Discover Niche Social Networking
With the huge rise of social networking and social media, most bloggers are finding a wave of traffic coming from social bookmarking sites. But, are you getting all the traffic you could be getting?
Almost every social networking site caters to all blogging niches. However, some of those sites cater more to specific niches. If you’re blogging about pets and you’re targeting a social networking site that loves blogs about blogging, you’re missing the boat for your wave of traffic.
Researching, discovering, and understanding the vast majority of social networking sites takes a lot of time, patience, and work to ensure that you’re reaching your target audience.
The Problem
Surely you have read the multiple posts out there by bloggers talking about social networking traffic not being sticky. This means visitors come, read or scan the post, and go. You don’t see an increase in subscribers, comments, or any residual traffic.
If you’re thinking that it’s because your post wasn’t as good as you thought it was you could be wrong. It may just mean your wave of traffic came from a site that doesn’t really cater to your niche of blogging.
The Solution
For starters, you shouldn’t attempt to target every social networking site out there. You may end up over working yourself for little reward. By spending hours upon hours networking at all these sites you’ll be spreading yourself too thin and creating more work when chances are, time is already limited.
To start your quest for finding the best social networking sites for your niche, you should go back to your traffic reports. Hit up your Google analytics account, Sitemeter, or whatever tracking system you use.
Have you gotten social networking traffic? Great! Where did it come from and in comparison, what networking site brought you the most traffic so far?
By knowing what site has worked for you already, you can start your search there to discover if this site is right for your blogging niche and bringing you sticky traffic.
If you haven’t gotten social networking traffic as of yet, that’s OK. We can still find the sites that cater to your niche to start bringing in the loads of sticky traffic you deserve.
Finding the Niche
So, how exactly do you figure out which sites cater to which niche?
Top Users
Have a look at what the top users of the site are doing. Know the pages that they like, often bookmark, and often review with comments.
The top users of any social networking sites tend to dictate what is displayed at the highest levels of any social networking site. Even though there is a vast majority of content within the site, by going through the top user’s submitted information, you’ll get an idea of the niche that’ll best be pushed forward on the site.
Understanding the niche that the top users submit will also help you to encourage some bookmarking love from those users. If they notice your content is rising within the site, visit your post and bookmark it, you’re going to get 10 times further than you would have before!
Reviews & Comments
What posts are people talking about? Good, bad, or indifferent, you want to see what posts generate a lot of reader response within the site.
Remember the old saying, any publicity is good publicity? That’s true for social networking as well. Everyone wants to see how the blogger messed up and thus negative comments will even help determine what is popular within a site.
Tag Clouds
Most (not all) networking sites have tag clouds. Scan them, remember the more popular a tag, the larger the font will be. It isn’t hard to take a quick scan of these tag clouds to see what is most talked about on the site.
If your blog matches what’s popular in these tag clouds, chances are you’re getting closer to finding a networking site that works for your niche.
Google Blog Search
As a blogger, Google should be one of your best friends. Using their blog search is even more helpful when discovering the niche of each social networking site.
If you find yourself interested in a particular site, before jumping through all the hoops to test run the site, Google blog posts on that particular networking site. Find out what is and isn’t working from other people’s experience.
Let the work and research of others be your guide to getting the most out of niche social networking.
Testing the Waters
To best understand if any social networking site is going to work for you, you’ve got to test the waters. Everything else before this point is just research in helping you discover and understand the site. Additionally, that research will help you when you get to the point of testing the waters.
While testing the waters of the site, you want to use the site to full capacity. Don’t neglect any aspect of using the site by allowing yourself to think that this could or could not be wasted time. It’ll never be wasted time and you won’t have a full understanding of the site if your test run isn’t complete.
Complete Your Profile
Fill out everything you can in your profile. Don’t overlook the little details thinking they’re unimportant like what kind of music you like, your favorite movies, and your favorite subjects. While some of this may seem irrelevant to you or your blog, you may be discovered by someone who has the same interests and loves your blog…
Submit Content
When you’re submitting posts from another site, make sure you submit to the site you’re testing the waters on. You want to be an active user or you won’t get noticed and your test run will become fruit less.
Evaluate
The last step to your niche social networking endeavor is to evaluate the results that you received over a specific period of time. My suggestion would be to test the waters of the site for no less than one month. This will allow you to compare a full month data to another full month of data helping you best determine if you received sticky traffic to your blog.
Conclusion
Repeating this process for several networking sites should help you come up with three to five sites that are really going to help your blog grow by leaps and bounds. And once you understand the traffic you’ll receive from each site, you’ll also understand how much time you need to spend working on that site to ensure you receive maximum exposure.
Remember, not all of the sites are going to be right for your blog. Not everyone will love everything about your blog, and no two sites seem to be the same. Full evaluation and use will help you target the right places at the right times with minimal effort.
April 24th, 2008 at 7:31 am
Awesome post! You did a very thorough job of making sure we understood your subject matter very well. I appreciate the tips and will be incorporating some of the ideas presented here. Thanks!
April 24th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Finding a niche is one of the most important steps of being successful online. actually, IMO, it’s THE most important.
April 24th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Mike » Thank you. I hope that my guide proves to be useful for you when promoting yourself in social media.
Becky » I completely agree which is why I wrote this guide. It took me a lot of trial and error to find the sites that work the best for me. Since then, there’s no turning back. I waste less time trying to promote myself and networking is now more effective than ever.
April 24th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
I have mixed feelings on spending lots of time on social bookmarking… Sometimes I think I waste to much time with stuff like this. The thing is – social bookmark visitors tend not to be “clickers” or “buyers.” Sure you may get some clicks and buys but a much much lower % than from search traffic. So then the question becomes… are you getting enough SEO benefit from it to make it matter? Maybe… Maybe in the long term you are. One thing that can happen is other sites picking up your link because they saw it on a social bookmarking site.
April 24th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Jonny » You bring up an incredibly interesting and valid point. Social media visitors aren’t typically buyers or clickers. Thus reducing your chances of making money from the traffic. But the last point you brought up is exactly why I continue to network…
Aside from traffic benefits, I get a lot of back links thanks to my best posts being submitted to social networking websites. Additionally, I have found a lot of blogs where I become a regular visitor and likewise, I have received a lot of repeat visitors because of my posts being submitted. In the long run those people could be clickers and buyers.
With social media, it’s important to remember that it’s done for exposure, building traffic and building your brand rather than building clicks. Personally, even if your blog is just for making money, you need to appeal to real people to actually make money ethically. Choice is yours to use it or not but in the long run, I believe it to be more beneficial than not.
April 25th, 2008 at 10:00 am
There’s also no harm in simply asking a social site it they can include a particular niche topic.
April 25th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Dennis » I’m not sure why there would be a need to do that. It’s the users of the site that dictate which niche will do well on that site based on their own interests. In general, as I mentioned, most social networking sites cater to most niche topics. On the flip side, you couldn’t go to Dogster or Catster (both niche networking sites) and ask them to include something about birds.
May 17th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Hi Katy! New to your blog via Twitter of all places and BlogCatalog. You make excellent points, and will be the subject of my post today. I love getting inspiration from reading other people’s thoughts :)
May 17th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
[...] lead me to today’s writeup. Discover Niche Social Networking by Katy [...]
May 18th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Diane » Thanks for stopping by, your compliment, and link back to this post. And I agree with you, I also get a lot of inspiration by reading other blogs and usually, it’s the best kind of inspiration I get for writing. :D
May 22nd, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Great post! I spend way to much time with social sites and have only found one to be effective.
May 24th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Very informative post.
May 25th, 2008 at 4:43 am
I haven’t really really explored fully even one of them. I added lots of contacts at MyBlogLog, but have little idea whether it works well or not. Thanks for the the article.
May 25th, 2008 at 11:53 am
Kim » Thank you! Care to share which sites have been effective for you?
Isles Tech » Thank you!
Aroengbinang » It may be worth your while to dig into a few sites at a time to see which work well for your niche of blogging. Every site has the potential to bring on a slew of visitors when they’re used right. Good luck!
May 29th, 2008 at 4:34 am
Great article, I have picked up a few tips, that are really useful!
May 30th, 2008 at 9:22 am
The best way to network imo is commenting! It is easy, simple, fast and real. Nothing can top that!
May 30th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
I think that’s the most ironic comment I’ve ever seen :-)
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:07 am
[...] What sites can I target for niche social networking? [...]
June 19th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
[...] adjust. Some of which you may have to do just based on what is the latest priority or the newest social networking site that you’ve got to spend time checking [...]
July 6th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Great article Katy, in fact I found it because one my friends of my Searchles Social Marketing group added your post. Ironic and yet at the same time how it is supposed to work. I do invite you to join us Katy @
http://www.searchles.com/groups/show/Social+Marketing
This is my homegroup where I add everything that I do not have time to blog about but I want to bring to the attention of my friends and also my bookmarking hub.
I do want to make a few points that most social bookmarking bloggers do not get right away. Hard to do, when you covered it so well.
Do not just submit your own content to your social bookmarking profiles. There is nothing worse you can do to your social standings and your Google rankings that that.
Next, do not use social bookmarking submission software and submit a blog post of yours to every site as fast as you can as soon as you publish a blog post. Social bookmark sites are NOT search engines, they are just blogs built by their users.
The best thing you can do is PARTICIPATE, submit interesting content that is not just yours. Leave comments that add to the quality of other users submissions and vote on them as you would want others to vote on yours.
Also do not expect articles on SEO, email marketing and anything critical of Digg, to do well there. There is a very malicious clique inside Digg, just google “digg mafia”…
Share the road.
July 7th, 2008 at 2:44 am
Thanks for the post, you give some good advice that I will try and use for my own blog I have started up looking into the issues of social networks for marketing.
January 10th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
The most important steps of being successful online is finding a niche (IMO)
June 10th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Facebook and MySpace are starting to get recognized as useful tools in networking for the online realtor. However, as social networking sites have become one of the front runners in connecting people on the Internet, people are starting to get interested in "niche" social networking: sites that connect people interested in specific subjects.
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July 22nd, 2009 at 10:26 am
I agree with you, I also get a lot of inspiration by reading other blogs and usually, it's the best kind of inspiration I get for writing.it is very interesting blog also.
July 15th, 2010 at 6:43 am
Social Networks is best Option for the drive traffic on you web site .if website are related to theme then it's so good and most useful.nice post