Sites That Sorta Work
Let’s say for the sake of saying you run a small time blog and you’d wish nothing more than to get a few dozen subcribers to show your efforts are accounted for, and motivation to continue forward was justified. Let’s also say that after a year of writing you’ve gathered under 10 subscribers and comments just aren’t there, neither is traffic. What do you do? Perhaps you set your sights on sites:
- Digg
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- SocialThing
- Technorati
- Jaiku
These are nice and strong, in fact, a lot of the great sites you visit are probably found on these sites, not such a bad idea! or is it?
Digg The digg effect is a strange one, what does it take to get dugg? Well, you’ve gotta be creatively and extremely different, first off. Second, you’ve gotta be ready. Chances are your server will take a dump if you get dugg.Of course, the first is just theory, sometimes all you have to do to get dugg is be one of the Digg Leaders or associated there in. There’s also groveling “please digg me!!”. Blah, so Digg requires you to sell your soul a little, pay off an alpha user, or have a stroke of creative genius.
Reddit and StumbleUpon The Internet’s A.D.D. life support. I don’t know, I interact with StumbleUpon and like/dislike/comment on sites I enjoy that, as should everyone who uses it. But that’s about all that happens. From what I see, getting Stumbled with do very little for your site traffic, other than increase it. It won’t qualify nor quantify your efforts, and yes – I’ve said this before, but hey – no sense not saying it again. Reddit is pretty much Stumble-Like in it’s audience, only… their interface is more Digg-like in nature. Audience attention is about as impossible to retain as well.
FriendFeed - If you want to use FriendFeed to get attention? Good luck, this site’s for consumption, not contribution. Funny thing is, if you fail to contribute, you’ll fail to be consumed. There are about 22 extremely influential people on FriendFeed, and about 4 times that in semi-influential folks – Aaron Brazell, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Mona N, Jason Calacanis, Kevin Rose, Kevin Marks, Eric Rice, Chewbacca… etc etc.
SocialThing – Imagine what the offspring of FriendFeed would look like… Got it? Ok, now imagine no one paying attention to it. The site’s great, but they’re in the shadow of the mighty FF at the moment, sorry fellas.
Twitter - It’s “What are you doing?” not “What link do you want to spam me with?”, people! Ok, ok, Twitter is good for sharing, but NOT JUST LINKS! For the love of God, don’t make others want to block you by tossing a link in every tweet… Learn from us on Twitter.
Technorati – I’ve slammed Technorati for being a lost cave of the Internet quite too often. Read here.
Jaiku and Other Microblogs – Face it, your only hope for using a Microblog to share anything useful and at least get someone to read what you say? Twitter. End of story, really.
So what do you do?
Be creative! That’s really the end of it. Another great tip – lists are great for generating interested readers as well. Why? We’re not sure, all you’re doing with a list is boasting or roasting someone else’s contributions as opposed to creating a contribution yourself… Sociosophy is pretty much that, only we’re one huge, giant long winded list. Hope you read more of what we have to say!
