Promote My Site

If believe that you shouldn't post your own material, then you won't care about this article. If you spend a week hand-crafting Apple Fanboy-licious posts for the front page of Digg, then move right along, because I got nothing here that will help you.

Let's talk about Drive Thru Social Networking for a minute.

Ok, you're hungry, so you have a few options:

If you recoiled in horror at the notion of posting your content and leaving, then you'll really hate the rest of this article! Because I think that it is just fine to put your content up and move on to your next task.

But, you might say, just posting isn't the proper use of the site. Really? Let's look at the continuum of users:

• Billy Browser visits Reddit once an hour, votes on stuff constantly (some of which he's actually read), has never submitted anything
• Patty Participator scours the internet for Kute Kitty Pix!!!! and posts them to Propeller all the time, plus she reads everything with "knitting" as a tag
• Silky SEO carefully collects a network of friends on Digg and posts things from a variety of sources; strangely enough, his stuff seems to go front page a lot
• Calvin Content writes a daily blogger post on his Corvette restoration and posts them up on Car Space, though that is all he does there

So who is a legitimate user? All of them, obviously. I bet if you polled site owners they'd ask for lots and lots of Patty Participators, but in their hearts they know they need all four. I'd like to ask them how many of the posts Patty reads have been contributed by Silky SEO and Calvin Content - probably a lot of them.

At this point in my rant someone will interrupt me and say that you get better results as a Patty Participator. I say: That depends on what better is to you.

I say that Calvin Content is deeply happy with being a content creator and that what he really wants is for other Corvette nuts to come to his personal blog and settle in for lots of tasty arguments about coil rates and fiberglass repair. Good on him.

We all know Billy Browser is happy. The guys at Reddit would probably be happier if he clicked on a few more ads, but that is not Billy's problem. (In fact, if SEO's clicked on more ads they'd probably be welcomed, rather than hunted like vampires in a bad Cornan flick.)

Silky SEO is trying to attract people to his website to sell them stuff. So what? The only reason that social networking sites stay in business is the hope that someday enough people will click on ads and pay the hosting and Ramen Noodle bill. So, what, the site owners are allowed to be commercial but nobody else? I contend that as long as Silky doesn't violate the TOS then he's morally clear.

How effective is this kind of traffic? It depends - the guys at Mixed Martial Arts did a Digg experiment and got 70K fresh visitors over a few days. They collected less than $50, so not much short term value, but presumably they got good value out of their effort. I'd say that the Silky SEO's at MMA were happy with their results And the post got 5000+ DIGGS so they made a lot of other Billy's and Patties happy too.

So Billy, Patty, Calvin, and Silky are all happy.

Nothing wrong with drive thru social networking, it's all about balance in the population.