You submit your articles everyday to Digg, Technorati, and Delicious, in the hopes that one of them will gain traction and net you some traffic. However no one besides you ever votes your stuff up, and so you’re caught in the endless cycle that never lands you more than a few clicks a day. With Digg and other Social Networking sites, such as Technorati and Delicious, dominated by the big players in blogging, the idea of leveraging off of social networking for smaller blogs seems unrealistic if not impossible. The problem is you’re targeting the completely wrong audience! 

Easier To Get Front-page Status

Look for smaller social media sites rather than the immensely popular ones. Since these smaller social media sites are just now becoming popular it’s a lot easier to be noticed. Users regularly check the newly submitted page and since your post isn’t bumped down in less than an hour you actually have a chance of hitting the front page through other browsing users.In addition, it frequently only takes about 3-5 votes to be placed on the front page compared to diggs 800 or so.

An Audience More Valuable Than Any Other

Sure landing on the front page doesn’t net you as much traffic as say Digg, but this traffic is actually more valuable than any traffic Digg could ever send you! Many of the smaller Social Networking sites are specifically focused on certain niches or topics. By focusing your attention exclusively on the handful that exist in your niche your essentially picking the audience that is most likely interested in your blog. Sites like Digg are frequented by casual users that as a habit click the daily links for interesting news and not by the content. However, in these small scale social networking sites all the users are interested in that niche or topic and thus have a much higher chance of being interested in your blog. In addition these users have a much higher chance of actually bookmarking your blog and coming back another day. I cannot tell you how useless your blog is if the only readers it ever gets is from random jumps of social networking users that never come back again. You want the social networking sites to help your traffic, but not depend on it!

Ensuring Future Success

Not only that, but these users are the Web 2.0 children. They are the first ones to adapt to new methods on the web and start new communities like these new social networking sites. Each and every user from that site is registered at that social networking site and knows how to use it. By capturing the interests of these premium users your ensuring future success, because these are the kinds of people that submit and vote up articles. It may seem tiresome submitting your articles to multiple sites at first, but over time your readers from those sites will start to submit and vote them up for you, leaving you with less and less work.

Cross-Linking Among Social Networking Sites

Even more enticing is the fact that a large majority of those users are people who frequent multiple social networking sites. If your article hits the front page of a small social networking site, a user who is registered at say Delicious may discover your post and submit it to Digg as well. What many people don’t know is that many of the current top Diggers got there by spam-submitting successful articles from all the smaller social networking sites on the Internet. From an ethical standpoint that may seem like something negative, but in the eyes of a blogger you should love these people. These are the lunatics that actually like doing lots of work and submitting articles. I say give them what they want and have them work for you!

Articles that reach the front page on one site frequently appear on other social networking sites over a period of days. In the page of my stats above you can clearly see how horrible my site was doing before I started using social networking sites. I had a decent amount of users who liked my content, but the problem was it was growing at a very slow rate. If you look at March 10th, when I submitted one of my sites to a small and tight-knit social networking site my traffic instantly flew up as I hit the front-page shortly after. Here you can observer the ricocheting effect of the social networking traffic as over the course of the next few days my site was submitted to multiple other social networking sites and gained an outstanding level of traffic. One after the other my article spread from one site to the next until I was reaching new highs in traffic than previously before.

In a future post I will be constructing a list of all the smaller undiscovered social media sites categorized by their niche that can help jump-start the traffic on your blog, so subscribe to my RSS feed so you can be the first to know when it’s published. Just click on the RSS icon in the top right corner of the page.

 EDIT: March 19 - I LOVE YOU STUMBLE UPON