One thing I’d like to clarify before continuing. Online social media promotion tools (such as the sites mentioned above) are best used as an extension of your existing, traditional marketing activities. The benefits in most cases result in:

• More targeted audience.
• Greater geographic reach.
• Reduction in marketing costs.
• Save time (in other words using time in a more productive effective manner).

However, the above are only some of the most immediate that come to mind.

One thing I always try to advise clients is to break down their business or blog promotion requirements to reflect the jobs (or responsibilities) at hand. Generally, there are four primary groups:

Management. Your are the blog and/or business owner. Your primary goal should be to raise awareness and visibility of your products, services, content, etc. You should work towards being the leader in your niche (whatever that is). Additionally, you’re the one that should seek out talent you require to that end.

Public Relations. You are the one that should be monitoring what visitors, blog followers, clients, etc. are saying about your blog and business. You should be responding to them and illicit discussion, creating “spins” and attention to your blog and the business or community it represents.

Marketing. Your job is to ensure you’ve targeted the appropriate venues to stream your information to (the blog, products, services, etc.) You are doing this to build traffic, that is one of your primary functions.

Sales. Your role is to find or create new business leads. As such, you need to establish an effective network in order to move forward, expanding it as new contacts are added to your database.

As I’m sure you can appreciate, most people who launch and maintain a blog, provide the functions at each level above. For many of us, that is where some of the questions begin. Which tool is best for which function?

The illustration below illustrates this issue:

As I’m sure you could appreciate, there are hundreds of social media tools available. In the above diagram, I’ve only selected a few of them. So… Let’s recap:

Managers/Blog owners can use tools like Pownce (closed on Dec. 15, 2008), Plurk, Twitter, etc so as to increase awareness of their information (as well as their visibility) within online communities. You are using a blog, right?

Side note: You can follow me on twitter here: @BloggerSavvy

Marketing gurus however, can best capitalize on tools like Stumbleupon, Digg, Flickr, Reddit, Furl, Delicious, Youtube, Newsvine, Mixx, etc. to get the “word out” where communities can access it and visit the appropriate content on your blog. Such tools provide a superior venue for increasing your blog traffic and at a cheaper cost, than traditional solutions.

The sales people need to maximize their contacts and find others contacts. Tools like LinkedIn, hi5, Bebo, MySpace, Orkut, Facebook, Freindster, etc. are best able to facilitate this. You can build your contacts much faster then via traditional methods.

Of course the PR people need to keep their fingers on the pulse. They need to be aware of what is being said and need to respond (which I’ll note in a moment). Some good tools to help monitor what’s being said about you in the blogsphere are Technorati, Backtype, GetSatisfaction, Twitscoop, etc. As I just mentioned, PR people need to respond to some of the things they find. Commonly, tools like Dig, Reddit, Flickr, GetSatisfaction, etc. provide the facility for effective responses to individuals and the community as a whole.

In conclusion, one point I’ve also tried to impress is to ensure you’re using the right tool to get the right response and right traffic. After all traffic just for the sake of traffic is a futile exercise. For example, I’d rather have visitors to this blog that are genuinely interested in the contents, than to have a ton of disinterested traffic that does nothing other than use my bandwidth up (costing me more money).

What tools do you use that I’ve not mentioned? What are your thoughts? Feel free to let us know in your comments! Any new startups we all should know about? – Announce them below.

Side note: If your blog is hosted on a shared web server, there is a greater likelihood that your site will fail as the server may not be able to absorb the traffic load from Digg or Slashdot (and your hosting provider might suspend your hosting account). You’ll be happier with a dedicated server (as it’s more reliable and robust), or at the very least, a VPS should perform better than shared hosting.

However, let me illustrate by quickly grabbing 3 months of statistics for a specific post (off my Linux based blog).

The image below shows the total traffic to that page, and the referrers. If you click on the image, you will see the larger (readable) version:

The above shows three months of traffic to a page that was submitted to Digg and Reddit (on Feb. 28, 2008); whilst being saved to StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us. You’ll note that not very much happens until March 11 when I noticed in my regular web stats (AWStats) shows a larger amount of StumbleUpon traffic and then friends of those members started actively sharing the link to the post on April 19 (as it eventually filtered through to members who had larger StumbleUpon “followers”.

In retrospect, here’s the actual StumbleUpon only traffic for the same period:

Keep in mind that this is StumbleUpon traffic for all posts (not just the one that was originally submitted to Digg and Reddit). Needless to say, we could debate the statistics for hours and delve into more finite and custom report creation and filters – But that was not the excercise of this post.

What can we learn?

1. Think long term – Always. That will ensure steady growth.
2. Sites like Digg are a great tool for introducing your blog and it’s posts to a wide audience (casting the net).
3. Social media sites, such as StumbleUpon do a better job at attracting interested readers. (The fishing net has holes of the right size, so the fish you don’t want to catch swim through).
4. You can’t argue whether StumbleUpon is better than Digg or visa versa, because they do different jobs.
5. Each post on your blog is of interest to the specific niche for which it was written! This means that a post about newsletters (for example), will appeal to a different audience that your other post about web hosting. To clarify, visitors interested in learning what you have to say about one subject will not necessarily be interested in another post (on another subject). USe plugins to show “similar posts” to readers.
6. The home page of your blog IS NOT necessarily the primary entry page. (It’s not on my Linux blog; where the home page ranks in sixth place for popularity and entrance to the blog).

Conclusion?

Digg works with StumbleUpon, as I mentioned above, a good tactic is to use Digg as your introductory “Shout Box” and StumbleUpon as your growth “Engine”.

I chose my Linux (Ubuntu) based blog, selecting the statistics for a full year (July 17, 2007 to July 17, 2008 – Since it I didn’t start promoting it until July) and was rather surprised by a couple things. I assumed that Google would still be the prime traffic source. I also assumed that all the links from other (non-blog, “traditional” sites) sites would rank high. I was surprised in both cases. I personally found it interesting to note that you get a good statistical perspective on a day-to-day basis, but you’ll get a more accurate view if you stand back and look at the big picture over a longer time period. Here are the results below:

As you can see above, Social Media sites took the lead (just a tich ahead of Google). I also found it significant that inbound traffic from other blogs had a clear lead over inbound traffic from “traditional” (static) web sites. Equally surprising was how I saw that Google outperformed inbound search engine traffic by a massive lead.

The specific driving force within the Social Media (36.41% traffic), without question was StumbleUpon, which championed a massive lead of social media based traffic at 85.56%. Just look at the Social Media results breakdown below:

One thing I found interesting to note is some users of StumbleUpon shared some of the post links they saw in Reddit and Digg. So… while some posts that went viral, Digg and Reddit produced traffic spikes, they were only significant for a short time period. Instead, social media sites  (primarily StumbleUpon) saved those “traffic spiked” posts and subsequently that blog enjoyed long term, year round traffic.

What did I learn from our discussion and an examination of the blog statistics? Among several things, below are some of the points that were more predominant.

• There’s a lot of discussion about to benefits or lack thereof, with regards to using sites that can provide instant massive traffic volume (such as Digg). While sites such as Digg may provide short term spikes (for the average blog). Visitors to sites such can and will share your post link with others. As such, don’t discount the power of sites such as Digg. Short term effect, but a long term social effect.
• Google still loves me. Humour aside, SEO or the lack thereof can have a large effect on traffic form search engines – I think we know that. More to the point however, I noticed that the posts that are heavily shared on social sites have a much higher page rank than those which don’t, appearing higher in search results. It seems to me therefore, to continue providing quality content that is of value to the “community”.
• Continue to participate in blogging and other dynamic platforms. Convert the remainder of my old-fashioned static site to dynamic packages (blogging, CMS, etc.)  Why? When you post a blog, it pings site update services (such as pingomatic). Static (“traditional”) sites don’t do that. Each time a post is published RSS readers obtain the updates, automatically. These are things that help drive repeat visits (subscribers). Many of which might be adding your posts to various social sites.

While I’m fairly sure many blog sites may follow the general pattern I’ve seen with my traffic sources. I don’t think they will all follow the pattern established in the social media site rankings. This is mainly an issue of blog character, readership, blogsphere area and so forth. Not all blogs are in the same neighbourhood and have the same types of readers. For example a blog that focuses on internet marketing, I would assume might have more traffic from Sphinn, for example.

All too often, I find business owners (and site owners) oblivious to the power that dynamic sites can bring them, and how they are better able to make use of social media sites. In other cases, business owners simply don’t believe what they are being told as they appear not to have a good grasp of how the Internet really works and how their potential market really uses it.  My previous post “Why Every Business Can Benefit Form a Blog” for example, shows that a UK survey indicates “…66% of businesses believe that blogs are becoming more influential as an information source…” While this number is UK based, I assume it may be similar in other geographic regions and , more importantly, will to grow!

It will be interesting to see how the trends change over time. Perhaps one of the upcomming issues that search engines will need to address even further than they are now, is the inherent appeal of sites (such as blogs) that are better equipped to address the needs of site visitors. What new tools will be available to blogs desiring visibility in a growing webscape? As the video in my prior post (link at the top) suggested, we’ll need to rethink ourselves.