My Half Hour Social Networking Plan: The Second Ten Minutes

For part one, click here.

Before we move onto step five we need to come to an understanding. Not every post you put up is going to be good, it is a fact of life. If you are writing five days a week or five times a month, not each and every one of your posts is going to deserve crazy promotion. You need to understand this and approach the next step with this in the back of your head. You don’t need to promote everything you write, if you continually point people to your blog in forums and you are promoting crap it is going to be like the story, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”. Exercise a little self control with the next step.

Step 5: Hit forums in your niche and social bookmarking forums- Get people going to your blog who are likely to promote it

This is where a little homework comes in before you start using this plan. You need to go out there and find forums or groups (google groups, myspace groups, and yahoo groups are all good places) within you niche, as well as forums and groups that are by bloggers looking for diggs or stumbles.

• Group Type 1- In your niche- My humor blog is really wide ranging so it is hard for me to do something like this. But if I do a celebrity based story I will find forums and groups that revolve around the people I am writing about or around celebrity gossip. The best way to get the people to go to your post is to start a discussion and reference your blog within that discussion post. People will tune you out if you just go in there and drop a link. Remember to copy your post so you can paste it into multiple forums, so you are not writing the same post from scratch
• Group Type 2- Bloggers looking for Diggs or Stumbles- You can find forums all over the internet where people are asking for diggs and stumbles. Basically you need to participate in these forums by reciprocating and digging or stumbling their requested pages. Again this is a good time to use the multiple tabs feature in firefox and plow through their requests page in a rapid manner.

Being a part of a digg or stumble group is important for a few reasons. One is that they will be stumbling or digging your post for you, not yourself, stumbling your own posts right off of the bat can hurt the power of that stumble, you can do it occasionally but I wouldn’t do it every time. Also joining a few of these groups is a quick and easy way to gain friends on both websites, which is important especially with stumbleupon, as the more people that are following your stumbles the more power your stumbles have.

Some people are afraid to stumble everything people request, and it is considered poor form to not scratch the other users backs in these forums. I personally have two stumbleupon accounts, one at work and one at home. I am a little pickier with what I stumble on my home account that my work account, that has helped me with the dealing with that question.

Time: 5-6 minutes

Step 6: Bookmark to other social bookmarking websites- Get your blog posts out to various other social bookmarking sites.

Earlier in this series I covered a few different social bookmarking sites in three parts: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. As well as the tool socialposter.com.

Using this tool write up the information on your post and send it to social bookmarking sites that fit your genre. For the first few weeks you should rotate through these sites and see what works best for you. I would recommend submitting your posts to five sites.

Time: 4-5 minutes

Next: The last ten minutes

Technorati Tags: social networking, forums, groups, promotion, marketing, Digg, StumbleUpon