Using Social Sites to Promote Design Blogs

Social websites are the latest advancement in the field of technology. It helps people to form small groups and communicate within that group. This group can be friends, families, colleagues or simply people who share a similar interest. These websites facilitate an online community of users who use it as a forum to discuss topics of common interest.

Social sites helps you to do a whole lot of things than just communicate with others. You can use these sites to promote your business as well. These sites can be used as a means to popularize your business and spread more awareness about your products or services to people around the world.

There are numerous advantages in using social sites to promote your blogs. Firstly, you can reach out to a wider audience without any kind of physical boundaries. You can make use of the huge number of these social site users to advertise your product. The second and most important advantage is that you will promote your blog to the right audience. When you see social sites, you can find your target audience easily and this will help you to reach out to the people who have the highest potential to convert your advertisement into a profitable stream of revenue. Also, this audience will be in a position to better appreciate your efforts and give you the credit and acknowledge that you deserve.

Other than these factors, it gives you a much better chance of finding collaborators for your business. These joint working partnerships can prove to be mutually beneficial to both the parties concerned.  It will also give you a chance to know what the latest trends and you can make the required changes to your business to meet the changing business environment.

Social sites give you an opportunity to start from scratch and build a global business. You can advertise, recruit, manage and work on just about every facet of your business through these social media sites. This also brings down the cost of your marketing and advertising to a considerable extent and all these factors contribute to the success of your business.

Social News Sites

Social news sites are a category of social sites that helps users to submit news stories and website links with the idea of sharing it with others. They can also vote on the news stories to express their likes, dislikes and preferences. These votes help to provide more visibility to any news story. Besides content-based stories, users can also submit pictures, audio or videos. In a nutshell, the users get to decide what news stories can appear in the site. Every user has equal editorial rights in the site.

So, how does it work? Social news sites use an algorithm that take into account many factors such as the relationship of the user to the news story, the discussions and frenzy surrounding the story and the number of votes that it has received to determine the rank and popularity of every news story. It also employs human editors to monitor the content and ensure that adult or malicious content is not posted to the site. They also have programs and algorithms that prevent any user from manipulating these sites to one’s gain.

As a user, one can submit an article or web page directly from the web page to the social news sites by means of icons or links put in place by the owner of the web page. This makes it easy for users to submit content without having to copy the URL of the web page and then pasting it on the site.

In this example, an article in a design blog can be submitted directly to news sites by means of the icons present on the left hand side. This makes it easy for the users to share interesting and informative links easily.

Popular Social News Sites

Some popular social news sites are discussed below:

Reddit:

Reddit is a popular social news site that has a large number of users. It has news on almost every topic that you can think of. For better readability and ease of navigation, the topics have been categorized into health, politics, science and business and each of these categories are called subreddites. The reader can vote up or down using the arrows present on the left hand side of each news snippet and he or she can also write comments for each story.

Digg:

Digg is probably the most popular social news site on the Internet today. It covers a wide range of topics and it even has a separate section for video and images. Users can vote, comment or even have discussions on each link that is posted. They have numerous widgets and buttons that will make it easy for you to integrate it into your website. The popularity of this news site makes it a great tool to generate more traffic to your website. When more users vote or comment on your news story, you have a higher chance of bringing in more traffic to your blog.

StumbleUpon:

This is a great news site to increase traffic to your website over a period of time. It has good potential to maximize brand exposure and reach out to the right audience. It is not an authentic news site, but a combination of social networking and social news site. With this site, you can tag your interests and then click on the button to surf the web for news and information related to your interest. This is a better way to find the news stories that you need, rather than browse through the search engines to identify what you want. Users can also vote on each of these related news stories. One advantage is that the Stumbleupon icon can be installed in the toolbar of the browser and all that the user has to do when he or she comes across an interesting page is to click on the icon in the toolbar. This way, users can share information even from websites that do not have a widget or button.

Slashdot:

Slashdot is primarily intended for tech news and it was probably one of the first social news site that appeared on the Internet. It provides the latest information on any piece of gadget or any technology-related news. It is a one-stop place for the needs of all nerds.

DesignBump:

DesignBump is a social news site that is related to design. It is a great site for anyone who has passion in designing or is a designer himself or herself. This site helps one to keep abreast of the latest trends in the design world.

DesignFloat:

DesignFloat is another popular social news site for designers. They have numerous categories like graphic design, web design, interactive design, industrial design, digital art, photography, motion graphics and even tutorials. One can find interesting posts and articles submitted by like-minded users on this news site.

From these examples, we can differentiate social news sites into two categories. The first category caters to a wider audience and it includes just about any topic while the second category caters to a specific audience that have interest in a certain topic. An example of the first category is Digg or Reddit while an example of the second category is Slashdot or DesignBump or DesignFloat. You can choose the news site that you want depending on your interests.

How can you promote blogs through social news sites?

There are many avenues to promote blogs on social news sites. Its a good idea to use a combination of these methods to popularize your blog and to generate more traffic to your site. The first way is to advertise in these social news sites to reach out to targeted audience. Its better to look for social news sites that cater to a small group of niche audience. For example, if you have a tech-based business, then you can advertise in slashdot or similar news sites that are visited by people who share a common interest in tech-related news and information.

You can use widgets and buttons given by the different social news sites in your web page. This will make it easier for users to submit the link to the news site of their choice. When more number of users submit your link to more news sites, the possibility for traffic increases substantially. It can even give a boost to the search engine rank of your page because more people have visited your site. Your traffic will also increase when more users vote or comment on your link.

However, while doing this ensure that you do not try to manipulate the social news sites. They have many advanced algorithms that can detect this trend and it can backfire. Though your web traffic can also increase when numerous people like your news story or comment on it, you also have to watch out for an unscrupulous method of traffic generation. So, use it wisely and cautiously to generate more traffic to your site.

Conclusion

In short, social news sites are a great means to promote your website and increase the traffic. There are numerous social news sites like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon that can help you to popularize your business. However, you have to ensure that you do not resort to manipulative and artificial techniques to achieve this purpose. It should be genuine and realistic for a long-lasting effort.