Lookin to share Marketing ideas with social network owners If you own a social network, or a forum, please reply back and share what marketing techniques work best for you. Thanks, -C
I started with a forum and thought that was the best idea I had ever come up with. Then I realized you have to populate the forum in order to get people to use it, so I did. Now, I have to keep adding posts with SEO in mind and monitor the forum for spammers and inappropriate content. I have a ton of post and members, but it is still not what I would call an active forum. So I have to continue writing about new stuff so that people will find me. I found the forum to be the best for getting indexed quickly, bots seem to love it. Next I got a cart and SEO optimised it, I mean I put alot of time into getting the right words. So I have a forum with great topics and a cart with very helpful and detailed consumer reports on the hotest products out (all up to date). The cart does not seem to get as many search results as does the forum, which surprises me because I know I always search for good independent sites that help me decide what product to buy. Now to get to your question I put time into getting backlinks. My strategy is to search for a keyword and find the sites that rank above me. Then you have to cross reference that with Alexa.com in order to find where your competitors have backlinks. Normally I find a large Company with thousands of backlinks. If you want links just go get them where other people do. I conclude that these larger Companies have staff or paid persons who get backlinks for them because I always see sites with thousands of backlinks. If you were patient and wanted to spend 12 hours a day for the next 2 months you might be able to get 200 backlinks and still be behind the big dogs. So I do not believe getting backlinks is practical. I am also do not like the notion of spamming your site all over the web, frankly I think it is ridiculous. But that is the current system. I have given up on getting backlinks, which is the only way I know of to rank higher on search engines. I am saying forget google altogether. Also I don't see the need to post an article on digg, when I can easily post it on my own forum. Although Digg and other article submission sites are great if you really have some breaking news that people care about. I am now developing a social network with a twist geared towards my niche. My strategy is to build a site that people want to go to on their own. something that really is useful and helpful. I hope to flood the members with free content, consumer reports, a forum, profiles, resources, and provide them with an awesome interactive experience. I want them to come back on their own and invite their friends. Otherwise I would have to get 2,000 backlinks just to pop up on the first page of some irrelavant search result, below the paid ads. (Just my experience over the past 2 years)