social crowd � Glowleaf

Oct 09

Is your community a ghost town?

Cybertowns, Doodling, Heavy construction, Noobs No Comments �

I recently started a community, on a specific niche. Anyway, I wanted to share with you the methods for bringing in members, rather than visitors to your communities.

Find relevant fora, signup and locate an appropriate section to inform its members about your community. Don’t spam, inform politely. Tell them briefly what your community is about, and offer a means for anyone interested to contact you, email or IM.
Use the google blog search, to find blogs on your niche. Post comments, if not insightful, make them at least engaging. Not a plain “Well said” etc.
Social bookmarking. Bookmark a short well written copy that describes your community, and tag it relevantly. Members from social bookmarking sites do become members if they find something they like.
Social networking sites work nice for this as well. There are groups for anything, find relevant ones on facebook for example, and inform its members about your community.

All of the above are simply common sense, but the point here is to try and engage people, not to simply drop a link.

Also, monitor all the places you posted for a few weeks, to answer any questions and indirectly bump your threads.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: forum, online community, social crowd

Sep 12

Writing good content for your website, and benchmarking it

Doodling, Social abuse No Comments �

As I always do, I read two magnificent posts on other SEO blogs, and came up with my own, brand new, twisted version.

First of all, read this post on how to write good content for your website, I believe its an excellent read.

Then, read the headsmacking tip from SEOmoz on testing a site with ppc.

Do you see the synergy? No? Oh well… It was silly of me to believe I could end the post right here.

Here it is:

Make categories of your content. Of course, that means that you actually do have content, 100 pages is a minimum. Separate them with tags like:

Spoonfeds (10 ways to get fat in 3 weeks eating just icecream and hamburgers)
Lists (15 things about the Aardvark that noone really wants to know)
Howto (How to stop peeing your pants by getting a bigger penis)
Rant (This world is not real. There is no spoon.)
News (Oops, she did it again… She played with his heart…)
Reviews (This site is THA shit)
Hatred (He bit me! Mom!)
Salespitch (Buy now, or HE will take your firstborn)
Etc…

Now, you need to research the social sites. Find top stumblers, diggers, whateverers, all those people who have nothing better to do with their lives than to find “interesting stuff” on the net.

Locate one top submitter, for every one of your tags, whose submissions fall in the same tag as your content. E.g. some top submitter who has 98% hatred submissions, gets the “hatred” tag. Got it?

There is no technique here, you just have to find the top taggers for every one of your categories. Find what they like, and feed them with it.

Now, you can do this the sneaky way, or the straight up way.

The sneaky way is to start up a conversation. Following our “hatred” example, send him a pm about how big mofos the guys at microsoft are, and how horny does your Macbook make you when you touch the touchpad.

Become friends through the system, and feed him stories without saying that they are yours, with angry comments, according to the story. Now let him rant about it and share the hatred with his other I-have-no-hobbies buddies.

The straight up way, is to contact a top tagger, and feed his ego, about how good his submissions are, how beautifully hand picked they are, and how he should work for the Times. Then send him your story, and ask for an honest review.

So, you might ask, why is this any different that the classic “make friends and share your linkbait” strategy?

There is a huge difference. This, if it hits, is a critical hit. Critical meaning frontpage, meaning getting tagged by a thousand people. Or, getting buried in an instant. All or nothing.

You need to understand, that this is the ultimate benchmark for your linkbait. Its all or nothing, get high or crash.

That way, you can go through your content fast, weeding out the crap ones. After 10 or so “suggestions”, you will have a pretty good idea of what “sells”. Then make more. And feed it. To the right people. Yes… to the sneezers.