I've been experimenting with SMO for quite some time. I think it has been 2 months or so while my site is 4 months old. Anyway, I participate a lot in Orkut, MyBloglog, Digg etc. And, it really pays off too. I get almost 40% traffic from those sites everyday. More than that, I can connect to a lot of people from around the world.

John what you said is exactly right. If you have a MySpace profile say (through there are probably better places to participate than MySpace) and it has a link to your site you can also work to build up that page and just like you say increase the link juice of that page and indirectly benefit your site.

it's irrelevant now that WikiPedia nollowed all their links, but before they did you could have created a page there. It would be frowned up to link to your own page, but it would probably have been acceptable or unnoticed if you linked to a page that linked to you. Maybe not a MySpace profile, but say I linked to you from my site. You might give my page that links to you a boost to indirectly give yourself a boost.

Adam I think SMO is going to be the thing this year. I agree with you it's not meant to be about manipulating those other sites, but I think making it easy for other people to Digg or Stumble you is going to be important. I know a lot of the traffic doesn't convert, but a lot of that traffic also blogs and if they like what they see they may link to you.

To me the basic idea is no different than what we do here. Social media sites are community sites and the best way to make them work is to participate and get to know the other people there and be a good memeber of those communities. I think people are manipulating it, but if you genuinely participate it's all good.

That's what people are seeing creating linkbait and getting it onto one of the big social media sites. Yes it brings a lot of quick traffic that possibly shuts down the server for a time and doesn't do much else, but in the weeks that follow links start coming into the page and the site.

Here's a post from one of the members at SEOmoz called Anatomy of a Super Digg. It's an experiment the guy did creating something he knew would go over well at Digg and all the traffic and links it brought. It's kind of interesting.

Buck all these sites are free. You basically just need to sign up with each and get an account. StumbleUpon is the only one you'll need to download something for. It's an extension for Firefox and I think it's now available for IE.

Sites like Digg and del.icio.us are free and you can use them from their sites.

To get high traffic which can be convert into sales. Go to site where can you find your potential customers. Like going to forums related to your site. I agree that social bookmarking is effective way to drive traffic but that would depends on the good articles that you create.

Steve: I agree with you that people will spend an inordinate amount of time "SMOing their websites" this year, but I think comparatively few will get it and give up after a while. The more evolved concepts like Digg and Delicious become, the harder it will be to game the systems (which effectively is what SMO is right now).

So, by this time next year, we'll probably be answering the same silly questions but with slightly different answers and much less frequently.

You may very well be right. My thought is there's nothing specifically wrong with SMO, just like there's nothing specifically wrong with SEO. Many of the people who attempt both are doing something wrong, but both still revolve around building something useful, informative, and entertaining and then marketing it.

But yeah, within a few months we'll be talking to people and telling them how not to game Digg and the rest.

I know I am just a little bit hesitant to download software, bad spyware episode a while back, had to wipe my hard drive.

I started using Digg yesterday and I already started getting traffic from a few articles. I tried installing a netscape widget but I am not so good with php. I'll make it work though.

I think my metal in the microwave article might get some traffic from Digg. I haven't added it yet.

Originally Posted by vangogh

Buck all these sites are free. You basically just need to sign up with each and get an account. StumbleUpon is the only one you'll need to download something for. It's an extension for Firefox and I think it's now available for IE.

Sites like Digg and del.icio.us are free and you can use them from their sites.

One of the keys to social media sites is getting to know the community and understanding what they might like. Not every piece of content can get dugg to the point of bringing traffic since the community just won't like it. The same is true for all the social media sites.

But I think if you get to know the community well enough you can start to understand what content is more likely to get dugg or stumbled, etc

No time for posting a big post. But, I wanna say that I'm currently indulged in doing some researches regarding SMO and I've posted a post 3 Things I Learnt About Stumble Upon.

Basically, my research findings about Stumble Upon.

Originally Posted by vangogh

One of the keys to social media sites is getting to know the community and understanding what they might like. Not every piece of content can get dugg to the point of bringing traffic since the community just won't like it. The same is true for all the social media sites.

But I think if you get to know the community well enough you can start to understand what content is more likely to get dugg or stumbled, etc

That is a good point. I recently started working with about 20 social media sites. They are all different with uniques users.

I've been spending time with a few myself and trying to learn which communities I do and don't like. There are quite a few so it's hard to try to know them all right away and realistically most people aren't going to have the time or the desire to participate in more than a few.

I agree that desire is a key factor for social media. I like sharing.

I already have the MySpace thing down. I have a few links on my personal profile with about 840 friends. Mostly women I try to pick up or guys who are into martial arts, web design, or marketing. MySpace is great for getting dates but not awesome for traffic. I get about a 10% click-thru rate from small text links in my profile. If you had about 100,000 friends you would be golden for marketing with MySpace.

Digg, that one is no brainer, submit articles. The problem is you have to know people who you can tell about your articles. There are a lot of articles to search through for so it's good to know a few people you can reffer directly. I had pretty good success with digg in a sense that every article I submitted gets some traffic. In fact every article I have submitted has got hits within the first day of it being submitted. Digg users are highly active.

I really like Ning becuase you can make your own networks and they have proffessional templates. The people seem down to earth and knowledgeable about their fields of interest. There is in fact a social media blog on Ning. I joined that group.

Delicous is pretty easy. Not much to say about that one I've only used it briefly. Traffic though. Same thing for blinklist.

I think we're entering (if not already smack dab in the middle of it) an era where getting traffic to our blogs is only the first baby step, and where visitors come back several times and read our posts before they're willing to even open their suspiscious minds, and barely trust us enough to follow a link to one of our sales/landing pages.

Just having affiliate links plastered on our sidebars, or even text links cleverly embedded in our articles, doesn't cut it (and maybe never did).

Social Networking in my opinion is more about building relationships and introducing readers to discussions and content that provides value... not just a sales pitch. The pitch still has to be there, but it must be much more subtle and carefully crafted.

I speak more from my failures on these points than successes, and still have a lot of learning to do in order to make my blogs successful.

Rick I think you're nailing it when it comes to participating in social communities. I think everyone forgets that forums like this are social communities. Think about who probably gets more traffic from this forum. Someone who posts a few spammy links in irrelevant posts or someone who spends their time helping people and generally getting to know the other people here.

With some of the social media sites there's an added component that your content can quickly get in front of a lot of people. Making the front page of a site like Digg or Slashdot often comes with some down server time. It happens to some pretty big sites too.

But still these social media sites are social communities and participating gives you an edge in understanding what type of content is more likely to make the front page and build relationships with others in the community that can help get your page to the front.

Yeah, I would deffinately agree with both of you.

I think publishing on the internet or social networking/media sharing is about helping people. I really enjoy when people read something I wrote and tell me they like it, it's a good feeling especially if it is something I had personally struggled with.

And it is great to connect with people. It's nice to read what people are about before you actually meet them.

I know what you mean about helping people. Every so often someone leaves a nice thank you in a comment to my blog and it's nice to know I've helped someone I've never met and maybe never will.

I also think if you look at a lot of successful sites they began by giving things away for free. Look at all the social media sites. They started out by providing a free service with no monetization. That helped them build traffic and once they had loyal users they started to figure out how to make money.

Think of Google. It was years before they were making a dime. They just built a better search engine and got everyone to use it and only then did they start with the ads.