Promote My Site

Because people will see your stuff? I’m sorry, did you want me to make it more complicated than that?

It is easy to get wrapped around the axle of wanting links that pass Google page rank, but that is really not the be-all/end-all of using social networks to help find people who are interested in what you are doing.

And it doesn’t matter if what you’re doing is commercial or philanthropic or deeply personal - you’d hardly be doing it on the internet if you didn’t want people to see and read all about it.

But this can be an obvious argument when you’re talking about Digg or Reddit or whatever. How about when you’re talking about Dig My Honda? It’s got an astoundingly low page rank, all the stories are internally linked and the link-outs are re-directed. No love to make your Google-strength in the SERPS higher. So ignore it.

Or, maybe not. If you’re selling Honda Mods, then this is the place for you to be active. The trick is to be active there with as little time investment as possible.

I tend to look at the social bookmarking sites like I do a mutual fund. What I want is a good spread of opportunities to intersect with success (customers). If some of them pay a dividend (Google Link Power) then so much the better, but if I only had those sites I’d be under-diversified.

One of the other reasons to lower the cost of using these niche sites is that you might have to put up a lot of quality material over a long period of time before you got enough aggregate traffic to decide if it was even worth a very low investment.

Say it takes six months of bi-weekly posting on Dig My Honda before you get enough click-throughs to calculate a 1% conversion rate. But maybe their average purchase value is 2x the norm of what you get from Google ads. Hmmm, maybe you want to invest in that demand channel.

Or maybe your traffic and conversion rates are invisible but after six months you get one BIG customer who buys a three grand header kit. And that might be a big enough deal so that you’ll keep investing for that semi-annual Blue Bird Buyer.

Your Mileage May Vary (YMMV), but I urge you to think about social networking sites as places where you can invest your time/content and then track your returns.