Social websites gain more and more popularity online. They generate a lot of buzz.

A few months back there were occasional reviews or coverage of these websites, now the information on the topic is abundant.

New to social websites? Then you should read ‘Introduction to social scene’ – what it is, what social bookmarks and tagging are.

Need to learn more about top social websites? No problem, a lot of information on this. For instance: what is Digg, how it works, its competitors.

If you are an advanced social websites enthusiast then you are on the next level: how to do social media optimization. Here is the list of top social websites to keep in mind if you are planning to apply social websites optimizing (just remember they operate in various niches and in slightly different ways – they are not all the same):

1. Digg

2. Del.icio.us

3. Wikipedia

4. Flickr

5. Reddit

6. Newsvine

7. StumbleUpon

8. Technorati

9. MySpace

10. Yahoo! Answers

11. Ma.gnolia

12. Yahoo! 360

13. LinkedIn

14. Squidoo

15. Wikihow

16. Ning

17. Frappr

18. Furl

19. Wetpaint

20. 43 Things

21. Shoutwire

22. Shadows

23. YourElevatorPitch

24. Jotspot

25. BlinkList

For professional social websites users, for those who find interesting ‘how stuff really works’ – Research list of social network sites.

Summary: I greatly enjoy all above resources. As I have stated a few times before I see these websites as a great help to those who make their first steps with making money online with their websites. It is next to impossible to gain high Google rankings despite your website content – the search engine takes many factors into consideration and the website age is one of the most important. Added to that most niche are occupied and the owners of the established websites do not feel like sharing space with new (late?) competitors.

On the contrary, social websites as a new approach to classify information opens doors (a bit) to all websites if you are good enough to do well online.

Unfortunately, not every type of the website is good for social websites – for instance, e-commerce sites are not likely to become popular and benefit from the social websites, but those with good content have good chances to see the advantages of social network sites.

[eminimall]

[tags]social websites, social search, social network websites, social bookmarking, smo, social media optimization, links bait, social bookmarking, web 2.0, domain names, text-link-ads, links buying, myspace, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogs, content generation, google, make money online, work from home, home based job, duplicate content, earn your living online[/tags]

You think you have a brilliant idea for a website, you generate great (from your point of view) content, but despite this you are short of traffic – search engines are slow to pick up your pages and promote them to the top of their indexes, viral marketing is not that powerful as you expected.

You conclude that your website needs promotion, it needs more traffic. You start your research of the most efficient ways to get that extra traffic by using some marketing techniques like this or this. Your appetite grows – you want more and more visitors as you notice that it leads to an online recognition and a bigger amount of earnings. And here comes a manual or a guide on traffic generation (pdf). It comes from a well known person in affiliate marketing – Allan Gardyne, AssociatePrograms website owner.

The manual is free and in fact lists all efficient tactics for getting traffic to your website or blog. 77 tips plus 2 bonuses. Every tip comes with some comments that make it more understandable – when I was looking through the table of content I could not get some points.

Not every tip is universal. Some tips are great for e-commerce type of website, other work for affiliate marketing websites, etc.

Summary: a well written guide is a collection of useful tips for getting more traffic to your website. It is a free edition – so, grab your copy. Print it out (I prefer using FinePrint tool to make it more comfortable for future reference) and explore the tactics you are not familiar with or have not tried so far.

Most tips cover just the top of iceberg. They show you the direction. Your task is to check if it works for you and try to employ its maximum potential.

[tags]traffic tips, search marketing, networking, online communities, forums, traffic, link bait, social bookmarking, web 2.0, domain names, text-link-ads, links buying, myspace, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogs, content generation, google, make money online, work from home, home based job, duplicate content, links, earn your living online[/tags]

I have already discussed social websites here and here. I consider them as a very important traffic source that allows to thrive those websites that are relatively new and can’t gain due to some reasons good rankings in Google (for the latter, website age and incoming links structure are probably the most important factors for ranging the website).

While reading the below tips from a regular top Digg.com user I thought: OK, one can follow these tips and do it with your own projects.

1. Recognize Big Stories: This rules seem to be obvious, but there is (usually) a recipe for big stories. For example, a story that contains, How-to, Tutorial, Reference or Top10 tag have more chance to get front page story. Also, a story about Digg itself, Google or Apple is always popularized by users

2. Track Pulse of Internet: To submit more and more big stories, you should have known “What’s populer right now”. My major resources for finding big stories are Delicious Populer, and Reddit. I track populer stories constantly at these sites. The populer stories which already bookmarked by dozens of people have big chance to get frontpage story on Digg, too.

3. Interesting Headlines: Some words like Awesome,Great, The only, Finally and Free are usually attracting more diggs than unexciting headlines. Create excitement with your headlines.

4. Humanized Story Description: Diggers usually prefer to quote from the original story. If quotation is exciting there is no problem, but usually there are better options. My advise is some add some human touch to your stories.

5. Trackback Your Submission: This is not applied by most of digg users. But it can be so powerful. If your story is taken from a blog, i recommend you to add a comment to the story. In comment you can say “I like the story and i submit it to the digg. You and readers please add your diggs to get it frontpage the story…”

6. Comment First: Comments added your story are important as the number of diggs your story have. Because diggspy get the latest dugg stories and the latest comment. If your stories have more comment, your stories take more impression and the possibility to get front page increases.

7. Timing: Timing is so important. Diggtrends have a great research about timing. They conclude that the best time submiting story is 9:00 EST because many office goers start digging as soon as they step in office. My experience confirm this. The stories i submit at night (at noon in istanbul) had less diggs than usual.

8. Make Friends: Digg is not %100 rational of course. People are more likely to dugg stories submited by their friends.

9. Digg Your Friends News: Rules of reciprocation is true for digg community, too. If you dugg your friends’ stories they respond positively and they start to dugg your stories, too.

10. Finally, Enjoy: Enjoy being part of world’s best community. Proud yourself to lead internet traffic.
Point 9 states: ‘digg your friends’ news’. And this comes from one of the top users of the community that fights against all those ‘bad guys from digg clubs’ (members agree to digg each other posts). I think this statement says for itself. Digg.com allows its regulars to digg each other, but disallows it if you are not their active community member.

Summary: I think the tips should help you to realize what it takes to succeed with Digg.com, but I do not think that it is that easy as described. You should definitely experiment: make a good combination of your website content and techniques described in this post, try it several times and do not expect to succeed with your every attempt.

Experiment with a number of social websites simultaneously. They are all different. Good luck!

[tags]social websites, digg, search marketing, networking, online communities, forums, web forums, traffic, link bait, social bookmarking, web 2.0, domain names, text-link-ads, links buying, myspace, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogs, content generation, google, make money online, work from home, home based job, duplicate content, links, earn your living online[/tags]