Understanding the Different Social News Sites

If you’ve been doing Web 2.0 marketing for any amount of time, you should know that your results can vary greatly from website to website. For example, you cannot submit a story about dogs and cats to Digg and hope for a lot of targeted traffic. For the best results you have to understand each site, the visitors that frequent it and what type of stories you need to submit to generate the most traffic.

It’s important to explain the differences of each site and what type of stories you need to submit to get the best results. That way, you will have a better understanding of each site and what is required to garner the most traffic from it.

Digg – The largest of the social news sites and one of the highest traffic sites on the entire internet. Currently, Digg has a Compete rank of 24 and receives an estimated 100,000 visitors a day.

Believe or not, almost all of those visitors are tech junkies and information technology (IT) people. They are interested in what is happening at Google, Wired Magazine and TechCrunch.

Therefore, you should focus on Digg for stories that are tech-related, geek driven or tied to the computer world in some way. You will have the best results submitting stories that conform to that standard.

Netscape – Inventors of the first widely distributed internet browser and passed by Microsoft in market share somewhere around 1998. Netscape stayed in limbo for several years until they quietly re-launched their search engine as a social news site in 2005.

The move has proved to be very smart for Netscape executives. It currently holds a compete rank of 274 and is growing everyday.

Want to be successful on Netscape? Submit a story related to families, animals or gardening. Netscape is generally browsed by consumers and stories that follow that vein will garner the most interest.

Stumble Upon – Probably the next biggest site in the social media sector, Stumble Upon currently holds a Compete rank of 2932, but an Alexa rank of 314. Those stats alone should tell you something about Stumble Upon.

Most of their users are webmasters, programmers or marketers.

The most successful stories on Stumble Upon are cool webmaster tools. Things like a Javascript based CSS preview creator or a peer-to-peer (P2P) application that you pop in your system tray.

For Stumble Upon, you will have the best results by submitting a nifty web tool that users can benefit from using.

Stumble Upon can bring success for any number or style of sites, so it should be top priority behind Digg or Netscape. You should spend at least 30 minutes a week “stumbling”.

You will see so many cool tools and get so many blog post ideas it will blow your mind. Guaranteed!

Just remember, you are looking for targeted traffic. Submitting a story about revolutionary dog food to Digg will not do you any good. Submit that same story to Netscape and watch your traffic skyrocket.

If you are unsure what kinds of visitors frequent a particular site, make sure to peruse their categories. The categories are a dead giveaway to what types of visitors are coming by.

Like anything else in internet marketing, these sites have to site “niche” down their sites to appeal to their target market.

Determining which site fits your target market the best, will bring you the best results long-term.

About the author: Brandon C. Hall is the editor of the popular blog SEOfeed.com and partner at the Authority Site Center.