My Half Hour Social Networking Plan: The First Ten Minutes

I have talked about some of the various services I use. Now it is time to talk about how I implement them. Before I dive right into this let me discuss a few points.

1) This will probably take a little longer to start out with- Until you establish a routine it will probably take longer than half an hour. Give yourself an hour the first week or so until you get this down.

2) Examine your stats- See what sites work for you, certain niches do better with certain sites. I talked about that briefly in my social bookmarking overview. However, I must stress not to give up on two sites: MySpace and StumbleUpon. Next to search engine results they have been two of the best sources for traffic for me and I firmly believe if you know how to use them you can garner a ton of traffic.

Ok lets start, we are operating from the assumption that I have just posted my blog for the day.

Step 1: Launch social networking programs- I start my programs for Hi-5 and MySpace letting them run off of a predetermined list that I have already researched. This programs require very little attention to run and are targeting people that should be highly receptive to my blogs overall theme. These programs send out friend invites to shell pages that have an RSS widget on my page, where people can read snippets of my blog. I don’t send any accompanying messages with the invites because I find that intrusive and it is a quick way to get busted for spam. A simple friend invite will bring people to your page and if you direct their focus to your content you will gain traffic from it.

Time Spent: 1 minute

Step 2: Open up the firefox browser and use StumbleUpon and MyBlogLog- I open up the firefox browser and a two sites in different tabs.

• Tab 1: StumbleUpon, over a five day period I rotate what I stumble. Three days a week I will stumble other stumblers. To do this go to the tool bar, to the left of favorites is an arrow that creates a drop down box. Click on that arrow and select “stumblers”. As I do my other activities over this half hour I check back to this tab every couple of seconds to stumble and thumb up other stumblers. This will bring other stumblers to your profile and hopefully they will friend you or give you a thumbs up, increasing the power and weight of your stumbles. The other two days I stumble pages naturally using the stumble button, where I give honest opinions on what I stumble by giving each page a thumb up or a thumbs down. (Note: StumbleUpon is something that really should be used throughout the day especially when you are surfing, if you find something cool get in the habit of stumbling it.)
• Tab 2: MyBlogLog.com, I will go to a previous bookmarked page of a blog in my niche and invite the maximum of 15 people. I will open each person I want to invite in a new tab. Then go through to each tab and click add to contact, wait for the next page to load and click to add the person as a friend, after that I move to the next tab. After I cycle through all the tabs I return to the StumbleUpon tag and right click on it and choose “close other tabs”.

Time Spent: 2-3 Minutes

Step 3: Stay in Firefox and move onto BlogCatalog- Remember, keep stumbling while you are doing this!

I will go to Blogcatalog.com, click on browse and then click on users. When that page comes up I will go over to the list of new users and open all their pages in a new window. From there I will go to each of those pages and add them as a friend, also if they have any other social networking websites listed on their page I will open those profiles in a new window and add them. The sites I concentrate on are:

1. StumbleUpon- I will add them as a friend or thumb up their profile page
2. Digg- I will add them as a friend as well as add the immediate people on their friends list on the right hand side of their front page.
3. MySpace- Add their profile
4. Facebook- Add their profile
5. MyBlogLog- Since we have already added our fifteen for the day I will right click on the tab and bookmark it, one a week I will revisit these bookmarks.
6. Technorati- I will add them as a friend.
7. del.icio.us- Add them as a friend.

The rest of the profiles I leave alone, YouTube could possibly be worth it if you do viral video but the rest are ones that I have seen a low rate of success with. Sometimes I will expand beyond this and just hit a profile I have bookmarked of an active member on the site. Instead of doing any of the following activities on the list I will spend 20 minutes just hitting this site, it is a goldmine of information if you are looking to expand our social networking and bookmarking base.

Time Spent: 3-4 minutes… More if just concentrating on that item

Step 4: Depending on how much time I have spent thus far I will concentrate on StumbleUpon for a few minutes- I will look at the clock if I am under the ten minute mark I will hit stumbleupon hard for 2-3 minutes. Including sending a message or two to any with a friend base of over 100 stumblers.

Tomorrow: The next ten minutes, using social bookmarking to its fullest potential.

Technorati Tags: social networking, mybloglog, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Digg, Facebook, Technorati, del.icio.us, marketing, promotion