Promote My Site

Three days ago I wrote a post, Promote My Site Above The Noise, and tossed out the phrase “For example: if you type “promote my site” you will not find us for 27 pages or something crazy like that.” Liar liar, pants on fire.

If you run that same search now we are 7th on the first page.

How in the world did we do that?

Let’s chat.

There are three big boxes I use to keep my thinking about social networking:

Pure Networks - MySpace/Facebook

Social Voting - Digg/Pligg/Reddit

Social Bookmarking - Delicio/Scuttle

(Ok, there is another box I keep upstairs and call Crazy Aunt Betty and I keep stuff like Twitter in it. Ignore that box until the bubble bursts. Then we can take out the mummies of VC cash and have a good laugh.)

I’m going to ignore Pure Networks like MySpace/Facebook because, well, they are not worth the time for us, unless we violate their TOS. Which we won’t do. But they are fine for some people - just not much intersection between our customer base and theirs.

So let’s talk about what we did… We promoted our site, gently, onto Social Voting and Social Bookmarking sites. What do I mean by gently? We put some of our best (IMHO) posts out for people to read and link to/from. (More later on that.)

What we did NOT do was any real traditional SEO stuff around optimizing our website, link purchasing, creating viral content, etc.

It’s not that we don’t know how to do that stuff (we do, natch) but because we really wanted to prove a point (to ourselves and you) about how social networks, honestly approached, give you the right kind of traffic and SERP results.