25 29 24 29 38 niche social media sites that actually seem to be gaining critical mass:
- AgentB (Deals)
- ArmchairGM (Sports)
- AutoSpies (Autos)
- Babblz (Parenting)
- Ballhype (Sports)
- blogs4God (Christian)
- BuzzFlash (News)
- Care2 (Social Action)
- Daytipper (Tips & Tutorials)
- Dealigg (Deals)
- Design Float (Design)
- Dissect Medicine (Health & Medicine)
- DNHour (Domaining)
- DZone (Developers)
- Game Diggity (Game Videos)
- Hacker News (Web Development)
- Hugg (Environment)
- iliketotallyloveit.com (Shopping)
- IndianPad (India News)
- KillerStartups (Startup Reviews)
- Meme or Lame (Gadgets)
- Mixx (Anything)
- PhotographyVoter (Photography)
- Pixel Groovy (Web Design)
- Plant Change (Environment)
- PlugIM (Online Marketing)
- qoolsqool (Education Resources)
- ScoreGuru (Sports)
- ShowHype (Entertainment)
- Sk-rt (Lifestyle)
- Small Business Brief (Business & Entrepreneurship)
- Sphinn (Search Engines & Online Marketing)
- Stylehive (Fashion)
- tipstrs (Tips & Tutorials)
- TTiqq (Tips & Tutorials)
- Tweako (Computers & Technology)
- Value Investing News (Investing)
- VideoSift (Videos)
It’s a good bet that nearly every linkbait you publish would fit in at at least one of the above sites, so I recommend making ‘niche social media submission’ part of your regular launch to-do list. Just like ol’ fashioned link begging, it’s a great tactic to hedge against the power of the Bury Brigade at Digg. (Save yourself time: Go sign up and get an identical username and password for each site, and then bookmark this page )
I expect that in a year from now there will be a few hundred niche social media sites with a critical mass of users. Let’s hope so, baiting Digg ain’t good for the old ticker
p.s. a message to all you muppets rolling your eyes and saying “great now the SEOs can spam the niche sites, too!”: an SEO submitting to (even spamming!) your social media site is a good sign. Just figure out how to make the community self policing and work through the growing pains.