How To Use Social Network Sites For Link Building!
admin on April 10th, 2009
Social media is the next big thing to target after Search Engines for traffic and backlinks. Social networking has become a a very effective method of promotion and you can run very effective link building campaign there and can build some high quality back links for your website or blog.
Now before going to the exact trick some stiff about social networking sites…
Social Networking sites are basically the community sites that that you can join and then search for people within the community with similar interests as you. Majority of these people has there own websites or blog running. Some social networking sites are very small and focused, so by definition the people who join such sites are already members of a tightly focused interest group. Such a group might be brought together by their political or religious beliefs, or it could be something such as their hobbies (they love Ford Mustangs or makingcheesecake) sports or basically anything else that mankind has found it possible to be interested in! So, in such a tightly focused group, almost all members without exception will be interested in the one common thing. However, there are many other community sites where the only real common interest that most of the members could possibly ever have with one another is that they are all, in fact, members of the same site!
This is simply a function of the size and therefore the diversity of the sites in question, with websites like MySpace and FaceBook having literally millions of members all over the globe. (107 and 73 million members respectively) Such sites generally have a totally open membership, meaning that anyone can become a member, no matter what their hobbies, beliefs, or views are. Thus, there is no general community wide commonality of beliefs or interests either. It is therefore only natural that once you are a member, inside this online community, you can begin to create your own network of friends, those that do
have similar interest and/or beliefs to those of your own. And this is where it gets interesting for you as an Internet marketer or online business person.
Firstly, if we use MySpace as our example, then you are looking at one of the ten biggest websites in the world. Whatever your interests, given so many millions of members, then there will inevitably be others that have similar interests, people that you could potentially ‘bond’ with immediately. For example, a MySpace search using the phrase ‘traffic generation’ returned 5,650 results. So that is over five and a half thousand people who might be interested in your traffic blog site from a direct ‘match’ of my search term to the specific subject topic of my blog site. However, run a search for a more generic (and broader) term like Internet marketing, and you get 45,400 results. Now, it is a very reasonable assumption that anyone who is interested in Internet marketing is trying to sell something on the net, and that they therefore need traffic to their website. So, of course, these people would be legitimate ‘target prospects’ for what I am trying to promote also. Take it one stage further and use single word search ‘marketing’ and it returns 549,000 results. Again, it is reasonable to assume that all of these people are at least interested in bringing their products or services to the marketplace, so, once again, traffic generation could be of immense interest to them. So, all I need to do is to tell them about the great resource that I have available, and that will be the ‘deal done’ right? Err, no, not really, unless the ‘deal’ that you are talking about is having your MySpace ‘space’ and account closed down immediately! The thing is that the folks who run MySpace really do not want their ‘community site’ turning into a commercial free-for-all, a sort of online bazaar, and they will go to any lengths to protect their site.
So, you cannot just open your account one day and start bombarding people with your commercial messages or asking them for backlinks. In the same way that, when you join any quality forum site, you have to establish yourself as a valid contributing member before you can start promoting your products or even adding a signature file with a redirect to your website you must establish yourself on community websites too. So, the first thing that you must do is to take some time and make an effort to create a proper profile or more specifically an active presence, something that shows that there is a real person behind the newly opened account. Then, you must start looking for ‘friends’ in the MySpace community, but you must do so gradually, as you are limited to so many friend invitations a day and, even if you weren’t, inviting a thousand new friends a day hardly looks natural or normal, does it?
So, start to become a real member of the community before you start promoting, is the bottom line. Sure, by all means begin to invite people to be your friends, but do try to spend a little time getting to know them and building up a relationship before trying to interest them in your business. Now, the great thing about a blog site is that it is pretty natural that, after you have been someone’s ‘friend’ for a while, that you might invite them to take a look at your blog or do some link exchange or even give your site a backlink from there site for just being friends.
That is far less threatening and direct than asking them to look at a ‘full-on’ sales page, for example. Nevertheless, it doesn’t matter what community site you are a member of, the secret is go gently and slowly, build relationships and try to nurture something at least vaguely like a ‘real’ friendship before trying to get people to visit your business themed blog site. And, just in case MySpace and FaceBook, with a combined membership of 200 million members are not enough to keep you busy, here and here are lists of many more such sites!
