SeaWaves Blog

Marketing through social voting sites is the new big thing for webmasters today. These sites include Digg, Propeller, StumbleUpon, and Reddit. Many search marketers are now adding this type of marketing to help them build links.

The attraction of social voting marketing (SVM) is that you can get a lot of traffic to your site with (seemingly) minimal effort. Depending on your skill, SVM can lead to a massive amount of quality backlinks. Andy Hagans, a search expert, says SVM (he calls it “link baiting”) gives the best ROI for your link building efforts.

However, there are many challenges with SVM. It looks easy for the experts but for someone just starting out the learning curve is very steep. I’ve gone through a lot of learning pains with SVM. I’ve had multiple social voting accounts banned because I was too aggressive. I’ve had submissions flop because I didn’t spent enough time promoting them.

Here is a list of four challenges to watch out for. If you can deal with these things in your SVM campaign, you’ll reap traffic, links, and even improved branding. However, if one of these things is lacking, your campaign will probably flop.

1. Building a Network of Voters

Just like networking offline takes time, so does networking on social voting sites. You need enough people voting for your stuff because most submissions need a push to get noticed.

2. Understanding The Different Audiences

A common mistake is to treat each of the sites in the same way. However, an article that goes viral on Digg may not go viral on StumbleUpon. It takes time and effort (and oftentimes a lot of trial and error) to research each site where you want to promote your content. You’ll need the votes of the site’s audience so spend time at the site to see what kind of content gets many votes.

3. Understanding The Different Webmasters

If you want links not only do you need to understand the audiences, you have to understand the webmasters within those audiences. These are the ones that can give you links. You can write an article that gets a lot of votes and sends massive traffic. However, you may not get many links. Do some research by checking the backlinks of different popular articles and see which ones get links. I like using Yahoo’s backlink checker, Site Explorer.

4. Monetizing The Untargeted Traffic

One of the biggest complaints about SVM is that the visitors don’t stick around. They may show up in huge crowds but never come back. They are untargeted traffic. They’re not looking to buy. This is fine if your primary monetization method is CPM (cost per impression). However, what if you’re monetizing through selling products or contextual ad clicks?

One of my sites got 4000 visitors from StumbleUpon. It makes money through AdSense. I only made $5 from those 4000 visitors. Figure out a way to retain some of the traffic to monetize them later. You can encourage them to subscribe to your RSS feed or even better, join an email list.

Final Thoughts

SVM looks easy at first glance, but it’s definitely not a piece of cake.

We still market through social voting sites here at Sea Waves. Check out our social media campaign service. But we don’t just hit social voting sites. We use our connections to hit all kinds of social media sites including forums and blogs.

Also, SVM works better if you have a general site because the social voting sites with lots of traffic cater to a wide variety of general topics. For example, a general real estate site will do better than a site about flipping houses in Dallas, Texas.

If you have a site in a more narrow subject, try our link building service. It’s oftentimes easier to get high rankings with narrow niche sites because their keywords usually have less competition.