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Using Niche Social Media, Digg-Like Sites to Drive Traffic To Your Site

Here’s an interesting article on the advantage of using niche like social media sites to drive traffic to your site.

Getting Immediate Targeted Traffic From Digg-Like Sites by Jack Humphrey

Digg-style sites continue to go vertical into specific niches and markets. And they can generate a lot of free targeted traffic if you use them and understand how they work.

As far as the original Digg itself, you can still do very well there IF you get to the front page, but it is now less and less likely the average person will ever see the front page since Digg has grown to be a behemoth website.

Without gaming their system, which more and more people are trying to do, you have to rely more on luck than simply writing a good piece to get attention.

And don’t forget that you have to write in a category they provide, which effectively eliminates hundreds of topics and market niches.

Digg has added more categories, but they are anything but comprehensive and their readership is, at heart, still made up of geeks and technophiles.

So good luck getting your “Healthy Eating Habits of Highly Successful Women” piece on the front page of Digg.

Which is why so many people are starting niche-specific Digg-like sites which work in the same way but are targeted to a specific niche, like Digg was in the beginning.

For internet marketing related content, people are finding places like PlugIM.com and MarkTD.com are sending them more traffic than Digg ever has. (Including me.)

Mainly because many Digg users have a pretty strong hatred of marketing content and they have nothing more than a general “Business” category for people like us to publish in.

Which is why PlugIM and MarkTD along with a handful of other niche story sites are doing so well so fast.

If you publish in another niche, don’t worry. You will start seeing Digg-like sites popping up in all niches this year, if you haven’t already found one in your niche.

Just as article directories were only for marketing content in the beginning, so too are the new Digg sites.

It is only a matter of time before you can start seeing almost instant targeted traffic from a site like Digg in your niche.

So there are two things to pay attention to here:

1) You should consider building your own Digg for your niche and gaining all the traffic from the hundreds or thousands of writers and bloggers in that niche. There are lots of scripts popping up out there that do what you need.

and

2) You should look for “vertical” Diggs and publish there before you go to Digg itself because you will, most likely, get more traffic from verticals than the almighty Digg even though they are so darn BIG.

Moshe’s Thoughts

Go to some forums relating to your niche and ask if anyone knows about Digg-like sites in your niche. Alternatively, ask the same question at a relevant Google Group.

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What to do after you’ve been dugg

Here is an excellent article on how to get the most out of digg.com. What I like about this article is it’s understanding of integrating digg with your greater marketing and sales goals. Social media sites in general, and digg in particular, should be just one element of your overall marketing strategy. It reminds me a bit of pay-per-click advertising, wherein your landing page needs to compliment and follow up on the content of your ad. So too, with social media sites, you have to have a plan of what you want to do with those social media visitors who come to your site.

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Making it easy for your visitors to social bookmark your site

Here is a quality post from Graywolf’s SEO Blog about how to help your visitors bookmark your content on social media sites.

There are, of course, other ways to make it easy for your visitors to bookmark your site. Here are some of the better ones:

  • If you have a Wordpress blog, use (as we do) Semiologic’s Subscribe me plugin.
  • Consider using Ekstreme.com’s Socializer.
  • Addthis.com has just come out with a couple of buttons to simplify the whole process. Check it out here.
  • Finally, don’t forget the Social Bookmarking Creator at Online Marketing Blog.

Whichever tool you use, it’s a good idea to make it easy for people to add your site to social media sites. Unless, of course, you aren’t really intersted in targeted, free traffic.

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