Promote My Site

Not evil like undercooked Brussels sprouts nor evil like a politician with a tax revenue windfall. Evil like some jerk at a cocktail party handing out business cards for “free investment portfolio reviews.” Ok, maybe “annoying” is a better term, but even annoying behavior sufficiently repeated can turn you into the shirtless guy on cops explaining why he torched his neighbor’s truck at 2am on Sunday morning.

Of course (following me here?) I am talking about people who post the most amazingly inappropriate content into Social Voting Sites. It doesn’t really matter what people put into Social Bookmarking Sites and god knows that Pure Networks like Facebook/MySpace are full of the most astounding krep. (Side note: who would have thought so many attractive young women from MySpace would want to be MY friends?)

For example, “Aphrodisiacs for Valentine’s Day” from a health supplements store. (No, no link, they don’t deserve it.) It’s a 150 word re-purposed post, a month before V-Day, and, worst of all, it’s on a site (Digg) where the Digg-erati will bury it in a hot second once they see it.

So, to summarize: waste of time because it won’t get seen, it violates the community creed, and it is ill-timed. Not evil, but maybe mini-evil.

Why not post it on The Rambling Irishman?

Who?

Exactly.

It’s a niche pligg site. Based on our traffic experiments we think they get between 1,000 and 3,000 people per day. It takes two votes to get to the first page, 10 to get to the top and stay there for five days.

Good math, really: five votes to get to a place where 10K people see your content. If you bought that traffic from Stumble it’d cost you $500.

Keep in mind that your Valentines Day content has absolutely no chance on Digg and they’re the same random crowd as on The Rambling Irishman. (There are more of them, but they are no more demographically sorted.)

So why don’t you use your network to put something in a niche and get it to the front page? It takes no more time. Maybe it is more cool socially to be on digg, but I personally think an increasing bottom line is cool.

Oh, and even better, your post is NOT EVIL on these smaller sites because they need the content and the traffic and the attention.