Website Traffic & Increase Rankings

If you have followed at all the imremarkable challenge you saw that I was making extensive use of several web 2.0 properties.

Really nothing new there, except when talking to people I realized that we all are utilizing these sites in very different ways in their effort of social media marketing. Let’s take a look at some different methods, this could work.
1. heavy social interaction

One could say these sites were originally build with that purpose in mind. Members interacting with each other around a particular topic; and on every site you will find always a group of people that are heavily engaged and constitute themselves a kind of authority on that site.

Some do it for the sheer ” ego factor ” some are very specialized smart marketers. I actually one “followed” an account on blogher.com that started out innocently enough as an avid commenter and slowly added more and more ” offers ” into his/her content. The community didn’t seem to mind because at that point he/she was trusted and respected enough.

The obvious downside to this approach is that it’s not really scalable, unless you could effectively outsource the task. Also it will take time to see results.

2. mass creation of accounts

On the opposite side of the spectrum would be to mass create these accounts with some specialized software. While very time efficient there is not a software out there that can take full advantage of special features that vary from site to site. That way you will miss out on some seo benefits that way.

3. somewhere in between

That’s really what I am trying to do. I will take my time to fill out a profile and I will post manually my content on these sites. That way I can fully control the link building ( a major shortcoming of any software I have ever tried ). It also reduces the chances of being blocked significantly; though it does happen from time to time

The setup on some sites is really seo friendly, albeit hard to find sometimes. Ideally I am looking for :

. profile page -that allows link to homepage
. blog feature – where content can be published
. link feature – a place that allows to point more links to my other sites ( think blogroll )
. rss feed
. group feature – create a new group based on your topic
. rss feed for group

The way I structure my content pages on these sites is probably not the most time efficient way, bit works for me. Most of my main ( $$ ) sites are data feed driven sites. On these sites either a particular product or category will become the keyword/topic that web 2.0 properties are build around on.

1. link to product/category
2. image link to either merchant or product page
3. direct link to merchant
4. link to related web 2.0 property ( optional )

Some web 2.0 sites frown upon having affiliate links in the content – so for ease of use and tracking purpose I just redirect the through a site like hopurl.com ( the basic version is free ).