9 replies to this topic

[ezwoodz]

I'm posting everyday through digg, propeller and etc. and I got less traffic from it, but from stumbleupon they can greatly boost traffic but not that quality. How to get more traffic from it?

[Jill]

Just posting stuff at those places won't bring traffic. You have to post stuff that is worthy of traffic. That's hard work.

[MikeAR]

Does it have to be your material or can you use others and have your link within the body?

[Randy]

Using someone else's work in that manner is both plagiarism and copyright infringement. So would be a huge no-no and could land you in legal hot water.

[nethy]

I'm going to assume that MikeAr is not talking about plagiarism.

Promoting other people's content that promotes your own stuff is one of the powerful tools in the viral/social/buzz/PR marketing toolkit. Say you have a site that keeps some up to date information on real estate sales. This information is useful to certain type of real estate investors.

Some third party puts together a video/blog post/tutorial/ebook about how to locate a properties for a certain type of purchase. She uses your tool in the process. That's great. Now you can help yourself by helping her. It's often easier promoting a third party then promoting yourself. Contact the tutor & offer her something making that resource even more valuable if you can. Go digg, stumble & propel that resource. The more weight you hold on these sites the better.

[internutontheloose]

By using other people's content, do you mean posting articles or blogs from other websites? If you quote them in your website, that's fine. As long as you also add stuff on your own. Don't forget to put your sources as well. Like for example, you can say that you found this article on the web and you can quote that article, with the website where you found it. Then you can comment on that article. That won't be plagiarism as long as you don't own the material as yours.

[torka]

That isn't exactly true. There are limitations on that. You can't simply grab as much of whatever you want and use it on your own website.

Some people have the idea as long as they give credit to the original author or add a few sentences of their own "commentary", they can copy anything they find posted on the Internet. That is absolutely not the case.

Yes, there are rules of "fair use" that allow you to quote a few words of an article written by somebody else. The operative point here is a few words. You cannot reproduce the entire article, or even a substantial portion of an article -- even if you add some "stuff" of your own, even if you attribute the article to its original author -- without permission. If you do, you are violating copyright law.

There's a lot of good information about copyright law in the USA at www.copyright.gov, the website of the U.S. Copyright Office.

--Torka

[nethy]

I wonder how long copyright law will last as is.

[thetraveler]

To get back to the original post, he was asking how he could increase his traffic through social networking.

Ezwoods, like Jill said you have to come up with quality original content first and foremost. Then you should go through the past posts on this forum under "Social Media Marketing" and learn some of the other many points of properly using social marketing. And lastly, give it time. It takes lots of time.

Good luck.

[Mhoram]

Yeah, I thought I'd use Digg this way, but I soon realized it's no free lunch. First I have to find an article on a topic that relates to my blog, that hasn't already been submitted. Then I have to write up and proofread a compelling subject and description for it and go through the submission process. All that takes me 15-30 minutes. I would need to do at least a few of those each day, to develop a reputation as an authority on the topic so lots of people will want to 'friend' me and read my submissions. I'll also have to spend time reading and digging other people's stuff, leaving comments, etc.

After who knows how long, when I've got hundreds of people digging my submissions and pushing them up to the front page, THEN I can submit my blog posts and get the benefit of all that traffic.

Not saying it's worthless, but it does look like a lot of work. I tried it for a while, extrapolated from those results, and determined I'd have to spend at least a couple hours a day for at least a month before it would gain me anything. That's a lot of time I could spend working and devote the proceeds to a PPC campaign. If I wanted to buy traffic with my time, at least that way I'd know what I was getting. I decided to concentrate on writing good content, and put social media submission buttons at the bottom of my posts. Eventually, people who already have already built reputation on the social media sites will use those buttons and save me all that work.