TechCrunch has posted some statistics for Social Networking Sites and how they are doing in terms of traffic and users. There is some interesting information in the report. I’ve used this types of sites to drive traffic to various sites for a couple of years now and they can be effective for generating traffic. As a rule the traffic from these locations do not tend to stick around long, but its not always the case.

I’ve noticed that every time I make a well thought out submission to one of these sites to promote a various blog post, I always pick up some subscribers. The key is to not spam the Social sites, but to provide content that fits in with the interests of the particular social site. I only submit related articles to this site which match the interests of the people there. I’ve found as long as I spend enough time reading various hot topics on the social sites I get a better feel of what to write when I submit one of my articles that will generate the clicks to the full article.

This takes a decent amount of time to learn, but once done properly it can really help your blog to grow. I don’t claim to have this down to a science, but I do know that certain topics seem to do better on certain sites. For example almost everyone knows Technology type posts seem to do a lot better on a site such as Digg than ones on Marketing. At the same time Sphinn is focused more towards marketing and will produce better results for Marketing articles. Netscape or Propeller will do better with human interest type or weight loss articles. Propeller has shown to do fairly well in quite a few niches and I still get traffic to certain articles that where submitted over a year ago from this site.

The key to making effective use of Social Sites for generating traffic is to match the social site to the niche you wish to promote. The more time you spend as a member of the social site’s community, the better feel you will have for what they want to find out about. It may be a little work and take some time, but the payoff can be tremendous. Remember the Golden rule when submitting to Social Sites “contribute, don’t spam”.

Technorati tags: social networking, traffic generation, techcrunch, subscribers, sphinn, digg

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If you visit just about any Internet Marketing type forum, you will find people advising you to submit articles to directories such as Ezinearticles to build backlinks and traffic your website or blog. I will admit I followed that advice when I first started out, but I quit. Article Marketing is an okay practice if you are doing Bum Marketing and don’t have a website, but why would you just give out your valuable content? The links you get back are usually not worth anything and in my experience they rarely return your investment. Search Engine Journal has a great post on how to market your articles without using the distribution directories and their advice makes a lot of sense. Its your content and you should get the benefits of that content. If you are passing it out freely then you are just passing those potential profits off to a third party. i.e. You won’t see any money, and the backlinks and traffic you may gain from submitting the articles can be accomplished in other more creative ways for generating traffic. Read the rest of this entry

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