You may have heard of some of these social networking sites like MySpace, FaceBook, Linkedin or a myriad other companies out there being used by millions to connect with long lost classmates, relatives or friends and family. Have you ever thought of using them to promote your blog or website?
MySpace has millions of users worldwide that use the site not only for communication to their friends and family but for getting information on all kinds of topics. There are MySpace profiles for TV shows, Musicians, Actors, Celebrities…you name it, there’s likely a MySpace profile out there for it.
Why Use Social Networking Sites?
That being said, why would you want to leverage these social sites to your advantage? Mainly because they hold a lot of clout in the netsphere/blogosphere. MySpace and FaceBook are the 800 lb. gorillas in the room. MySpace ranks highly in search engine results and technorati authority so when you create links from MySpace to your own blog you get more credibility than you would from just about any other source out there. This has to do with how search engines like Google rank links coming and going on sites. Google is going to give more weight to a site like MySpace than it will to your friend’s blog that just started and has a link back to your site.
How Do I Use This To My Advantage?
It’s quite simple really. Create an account at your favorite social networking site which is usually free. Start adding friends. I started with real friends of course and then searched for other people that were interested in the same kinds of things my blog was discussing. I then extended friendship to these people explaining why I wanted to add them as friends.
For one of my sites, I was able to find about 80 people that had similar interests to what my site was about and added them as friends. Some declined but a lot more accepted. Once I had a decent base, I then began using this site (in this case MySpace) as a marketing tool. I would create a blog post on MySpace with a teaser paragraph summing up what the article or topic was about and created a link back to the article on my own site. Hopefully the reader is interested in what you have to say and follows the link to your site. In the best case scenario, they not only like that one article but also see the value in whatever else you have to say and beocme a subscriber.
To be honest I didn’t set up any complicated tracking or anything because MySpace includes a tally of how many views your blog gets on a daily and weekly basis and also displays the total views. The results were promising. Within about 10 minutes of posting the blog on MySpace, i would have maybe a dozen views. Remember the more eyeballs that are looking at your content, the more likely it is they are going to click on ads and use your site on a regular basis.
I can’t say that as a direct result I have made any more money than I would have with other methods but I still think it’s a good way of getting your information to the right people because you have done the targeting yourself.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on this and what success or failure you have experienced as a result.
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