Have a look at what steps you’ve taken and question whether they are helping or hindering you. Take a look at these items that might be damaging your chances at success or preventing you from achieving your social media goals…

1. You’re Being Too Self Centered

Here is the secret about people. Everyone is pretty worried about themselves and if you want to reach someone you need to be worried about them too. People are only interested in you insofar as they are concerned about how you can help them. Think in terms of how you can provide value to these people. The easiest way to do this is to just worry about how you can help someone else, not talking about yourself and what you are going to get out of it.

2. You Aren’t Visible

You can write what you know and what you love all day. This might give people an idea of who you are and what you think but it probably leaves a lot to the imagination as well. If you take some time to get out and interact with people, via responding to comments, making comments on other blogs and through social media sites, you will make yourself much more visible to others.

Doing this gives you credibility too, when people see you around and providing interesting commentary they will be more likely to check you out. Try to stay within your niche as well, because that’s where your target audience is going to be.

3. You Are Too Serious

There is such a thing as thinking about something too much. If you are going around reading articles about how to be the best you can be, and that’s a noble goal, make sure to take a step back and evaluate what you’ve been told. Maybe certain things aren’t for you, or you could come up with something new that really works.

Test things out and make mistakes if you have to. Just because you haven’t heard it from a social media guru doesn’t mean it can never work. Leave some room for being spontaneous in with all your planning.

4. You Are An Island

It might sound counterintuitive, but promoting other peoples posts can be beneficial for you. If someone in your niche has made a great post, share it. If there is a cool new product that is related to yours, let your followers know.

People will appreciate the value that you bring and you will grow your reputation. Maybe next time when you come up with something great people will be more receptive, knowing that you are someone who shares good content, regardless of the source.

5. You Are On The Wrong Network

Not being on the right networks can prove to be a real problem, but with a bit of research you can find the right spot for your audience. You (hopefully) know who your target market is, so all you need to do is identify where they congregate on the internet.

For example, if you are in the graphic design industry a place like deviantArt would be an amazing place for you to begin networking. On the other hand if you are in the vacuum cleaner business, deviantArt would not be for you. Get out of networks where your target audience isn’t and concentrate your time where you can reach more people.

6. No One Is Sharing Your Content

Its a good idea to check that you’ve provided easy ways for people to share your content. Tools like TweetButton or StumbleUpon buttons are simple to add and make it so much easier for people to share your stuff with others. The easier you make it to share, the more likely people are to do it. It doesn’t hurt to have a button or two built in as a reminder, as long as it isn’t gaudy.

7. Your Site Isn’t Captivating

Maybe you’ve done a good job with your social media outreach. People followed you and see your messages regularly, but traffic has remained pretty constant and hasn’t gone up, or sales are still holding at the same rates. You might need to take a look at your whole operation, website included.

Take a look and consider things that could use improvement. Run some tests with friends/family/person you met off the street five minutes ago. Ask them to have a look at your site and offer feedback for improvements, set up a poll, get the information and make some positive changes. For some more help check out some tips from Copyblogger.

8. You’re a Seller

Don’t sell anything to anyone. If someone thinks they are being pitched to they will turn off and put up guards so you have no chance of getting in. Instead just provide useful services that people WANT and then let them decide on their own what they need.

If you have the patience to let people come to you and you are there providing value to them in some form, be it great content or useful products and services; not only will they be more receptive, but they’ll remember you as the person who helped them out instead of the pushy salesperson!

9. You’re Getting Discouraged and Want to Give Up

Like many great undertakings, social media promotion doesn’t yield results overnight. Have faith in your product and keep getting the word out. If you are persistant you will be discovered by people and if they like what they see they’ll bring other people in on it. Don’t let a slow start get you down, keep your social presence high and wait for good things to come your way.

10. You’re not Having Fun

Take a moment to think right now. Social media, hmm, so I’m spending time on sites like Facebook for work. That’s something most people would have to reserve for leisure time! Now consider that as well. If many people are using social media for fun how can you reach them. You need something interesting and fun to grab their interest away from looking at pictures of puppies or hearing about what someone did on the weekend, even if its for a few minutes.

Write something out of the ordinary that’s just for fun, see how it plays out. Find other interesting people in your niche and follow them, interact with the community and have some fun! If you’re enjoying what you’re doing that’s going to show and people are going to gravitate towards you all the more.

What is your top reason for getting down on yourself about social media? Did you ever want to quit? Did you make a change and see great results? Write a comment and let us know!

About The Author:

George McConnell is the head writer for Traffikd.com and totally likes social media! He is a full time internet entrepreneur and currently writing “That Social Media Book”, focusing on the history and effects of social media on internet and real world culture since its inception.

Social media campaigns are becoming more integrated into the overall online marketing mix. And as with anything on the Web, you need to think global to succeed in the long term.

To succeed with social media marketing for different cultures, you need to familiarise yourself with what’s happening in social media around the world.

You must research the emerging trends and identify where the social media hotspots are. You also need to consider that different social networks are popular in different parts of the world. You should carefully research which networks are popular in the regions you aim to target

With that in mind, here is a summary of the most popular social networks in various countries around the world.

France
Skyrock.com is a popular social network in France. It’s second to Facebook but it has over eleven million users locally. Skyrock began as a blogging network and many prominent French political institutions have chosen Skyrock as their preferred blogging platform.

Germany
German people have been relatively slow to adopt social media. In 2009, an article on ReadWriteWeb suggested that Germany was five years behind the USA in terms of social media adoption.

The VZnet group of social networks is popular in Germany with over seventeen million users across its studiVZ, meinVZ and schülerVZ websites. Two of the networks, studiVZ and schülerVZ, are aimed at students and schoolchildren, while meinVZ is for non-students.

Finland
With over half a million users, IRC-Galleria is Finland’s largest social network. It started life as a photo gallery for Finnish users of IRC (Internet Relay Chat), but now less than a fifth of its members are IRC users. Most visitors to the site are aged 13-22 with the average user being twenty years old.

China
Renren.com and Qzone.com are the biggest networks in China. Renren is a Facebook clone. It is popular with students and claims to have over 120 million users. Qzone claims to have over 380 million users, but many of these are likely to be dormant accounts opened via QQ network, which is China’s largest instant messenger service and owned by the same company.

Japan
Mixi.jp and Twitter.jp dominate the Japanese social media landscape. Mixi is easily the largest with over 80% share of the market, which is about 30 million users.

Twitter’s official Japanese site has grown to around five million active users since it was launched in 2008.

Twitter.jp employs a revenue model where users can charge their followers to view their tweets, either on a monthly basis or for each single tweet. In Japan, users are willing to pay for content, especially on the mobile web. Many online marketers are excited by the fact that writing in Japanese and Chinese characters enables Twitter users to squeeze a lot more content into a single tweet than if it were written in English.

India
In mid-2010, Facebook overtook Orkut in India in terms of monthly unique visitors. Facebook now has 20.87 million visitors, compared to Orkut’s 19.87 (according to July 2010 Comscore data).

Most English-speaking online marketers will already have experience of creating campaigns on Facebook and Orkut, which makes India an attractive market to target via social media. BharatStudent is another popular network in India with 4.32 million monthly unique visitors. As its name suggests, this network has a young demographic and is popular with students.

Brazil
In Brazil, Orkut is by far the largest social network. In fact, over half of Orkut’s worldwide traffic comes from Brazil, which equates to around twenty million monthly visits.

Despite the size of audience, it represents a fairly narrow demographic with half of Orkut users being under 25 and 80% male. Sonico.com is a popular network targeted at Latin American users and has around eight million members in Brazil. MySpace has been the third biggest social network in Brazil for some time, but it now seems likely that Facebook will take the number three position.

Russia
Russians are avid users of social media. Twitter and Facebook are both popular, but the largest Russian social network is Vkontakte.ru. It has over seventy million registered users and at least fourteen million visitors per day. Many Russians tend to use English for personal posts on social networks, and revert to Russian for business and work-related networking.

About the author
Christian Arno is founder of Lingo24, one of the UK’s fastest growing translation agencies. With 150 full-time employees, and a network of over 4,000 translators, Lingo24 secured a turnover of $8m in 2010.

Over a billion and a half people use the Internet, and this has created a plethora of opportunities for talented Internet marketers. Specialized knowledge in Internet marketing and social media is vital for many businesses. Yes, there are successful, self-taught Internet marketers, but many folks aspiring to make a name for themselves in the field are looking to education programs to enhance their skills. Internet marketing and social media degree programs are available both on-campus and online.

Internet Marketing Bachelor’s Degree

Internet marketing programs typically provide training in determining target audiences, evaluating Internet consumer behavior, and developing, implementing, and tracking e-marketing campaigns. They will usually cover important aspects of traditional marketing as well.

Some of the topics covered in these programs are as follows:

• Architecture of successful web sites
• Online survey tools
• Building and optimizing websites
• Web metrics
• Social media
• Audio and video for the Web
• Internet law and intellectual property
• Search engine optimization
• Company branding

University of San Francisco

The University of San Francisco (USF) provides an online Master’s Certificate in Internet marketing. This program covers strategies to increase the Web presence of businesses and to increase traffic to websites; more specifically, important topics include generating website revenue, increasing web traffic with search engine optimization, promoting businesses with online videos, testing and tracking the effectiveness of marketing strategies, and social media. The certificate program is suitable for students new to Internet marketing as well as for marketing professionals. (It should be noted that the author has no connection with the university.)

Social media

Should aspiring Internet marketers take social media courses? Let’s take a look at a statement by Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School: “Very often our perception of social media, and what we can and can’t do using social media, is very much tinted by what we think our favorite person is doing – and our favorite person is usually ourselves. So it is about getting students to understand that the empirical skills are absolutely necessary, because whatever they think is intuitively correct, is probably about themselves, but nobody else.”

Social Media Bachelor’s Degree Programs

Social media education programs provide an understanding about fast-growing, evolving social media platforms from a marketing and public relations perspective. Social media bachelor’s degree programs cover the various aspects of social media, including building marketing strategies and tracking their effectiveness.

Social media bachelor’s degree programs typically utilize case studies of online social networking and content sharing websites such as YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Friendster. In some programs, students participate in a team project to develop and implement social media marketing strategies for real world clients.

Those seeking a degree program in Internet marketing or social media should find out if the school has been accredited by an agency which has been approved by the United States Department of Education or the Council for Higher Education.

It’s up to you to decide if a degree program in either of these fields is right for you. Again, many internet marketers are very successful without much formal training. However, most people are likely to benefit by learning from experts in the field. Additionally, the boost your resume will get by acquiring a college level degree or certificate will give you a leg up on your competition.

Brian Jenkins writes about college degree programs in marketing, among other topics, for BrainTrack.com. Brian has been a member of BrainTrack’s writing team since 2008.

Of course, social media will always benefit a small percentage of marketers and users the most, as the nature of social media is to provide exposure only to the best or most popular content. However, your chances of success can be greatly improved if you understand the community of users that you are marketing to and if you create the right content.

If you are not getting results with social media, check this list to see of any of these issues apply to you.

1. You’re a Marketer, Not a User

Yes, marketers can certainly have success with social media, but the key is to be an active user who contributes to the community of the site. Be a user first and a marketer second. If other users feel that you are only there to market, they will not be receptive to your submissions, votes, or suggestions.

2. You’re Only Submitting/Voting for Your Own Content

I had a client a while back who told me that she was getting no results with social media despite working very hard at it. She sent me links to her profiles at a few sites and as soon as I checked them out I could see that they only links she had ever voted for were her own submissions. If you’re doing this you are not able to be a true member of the community and it’s very obvious that you are only there to promote your own content.

Make a habit of going to your targeted social media sites every day just to be active and vote on quality submissions from other users. It’s a good idea to also submit some content that’s not from your own site, and at some social media sites it’s frowned upon to submit your own content. In these cases you can either wait for someone to submit it or ask a friend to do so if you don’t think it will be submitted naturally by a random reader.

3. You’re Not Creating Content Specifically for Social Media Audiences

Not all types of content will do well with social media, even if it is high quality. Social media users like to be entertained and each social media site will have its own unique audience. Take some time to observe what the users of a particular social media site tend to appreciate. Pay attention to the types of content that draw a lot of votes and comments and this should help you to know what type of content you need to create.

Effective social media marketing involves creating content that will pique the interest of social media users. Once you are familiar with the community at your targeted social media sites, take some time to brainstorm article ideas that may appeal to them.

4. You’re Not Targeting Specific Social Media Sites

One common problem is trying to use too many different social media sites. Because being an active part of the community requires that you visit the site frequently to submit and vote on content, it’s very difficult to be effective with more than a few different social media sites. Evaluate the various sites and try to identify a few that would be a good fit for your content and your audience. Think about your blog’s readers, what social media sites do they use? It’s better to be active and effective with 2 or 3 social media sites than to occasionally use 25 with no real results. Just because you are not active at a particular social media site doesn’t mean that you can’t get traffic from it. Others may submit your content without your prompting, or you could ask friends to submit if for you if you know that they use that site.

5. Your Visitors Are Not Social Media Users

Many sites and blogs, especially those with large audiences, benefit from having readers who are social media users. This makes it more likely that your content will be submitted without you initiating it, and it will make it easier to get votes. If your blog has a low number of social media users you may want to consider introducing them to specific social media sites in your posts. For example, if your blog covers finance related topics, you could write a post about Tip’d, which is a financial social media site. If the site is useful to your readers, they may start to use it, and they may vote for your posts. Also, in addition to introducing them to specific sites, you could mention that if they like your content they could help to support you by voting at their favorite social media site or by voting at a particular site.

6. You’re Posting Commercial Content

Social media users do not like to feel like they are being marketed too, and many social media sites even prohibit commercial content. If you are trying to promote your company with social media you will need to do it passively in order to have any success. The best approach is to use social media to build links and exposure to your site, and leave the marketing to other times and situations. If people find content that they like and appreciate at their site and they become a regular visitor, they will be more receptive when you do start to market to them.

7. You’re Only Focusing On Digg

Another common mistake is only focusing on the major social media sites, especially Digg. While the major sites are the ones that will send the most traffic, they also have far more users who are competing with you. If you focus on smaller sites or niche social media sites you may be able to get a “popular” submission with only a few votes. This traffic is much easier to come by and at least you will have something to show for your efforts. A very small percentage of Digg users will ever get results with their submissions.

My advice is to pick one or two major social media sites to use as well as one or two smaller sites. This way you can still go after the more significant traffic of Digg, Reddit, or StumbleUpon, but you will also not put all your eggs in one basket and you’ll be very likely to get some results with the smaller sites.

8. You Haven’t Built a Network

The most successful social media marketers are very well connected. Having a network of friends and fellow social media users allows you to help each other with votes and submissions when needed. Many social media marketers share voting requests with their friends via email or IM, and sometimes even via Twitter. If you haven’t yet built a network, focus on getting to know some fellow social media users, particularly those who are bloggers or marketers. These people will likely be interested in building a connection with you because of the potential for mutual benefit.

9. You’re Asking for Too Many Votes

Although it is good to be well connected, you don’t want to be annoying to your friends and contacts by asking for votes all of the time. People who do this are likely to alienate others and not get the votes that they are requesting. Save your requests for situations when they can make a real difference and don’t be requesting votes for everything you submit.

10. You’re Not Using Voting Buttons

I’m sure you’ve seen voting buttons and widgets on blogs. When used appropriately they can be very effective. Ideally, you should not put too many buttons on your blog or it will look cluttered and will be more of a distraction than anything. Pick one or two sites that you want to target and try using voting buttons on your site. If you have some established traffic you may be able to rack up a lot more votes this way. I have had good success with the Tweetmeme button on my blogs for getting more tweets and visitors.

What’s Your Experience?

What have you learned through your own social media marketing that you can share with readers?

For related content please see:

• 10 Ways to Improve Your Results with Social Media TODAY
• Social Media Marketing FAQ
• 9 Reasons to Build a Strong Social Media Profile

Other types of traffic like search engine visitors, direct visitors, and those who come via links from other sites are more significant in the long-term, but getting to that point can take considerable effort and time. In fact, most bloggers who set out to build a profitable blog wind up getting discouraged and quit before they ever see those long-term benefits.

On the other hand, social media allows anyone to get some exposure for their blog almost immediately. Of course there is work involved and you will need the right content, but social media marketing provides opportunities for bloggers to make an impact right now.

This immediate impact is what most bloggers who use social media are after, but the real strength of social media marketing is that it can help you to be more successful with those other important long-term sources of traffic. Popular posts with social media tend to attract links from various blogs and websites, and those links lead to click-through traffic and better search engine rankings in the future.

Keys to Balanced Blog Growth

Although there is a lot to like about social media, the visitors you receive from these sites typically will be less likely to subscribe to your blog, to visit multiple pages, to click on ads, to buy any products, or just about anything else you want them to do. This doesn’t mean that social media traffic is useless, it’s always good to get more exposure and to help people to become more familiar with your blog, especially if it’s new. However, what it does mean is that you need to have a balanced approach that works to build traffic from a variety of sources. Get what you can out of social media, but don’t attempt to build a website or blog without focusing on other types of traffic as well. Here are some keys:

1. Search Engine Friendly Blog Theme

Search engine visitors are highly important for the long-term health of any blog. There’s not a whole lot of on-site factors that are going to make-or-break your blog’s ability to attract search engine visitors. Page titles are obviously important, but for the most part you should focus on having a site that is search engine friendly, and spend your time on producing the best content that you can rather than spending hours worry about meta tags or other details that aren’t significant.

What is a search-friendly website? Basically it involves building a site that makes it easy for search engines rather than making it difficult or trying to trick them. If your blog has a search-friendly theme, attracts a decent number of inbound links, page titles that include keywords, and content that people will search for, you will be in good shape for generating search engine traffic. To get a detailed look at the subject, see Derek Edmond’s article How to Create Search Engine Friendly Websites. The article is over 2 years old, but it has a lot of valuable information.

2. Consistent Efforts for Link Building

Inbound links from other websites are critical for long-term blog growth because of their impact on search engine rankings. There are a number of different things you can do to build links, but the effort should be consistent in order for the growth to continue. Once your blog gets to a certain point, most of you link building efforts can be spent on creating great content. A blog that has an established audience doesn’t really need that much promotion to attract links if the content is high quality, but in the beginning you need to get your content in front of people to attract links. Some effective link building techniques include social media marketing, writing guest posts for other blogs, blogroll link exchanges, and article marketing.

3. Networking

One of the most consistent characteristics of successful bloggers is that they are almost always very well-connected. Take the time to get to know other bloggers in your niche and take a genuine interest in them and their work. People tend to link to people that they know and like. Plus, you may be surprised at some of the ideas and opportunities that arise from having a strong network of other bloggers.

4. Efforts to Build Subscribers

The definition of a successful blog is going to be different to various people. Some would define success in terms of money that is generated from the blog, others by the amount of exposure that the blogger receives, the number of visitors, or maybe by the number of subscribers. Regardless of how you measure your own success, getting people to be interested in your content and keeping them coming back for more is critical. Gaining subscribers is a great way to improve your long-term chances of success.

5. Consistent Emphasis on Content

This point isn’t mentioned last because it is less important than the others, but more so because it is kind of obvious but still needs to be said. A blog is really all about the content, and in order to have a balanced approach to building the blog you will need to consistently put effort into creating the best content that you can. A blog with great, unique content will open up a lot of possibilities and your marketing efforts will be more effective.

Using Social Media as Part of the Balanced Plan

So now that we have seen the keys to balanced growth, let’s look at some specifics for ways that social media fits into that plan.

1. Consider Social Media, But Don’t Let It Control Your Decisions

One of the keys to getting traffic with social media is creating content that is well-suited for the social media audience. While this is a big part of building a blog with the help of social media, not all of your content should be created in this way, and it should not completely dictate what is published on the blog. In many cases your regular readers will appreciate posts that may not appeal to social media users. If you get too caught up in targeting social media, you may miss some good opportunities to build your blog in other ways. Using social media as part of a balanced plan requires that you don’t ignore other types of content and marketing opportunities in order to go after more social media traffic.

2. Don’t Rely On Social Media Traffic

Social media is often unpredictable. Sure, you can learn more about it and drastically increase your chances of having success, but there will always be a lot of peaks and valleys with social media traffic. Try to build diverse traffic sources and avoid relying too much on getting traffic from social media sites.

3. Don’t Focus Strictly On The Major Social Media Sites

One of the most common mistakes in social media marketing for bloggers is putting all of their attention into sites like Digg and Reddit. Yes, they do have potential to send much more traffic than smaller social media sites, but the chances for success are very slim. Most bloggers would be better off to spend a little bit of time on the major social media sites, and spread out some of the effort to include smaller social media sites and niche social media sites. Niche sites are great because the traffic will be targeted more effectively, and because it’s much easier to have success.

4. Publish Some Content Specifically For Social Media Audiences

I mentioned that it’s not a good practice to ignore your blog’s subscribers by publishing only content for social media audiences, but it is a good idea to publish some posts that are catered to social media. Take the time to browse through the popular items at social media sites that you use and see what they have in common. What types of posts do the users respond to? With that knowledge you can apply it by creating your own content that fits.

For new bloggers one of the biggest challenges, even with quality content, is getting the first few votes. If you don’t have a strong social media profile that will help you to get attention, you may have great content that you submit to social media and it does nothing. Major blogs can put voting buttons on their posts and get a boost that way, but newer blogs don’t have the amount of visitors that will result in many votes. One thing you can do to help get over the hump is to find some other bloggers who are also attempting to grow their blog and form a group to share votes. That way when you have content that you want to get some attention, you can email a few friends and get some easy votes to get it started. And you can help them with votes as well. Of course, it’s good practice to only vote for quality content, so be careful to choose the right partners.

5. Consider Using Voting Buttons On Your Posts

Voting buttons can be effective when they are used properly. Having tons of buttons on your posts is not a good approach because it looks bad and each button will get very little attention. But simply using one or two buttons can be very effective. Even if you have a new blog with low traffic levels, a voting button for a niche social media site may help to get you the few votes that are needed to get your post promoted to the front page.

I’ve had good results on my design blogs with the Tweetmeme button. Traffic from Twitter has grown exponentially since I added it to the blogs several months ago.

6. Consider Post Topics That Will Be Searched For

Search engine traffic is not something that I consider very often when I am working on a new post, but the few times that I have created posts for search traffic the results have been very good. A post that winds up doing well in search engine rankings could continue to send hundreds or even thousands of visitors on a daily basis.

If you have a topic that you want to cover, use a keyword tool like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Type in a few keywords and it will show you a bunch of related searches and how often they are searched. This can help you to see what people are looking for, and you can use the keywords in your post title.

Next, think about how you can create a post on the subject that will appeal to social media users so that you can attract some attention and links to the post. Using keywords in your post title is important because most of these inbound links that you draw will use the post title as the anchor text. Once you have the post idea, spend plenty of time to make it as useful and interesting as possible to get the maximum impact. Then get some of your friends to give you a hand with the initial social media votes, and hopefully it will take off from there. If the post draws links and has an optimized title, search engine traffic should follow. Of course, the more competition that exists for the keyword the more difficult it will be to achieve high search engine rankings.

What’s Your Experience?

How do you use social media in your own plan for blogging growth?

In my opinion, many new bloggers miss out on some great opportunities by not being more active at niche social media sites. These will not have nearly as many users as the major social media sites, so they will never send a comparable amount of traffic, but there are many reasons why they are every bit as valuable for the new blogger.

1. Targeted Traffic

Niche social media sites provide links to content that focuses on a specific topic, which means that most of the people that use that niche social media site will be very highly targeted if your content is a good fit with that topc.

While the most popular social media sites may be able to send thousands of visitors very quickly, those visitors are typically not very well targeted. Some of them may be interested in the subject of your content, but most would not fit in your target audience. With niche social media sites, a very high percentage of the visitors you receive will be exactly the type of readers that you want to reach.

2. Better Conversion to Subscribers

Social media traffic is usually pretty poor at converting to subscribers. There are a few reasons for this. First, the average social media visitor is just browsing for interesting content, they’re not looking for a source of information that they will keep coming back to. Second, because the traffic is not targeted they will not be interested in subscribing and receiving the content on a regular basis. B

ecause visitors from niche social media sites is more targeted, part of this issue will be taken care of. Additionally, users of niche social media sites tend to have a strong interest in the community of other users of the site who have similar interests, and this can carry over to the links that they find through the niche site.

3. Higher Chances of Success

One of the most significant reasons that I think new bloggers should be submitting their content to niche social media sites is that it is much easier and realistic to get your content to the front page. You could spend tons of time using Digg and trying to push your content and you may never get a post to the front page. Most bloggers that try to get traffic from Digg never have much success.

On the other hand, a much higher percentage of submissions at niche social media sites will get promoted to the front page. If your content is not making it on its own, you can even find a few friends and request some votes. With most niche social media sites it only takes a small number of votes to get from the front page and this is often possible to achieve just by asking a few friends for a vote.

4. Networking Opportunities

Social media and social networking sites provide plenty of opportunities to get involved with the community and get to know other users. With niche social media sites you will be able to network with like-minded users who have a lot in common with you. Making strong connections is very possible through this contact.

5. Can Lead to Success with Other Social Media Sites

Most social media users are active at several different social media sites. You may be able to easily get 100 visitors from a niche social media site. That may not seem very significant, but maybe from those 100 visits you will get a few Stumbles that will lead to even more traffic, or some Delicious bookmarks that will help you to make it to the frontpage. This domino effect is something that I have been writing about for a long time, and it sometimes can have big impacts.

What’s Your Experience?

Do you use niche social media sites? If so, how have they helped your efforts to grow your blog?

If you’re not familiar with any social media sites in your niche, see our categorized list of social media and social networking sites to see if you can find anything that may be of use to you.

There is a great deal of variety in the sites that are featured (hopefully the categorization helps to make it more useful). Some are social media sites with user submitted links and voting to see which links get promoted to the front page (Digg-style), and others are intended to allow people with common interests to connect in various ways.

Here is a listing of the sites that were just added. Be sure to visit the list of social media and social networking sites for more.

Bookmarking:

Jack of All Links

Mister Wong

Cars and Auto:

Car Community

Dating:

BachelorPlace

Education:

Curriki

We the Teachers

Fashion/Clothing:

Springleap – T-shirts

General Networking:

ECpod

MyWebProfile

Plaxo

Health/Medical:

DrConnected

Sanewire – recovery

Internet Marketing:

Gooruze

Movies:

Reelempire

News:

BookmarkUs.net

Mad or Love

Zoomit (Canada)

Photo Sharing:

eSnips

Professional:

CitiAlly

MyCareer.ge

Naymes

Venture Capitalist Network

Sports:

KeeCricket

Prep Champs (high school sports)

Strands

Travel:

TrekCafe

Miscellaneous:

Clubnet UK – clubbing

Freagle

GreekStrength – fraternities and sororities

Match A Dream

Scoop.at – Austria

Sydney Networkers

Velospace – Bicycles

• Week One
• Week Two
• Week Three

Throughout the first three weeks of this series we’ve taken a look at the process of setting your goals with social media, getting involved at some targeted sites, building a network of social media users, brainstorming ideas, and publishing your first content to target a social media audience. At this point hopefully you’ve had some success with social media, although it does take some time, so try to stay patient if things haven’t gone exactly as planned. Now our focus turns to refining the process and focusing on the big picture.

1. Continue to Visit Your Targeted Social Media Sites Each Day

If you’ve been reading through this series, you know that I feel it’s very important to be active at the social media sites that you’re specifically targeting. Being active is essential to understanding the users of the site and to build your own network. After you’ve been using the sites for a while and you’ve established some consistent success with social media marketing, you may want to cut back a little bit on your usage of the sites, but it’s important to still have an active presence.

2. Continue to Network

For those who are hoping to build a strong social media presence, the need for networking will never end. Keep meeting new people through social media sites and through blogs, and work on strengthening the connections you’ve already made. Everyone who is successful with social media marketing is well-connected.

3. Focus on the Details

Throughout this series, we’ve looked at the process of creating content specifically for the purpose of targeting social media users. We’ve focused on finding the right sites to target and on creating content that has a chance to do well with social media. At this point it’s helpful to look more at some of the specific details of the posts you’ve created with the purpose of targeting social media.

A lot of different factors can influence the success of a post with social media. In order to maximize your success you’ll need to focus on some specific details of the post, such as the time of publishing and submission, formatting of the post, headlines, etc. At this point you’ve probably published a few posts in the past month, so take a look at the posts and see how they could be improved to be more appealing to social media users.

In order to test things and see what works, try mixing things up in terms of when you publish and how you format the posts. Pay attention to the results to see what works best for you. In most cases you’ll find that publishing early in the week will work best, and formatting posts to be easily scannable is important.

4. Look Back at Your Goals from Week One

The very first step of this whole process was to decide specifically what you wanted to accomplish with social media. Maybe you wanted more subscribers to your blog, or maybe you wanted to gain exposure to a wider audience and work on developing a brand. At this point it’s helpful to go back and look at your original purpose. Has your work through the past four weeks helped you to get closer to achieving this?

It’s possible that through your first month of experience with social media marketing, you may have realized that your initial impressions and assumptions were off and what you set out to accomplish may not be the best approach to take. If this is the case, now is the time to re-evaluate your priorities with social media and focus on developing a sustainable plan to get you there. I’m sure you’ve learned a lot through being active for the past four weeks, so be sure that you allow yourself the flexibility to adjust your priorities and your goals as necessary.

5. Focus on Sustainability

Now that you have gone through the process of jumping in to social media marketing for the past month, you’ll need to develop a plan that you’ll be able to carry out successfully over a longer period of time. You’ll want to think about the social media sites that you have been targeting. Do you still feel that they are the best platforms to promote your site? If not, don’t be afraid to change things up and move your activity to other sites.

Think about your schedule and how much time you’ll realistically be able to spend on social media sites and developing content to target these users. There’s no right or wrong approach to posting schedules, but it’s important to have some sort of plan or schedule if you hope to be able to sustain the success on a longer term.

Conclusion

I hope this series has been helpful for those of you who were looking for some step-by-step content for getting started and improving results with social media. If you have questions or if you would like to see any part of the process covered in more detail, please leave a comment.

• Week One
• Week Two

Last week we looked at the process of developing a blog post for the purpose of targeting specific social media audiences. This week we’ll look at a few steps that will help to determine how successful we were and to build on that.

1. Continue to Use Your Targeted Social Media Sites Everyday

This is the same as the first step from week two, so there’s not a whole lot I need to go into here. Basically, in order to have a strong presence on your targeted social media sites, you need to be consistently active. Set aside a little bit of time each day to vote, comment, submit, and add friends.

2. Analyze Last Week’s Post

The steps from last week included publishing and promoting a post. Now it’s time to take a look at the stats and see how successful we were. Of course, there are some obvious stats you can look at, such as overall unique visitors, total pageviews, number of visitors from social media sites, etc. But don’t forget to also look at some other numbers, such as growth in subscribers and inbound links (you can track your blog’s Technorati rank over time to see an increase in in-bound links).

Remember the stats can only tell part of the story. In the first week of this series, our very first step was to decide what you wanted from social media. When you’re analyzing your results it’s easy to get distracted by numbers, but you must not lose focus of what is most important to you. For example, say that your priority is to increase exposure and branding, not so much about the number of visitors you receive. In this case you may want to gauge your success based on factors like links and mentions from other blogs, mentions on Twitter, and comments on your own blog as well as on social media sites.

Remember that it takes time to get results with social media. Simply creating one post that targets this audience is not enough to get serious results. An effecive social media campaign needs to involve an ongoing plan to help you reach your goals.

3. Learn Something New

During the first two weeks, we spent some time on the targeted social media sites with the intent of learning more about the site’s audience, what they like and what causes them to respond. This information was used along with your brainstorming to develop the content that was published last week. Now it’s time to learn something from your first hand experience.

Did the social media audience respond to your post in the way that you thought they would? You can evaluate the number of votes you got, the comments that were left by users, and the amount of visitors you received. On your first attempt you can’t expect everything to go exactly as planned, so take the opportunity to learn something from your experience that you can use for your future efforts.

If things didn’t go the way you had hoped, try to identify where the post came up short. Was it the content of the post itself? The formatting? The title? The title and description used on the social media sites? The profile of the submitter? A lack of a network to get votes? Once you can identify some weak points, you now have an area to focus on for the next attempt.

4. Continue to Network

From my experience, the two most important factors in social media success are 1) the content itself, and 2) the network of the blogger or the submitter (or both). Your network can consist of friends and contacts that you requeest votes from, your regular readers that are interested in voting for your content, and your friends on social media sites.

Keep making efforts to get to know other bloggers in your niche and keep working on building contacts with other users of your targeted social media sites. Well-connected bloggers are successful bloggers.

5. Think About Scheduling

As I said earlier, a social media campaign requires on-going work. Because these posts take time to develop, it’s important to think about your post schedule, how often you want to publish new content, and how often you want to make a push with social media. There’s no right or wrong approach to posting frequency, but for building results with social media you should be posting at least somewhat frequently. I would recommend at least a few times per week, with maybe one post per week, or one post every two weeks, for targeting social media.

When you’re working on your own posting plan be realistic about how much time you have available and how long it will take to develop quality content. It’s important not to rush so much so that the quality of posts drops below what is likely to get results from social media users.

6. Continue to Brainstorm and Refine Your Ideas

In the first week we took some time to brainstorm ideas for potential posts. As you continue to learn more by being involved at your targeted social media sites, and from your own experience with your posts, you will continue to get a better idea of what is likely to draw results.

Set aside some time to continue brainstorming for post ideas. If you’re going to be publishing content consistently, you’ll need to have a steady flow of ideas. Also, go through the ideas on your list from previous weeks and analyze them based on what you are currently learning about your targeted social media sites. You may find that some of these ideas are not perfect, but you may be able to tweak or refine them in some way that will make them more useful

Looking Ahead:

Next week will be the final edition to the series, so we’ll take a deeper look at setting yourself up for long-term results.

In effort to make this series as practical and usable as possible, the activities for each week will be broken down into specific steps that should be taken. This week we’ll focus on taking action and moving towards that first successful social media post. So let’s start week two’s activities.

1. Continue to Use Your Targeted Social Media Sites Everyday

Last week we talked about the need to target a few specific social media sites rather than just taking a general approach. The reason for this is that as a new social media marketer you will need to be very active at these sites in order to maximize your results, and it’s just not possible to be active everywhere.

Since you should already have your targeted sites chosen, you’ll now need to continue to visit them on a daily basis and become an active user. Vote for submissions that you like, leave comments on submissions, add friends, and even submit some items if you find any that would be appropriate for that particular site.

As a new user, it’s best to submit items from sites other than your own at first. If active users notice a new account that has started submitting his or her own content right away and not really been active in other ways, it throws up a big red flag.

The goal here is to be truly social and get integrated into the communities of your targeted sites. Each social media will have its own community, and in order to help your chances for success, you’ll need to be useful member of the community.

You don’t need to spend hours at these sites each day, but set aside at least a little bit of time to start to build a profile. As you’re on these sites each day, continue to pay attention to the types of content that are doing well and to the content that is not doing well. You may want to subscribe to some RSS feeds from your targeted sites to save yourself some time. Knowing how an audience will likely react to a submission is a huge part of the process.

2. Take One Idea from Your Brainstorm and Develop a Post

At the end of week one we looked at the need to brainstorm for ideas of content that you could use to target social media audiences. By now you should have a better idea of what types of content are getting results for others, so you’ll want to take that into consideration as you choose the first idea to develop. Of course, you don’t want to copy the ideas that others have had success with, but you want to pay attention to the type of content. For example, you may see that users of a particular social media site tend to vote for resource lists, controversial articles, or some other specific type of content.

Before you start to write the post or put the content together, take some time to plan out the post to make sure that it is well thought out. I like to outline posts before writing as it helps me to get end results that are more thorough and organized.

As you’re developing the content, don’t skimp on time. It’s better to put in twice as much time and actually get positive results than it is to rush through it and wind up with something that doesn’t generate much interest. Especially at first, you’ll need to create something that is exceptional to get the best results.

Pay attention to formatting and layout of the post. Regardless of the type of content, make sure that it is easily readable and scannable. Use plenty of whitespace, short paragraphs, headers and sub-headers, bold text, lists, and anything else that will make it easier for visitors to quickly read the content. Formatting has much more of an impact on social media users than you may realize.

Also, using photos really tends to help with content that targets social media. You can either buy stock photos at sites like iStockphoto or StockXpert, or browse through Creative Commons photos at Flickr.

Another important issue that deserves plenty of attention and consideration is the post title. Titles can make or break the success of a post, so don’t just give it the first title that comes to your mind. This is another area where it is helpful to observe what types of titles are drawing results at your targeted social media sites.

For more details on creating content that will draw results, see How to Target Social Media with Specific Posts.

3. Publish and Submit to Your Targeted Sites

Once your post is ready and it has been proofread for mistakes, you’ll need to decide on a time for publishing. Timing can play a factor in terms of how many readers will see it and how much exposure it will get with social media. Typically, the weekends will draw less traffic, and Monday through Thursday will be the best days for getting exposure.

Personally, I recommend publishing this content Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. If you’re able to achieve success with a social media site the traffic will usually last for a few days before tailing off. If you’re able to get that success early in the week you’ll have time to benefit from its peak before the weekend when the numbers will decrease faster. However, there are some benefits to posting on the weekend that can be considered, such as the reduced competition.

Once you’ve published the content you’ll need to get it submitted to your targeted social media sites. Some sites, such as Digg, tend to look down on self submissions, so you may want to consider asking a friend to do it for you. At most sites however, you can submit your own content and it won’t be an issue.

Many established blogs do not worry about getting their content submitted because someone will do it anyway, but for newer bloggers who don’t have much of an established audience are unlikely to get their content submitted to social media if they don’t give it a boost themselves.

4. Give it a Push

You’ve now taken the time to target the right social media sites, study the types of content that do well, use that knowledge to craft your own content, and published and submitted the content. However, the job isn’t done yet. In order to get anywhere, you’ll need to get people to see your content or it will get no votes.

It’s important to consider that social media votes come from a few different sources. Some social media users will see content on the upcoming page and vote for what they like. Other votes will come for visitors on the website or blog itself. For example, sometimes I put Sphinn buttons on my posts here at Traffikd, and some of the readers see the button and give it a Sphinn (I do recommend using one or two buttons on your posts for your targeted social media sites). Other votes may come from requests made to other social media users. Most major social media sites have a method for allowing users to share requests, such as Digg’s shout feature, but this is also done by email and IM by a lot of people.

To help your content out and give it the best chance for receiving votes, consider sending a request to your friends that are social media users, but be aware that this can be a touchy situation. It’s a very common practice among bloggers and social media users, but not everyone appreciates it. My recommendation is to use your knowledge of your contacts that you know pretty well.

You probably have a good idea about who would be interested in helping you in this way, and who may be uninterested. Limit your requests to those that you know well, and don’t bombard them with requests. It’s always a good idea to offer to vote for their requests as well  if they want to send them to you. If you have several friends who are interested in helping out, you may want to set up a group where everyone can help each other when votes are needed.

5. Watch Your Stats

In order to improve your results with future posts that target social media, you’ll need to know what worked and what didn’t. Pay attention to your stats. See where your traffic came from, how long people stayed on the site, how many pages they visited, how many subscribers you gained, etc. Stats can’t tell you the whole story, but especially at first they’re necessary to know if you’re on the right track or not.

6. Have Patience

Ok, this isn’t really a step, but it’s something that needs to be said. Even if you do everything right and you create a great blog post, it’s possible that you won’t get the results that you want. Especially for small blogs that don’t have much of an established audience, achieving success with social media is a challenge. If it doesn’t work on your first try, don’t get discouraged. Just learn what you can from your experience and keep trying and tweaking your approach as needed.

Looking Ahead

At this point in the series you’ve now started to establish your presence on your targeted social media sites and you’re working towards achieving your first success. Next week we’ll look at what you can do to build on this and to take it from a one-time thing to something that has more lasting results.