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The social marketing directory is a master resource list with three categories of social (web 2.0) sites that you can use to create your very own streams of highly targeted traffic/subscribers/sales for your websites in 2008 and beyond!

This resource guide contains:

Over 100 Social Networking Sites (i.e. MySpace, Squidoo, etc..)
Over 150 Social Bookmarking Sites(i.e. StumbleUpon, Digg, etc..)
And Over 180 Video Sharing Sites (i.e. YouTube, AOL, etc..)

ONLY $9.95!

At least that’s what it says on the sales page.

It’s actually a decent list of Web 2.0 resources. But, being a Nice Guy and all, I got the resale rights so you can get it here for free.

The normal way of  becoming a successful blogger is to build a quality site, then go and find ways to get lots of traffic.  It’s a fairly long and painful process and you probably won’t be popular for several months.  You’ll spend as much time marketing as you will writing.

One of the more successful ways of marketing is to use social bookmark site like Digg, Netscape or Reddit.  these can deliver enormous quantities of traffic very quickly.  Your biggest problem on reaching the front page of Digg is whether your server can withstand the load.

So you work hard on a post and submit it to Digg.  Maybe you get 3 votes and then fade into obscurity. Sound familiar?

Maybe it needs another approach.

I touched briefly on the finding a hungry school of fish method for choosing a blog subject recently.  The idea is to find a ready and willing market for your subject and give them whatever information they need.  How about Digg, or any of the many other popular social bookmarking sites, as a ready market?  Each of the sites has very similar subjects on the front page day after day.  Digg users love Apple and Firefox.  They love Photoshop.  Anything new on the iPhone this week has an easy shot at the front page.

So you choose a networking site, watch it for a couple of days and see what’s popular.  There’s a lot of the same stuff on all of the sites but each has it’s own user characteristics.  For example, Digg user are mostly young, male and into technology.  Then you build a blog targeted at the users of just at one networking site.  You write link bait articles and submit the best of them.  If you are on-target with your subject, other users will bookmark your blog and you will find them submitting for you. 

There’s no reason you can’t get hundreds of visitors a day within a week of starting the blog.

I wouldn’t start with Digg.  Although the traffic is there, it will take a lot of votes to get to the front page.  Luckily there are hundreds of Digg-type sites springing up partly due to the existence of Pligg CMS which allows you to create a social networking site very easily.  There’s bound to be one in almost any subject you choose.  Half a dozen votes (got any friends?) will get you onto the front page of most of these and still give you a decent amount of traffic.

I’ve long been a fan of long-tail searches.  These are those searches in Google that may only result in a handful of visitors each but add up to the majority of your traffic.  For example, your intended keyword may be “Bass Fishing” but your visitors will find you using such terms as “green bass fishing lures” or “best bass fishing spots in Texas”.  Each may only get 1 or 2 visitors a month but there are literally millions of such terms being used in Google daily.   These searches make up at least 80% of my traffic.

These will also often convert far better than more general terms for affiliate marketing.  A search for “buy bass lures” is of more value than a search for “bass fishing”. The first has their credit card out and is ready to buy, the second is probably just wondering what a bass looks like.

Up to now it has been difficult to take advantage of these long-tail searches.  You can go through your website logs but the sheer quantity of them will leave your mind reeling.  Enter Hittail.com

“HitTail is a content intelligence service that reveals in real-time the least utilized, most promising keywords hidden in the long tail of your natural search results. We present these terms as suggestions that when acted on will boost the natural search results of your site. It’s simple, easy to use, and the results are immediate.”

Hit Tail, in beta at the moment, sorts through your long-tail searches and gives recommendations on blog topics.  Topics that your readers are already searching for and, more importantly, topics that will likely result in more visitors.

I’ve been using Hit Tail for about a week now on two of my blogs and the results are impressive.  It has given me some great ideas for blog topics.  It’s too early to say if these will result in more traffic but I’m optimistic.

It’s a bit confusing to see how it all works, so watch their demo and read their blog.

The Warcraft blogger.com blog that I created in November has been getting a steady 100 to 150 unique visitors a day since soon after it was indexed. Yesterday, one of the keywords appeared on the front page of Google and the traffic shot up to 573 uniques. Today it’s back down to normal levels.

Sudden jumps in the SERPs are usually either due to Google rearranging its rankings for everybody with a new algorithm, or simple time-based changes for a new site. New blogs get a honeymoon period where they will rank higher than normal then, after a couple of weeks, jump around a little and sink to their permanent positions. Only changes to the site content or increased link value will raise them higher.

Since the chatter level in the Google forums is low, I’m assuming that it’s only the vagaries of a new site index, rather than a Google shuffle. Only time will tell if it’s a taste of things to come or just big G teasing me before it is dropped completely.

Affiliate commissions over the last 30 days have been a total of $422, an average of $14 a day. This average has been very consistent over time. Remember that this blog only took five hours to create and cost nothing. It hasn’t been updated since it was created. If Google is kind to me, there’s no reason it shouldn’t continue to make money for several more months. Let’s say it only lasts another three months. That should net me a total in affiliate commissions of around $1600. Divide $1600 by 5 and you have an hourly rate of $320. Now I realize that this isn’t going to make anybody a millionaire overnight but how does it compare with the average McJob? Work five hours and create one blog a day and it’s a viable full-time job. I’m certainly not suggesting that you, or anybody else, quits their day job and starts creating blogs before they prove it a viable money earner. Start in your spare time. Build two blogs a week and see how it goes. Some will be failures, I guarantee that. Starting out, you will have more failures than successes. If I can give you enough tips on this blog to improve on the success ratio then I’ve done my bit.

Now that Christmas is out of the way, I will start on the blog case study. The idea is to show each step, in depth, on building a money-making blog over a couple of weeks. If you are serious about making a living blogging, or at least some extra cash, follow along and build your own blog. It’s really only by doing that you will learn. If you are going to just read, nod your head, and go back to browsing the web or watching TV then you’ve wasted my time and yours.

I was going to write a post about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) but then I figured you might just as well learn directly from one of the masters.

Brad Callen has written an excellent free SEO guide.  Right click on this link and select “Save Target As” to save the pdf file to your own computer.

If you don’t have a pdf reader, you can get one for free here.

If you have an entertainment, games, celebrity or humor blog, you may be interested in using StumbleUpon to generate a few thousand visitors to your blog over the next few weeks.

Why only these types of blog? In my experience, most StumbleUpon users are “channel-surfers” who are bored and looking for diversion and entertainment rather than information. Sure, it can deliver traffic to almost any site but the real impact will be on entertainment sites.

StumbleUpon is a website discovery service that integrates social networking with peer review. It uses a tool bar browser add-in available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. It effectively generates networks of surfers linked by common interests. Users ’stumble upon’ pages recommended by peers in their network. Users rate sites by way of a simple thumbs up or thumbs down buttons on the tool bar, and can optionally leave additional comments for the site’s review page.

It has 1.5 million users who rave about it in their personal profiles:

I am addicted to StumbleUpon! You can participate as much as you like… you can simply “stumble” and discover great sites on the internet or you can be more active and participate in the forums and/or message fellow stumblers from around the world with interests similar to your own and make friends. I can sincerely say that, since I installed the Stumble Upon tool bar, I cannot imagine surfing without it!

This is possibly the very very best thing you can download for any browser, ever. An absolutely peerless tool for the nethead culture (to which I can claim membership) to aid in the endless quest for cool sites.

The StumbleUpon website isn’t particularly easy to use and, for me, it was a struggle to find stuff I needed or how everything worked. Indeed, just by browsing the site it’s hard to work out what it’s about. The tool bar however is very easy to use - just go to a page you like and click on the thumbs up button. You can then click on the Stumble! button to be sent to similar sites.

As an experiment, I added three pages from a neglected arcade games site to StumbleUpon on November 12th around 5pm. Here’s the traffic I received:

 
The site previously had an average of around 250 a day and this had been steady for several weeks. Following the StumbleUpon thumbs up, the traffic reached 1179 the next day, dropping to 816 on the following day. Bear in mind that I only added three pages - for sites with several hundred pages the additional traffic could be significant.

A few tips on maximizing your StumbleUpon visitors:

1.  Add, obviously, your own quality pages or permalinks but also add pages from similar sites or blogs. This will give you entry to a relevant network of peers and helps you blog appear more often.

2. When you submit a permalink, make sure you add the appropriate tag.  Obvious maybe, but easy to overlook.

3. Make your title sell. “How to get 1,000,000 visitors to your blog” will attract more people than “Blogging on Blogging”

4.  Make friends. The more StumbleUpon friends you have the more visitors. It’s as easy as clicking on the “Friends” button on the tool bar then on the “Add as Friend” link in the user’s profile.  Rate sites that you friends have submitted.

If you do install their tool bar, be aware that a number of the stumbled pages you see will be paid placements. They are reticent to reveal the quantity of these paid pages but it’s believed to be less than 2%. Also, review their privacy policy.