Posted in Online Publishing Strategy	April 18, 2008

How to use social networking sites to create buzz, an online community, and more traffic to your website

In our last post, we mentioned three types of social sites:

• Profile-based sites (MyBlogLog, LinkedIn, MySpace)
• Bookmark-based sites (Digg, Reddit)
• Review/Favorites-based sites (del.icio.us, Yelp)

There are so many social networking sites out there, how is a publisher to know which ones will benefit them the most, and how to use all of them? First off, find an intern or person on your team who enjoys social networking sites, preferably your webmaster or someone with that skill set. Someone who is interested in social media marketing will be more successful at it than someone who doesn’t “get it”.

These are our recommendations for top social networking sites, and how to implement them on your website:

Flickr.com: Flickr is more than a photo site, it is a live event promotion haven. People can search pictures, tag pictures, comment on pictures, even see the location of pictures. For example, we posted a Mequoda Summit Napa Valley 2008 album on Flickr last week after the Summit ended. We used the tags “mequoda summit” and “mequoda summit napa valley” on our tags. Now, we’re inviting attendees to upload their own photos to Flickr with the same tags. Now when someone searches for “mequoda summit”, “mequoda summit napa” etc. they will see all of the pictures that both our attendees and we posted on Flickr. Oh and by the way, every one of our pictures has a link back to Summit.Mequoda.com.

Download our Online Publishing Secrets special report for FREE and learn the seven Internet marketing strategies that magazine and newsletter publishers are using to make money online

Digg.com: You can use this site two ways. You can submit your articles to Digg.com every day manually, or you can add a “digg this” button to your website so that your readers can submit your articles themselves, easily. This site drives a great amount of traffic to your website and offers you inbound links to help your search engine optimization. Also, you’ll look hip with that sweet “XX diggs” button on all of your articles. (Similar sites include Reddit.com, StumbleUpon.com and Daytipper.com)

YouTube.com: Simple enough.. host your videos, testimonials, biographies, seminars, etc. on YouTube and include a link back to your site in every video description. Then go around to other videos leaving comments so that people will get interested in what you have to say and come to your profile. Ideally, they will then become interested, click on your link and visit your site.

NowPublic.com: A community generated news site that is SUPER for online press releases. Sign up and start distributing press releases, share blog posts and upload videos, all driving traffic back to your website.

MyBlogLog.com: This is similar to Technorati, except that it goes much further. The task is simple: go to MyBlogLog.com, claim your blog, and join the blogging community. You get a profile which you can then use to comment on other blogger profiles. Those bloggers then visit your site and leave you comments. In addition, Yahoo!’s MyBlogLog.com will give you a widget that you can put on your homepage that shows who’s been visiting your site. Even better, when you visit other sites with the MyBlogLog widget (such as TechCrunch.com) users will see you right on that website. Perhaps they will click on your smiling face, perhaps they will click through to your site. Great way to get your site noticed on big highly trafficked sites. To top it off, they offer free blog stats.

Empressr.com: Share your presentations online with a community of presentation junkies. Create a following, give yourself a place to host presentations, and hopefully get indexed by a few search engines.

Learn more about driving website traffic and making money online in our Internet Marketing Strategy for Publishers Handbook.

Wikipedia: This one can get tricky because they DO NOT stand for duplicate content of any form. This means if you want to create an entry for lingo that was created by you or your company, you will need to make sure it is completely original content. At the bottom of your entry, where you list references, don’t forget to link back to your site. You can also create your own wiki with WetPaint.com.

Eventful.com: If you host an event, this would be the site you don’t want to miss posting to. Due to its popularity and easy navigability, it has a huge following and is the first checked website for many conference-goers. Users are able to comment and have conversations about the event on its event page. They can also “share” an event, save it to their calendar or add it to their “watch list”. Tagging and overall good reputation of the site increases search engine visibility, and thus increases traffic to your event site. Eventful also has a Facebook.com application which increases your visibility when it doesn’t make sense to start your own social network profile.

Crowdvine.com: If other social networking sites aren’t doing it for you, create your own! CrowdVine is a sleek Do-It-Yourself social network tool that allows you to create your own social network. For a fee, you can create a more complex event-based site with more options. Ning.com has a similar service that was recently nominated for a Webby Award.

Take a look at these social media marketing portals to see where you fit. Almost every publisher can benefit from these sites; and if your intern/web designer/IT guy is foaming at the mouth over these opportunities, you know you’ve got the right person for the job.

Above all, don’t forget to include links back to your site in every profile, blog, wiki, video, and social network you create. Afterall, that was the point right?