17 Social Sites To Spam For Backlinks
Okay deceiving headlines is not a tactic I usually use but I wanted to catch your attention with this one! I had a rather disturbing email today in response to my recent post warning of the dangers of including StumbleUpon in automated bookmarking tools. My reader asked the question:
“I’m just wondering whether StumbleUpon is the only social bookmarking that we shouldn’t spam?”
It Is Never Okay To Spam!
The first thought that popped into my head when I read that is that my post must somehow have sounded as if I was advocating spamming social bookmarking sites which of course is not the case. There is always an eyebrow raised when a tool comes out to automate a process which would usually be done manually. Automation saves time and usually allows the process to be done en-masse which is the case here.
The question is, how do you know what is spam and what isn’t?
Spam is a form of unwanted marketing in some form. Unwanted by whom? Unwanted by the recipient. Therefore whenever you market anything the question you should be asking yourself is, “will the recipient of this message want to hear what I have to say?”.
Private Bookmarking Has No Recipient
I’m struggling to find the right words to explain the difference between what I consider to be pure ‘bookmarking’ sites and all the other types of social sites in which other people are the recipient of your submissions. In the comments to the post Peter Buick called it the “reviewer quality score”. When you submit a page to StumbleUpon who is the recipient? The entire StumbleUpon community? When you submit a story to Digg who is the recipient? The entire Digg community. When you bookmark a page in del.icio.us who is the recipient? YOU ARE!
It just so happens that del.icio.us makes their bookmarks public so if other people want to come along and see what you have bookmarked then they are free to do so but you are not submitting the bookmark for the approval other other delicious users - they are your personal bookmarks. It matters not what other people think of them. There is no voting up of the bookmarks.
In my list of do-follow social bookmarking sites I am very careful in my selection to only include sites that have no voting component. I have had people ask me to include this site or that site and when I go and look at it I see a voting system and it doesn’t get included. Do you see the difference? When you are the only recipient of your submissions then you cannot spam yourself! As soon as other people are invited to view and vote upon your submission you introduce the possibility of spam.
Voting Based Sites Still Have A Place
I just thought I’d point out that sites like Digg, Reddit and the hundreds of other niche social sites have a place in social media but only if your content matches the subject of the site and this is where so many marketers get it wrong. I was banging my head against the wall in last year’s Thirty Day Challenge because every single day there would be messages on the forums from people confused at why their social media accounts had got banned. Why did the Digg audience not like my article about toenail clipping? Spend some time at Digg and find out…
The problem with the automated tools such as social marker is that they encourage marketers to just mass submit their content to a whole bunch of sites, many of which are highly inappropriate. This is pure laziness of behalf of the marketer. I could go and write a long post about this but the essence is that if you are going to submit some content to a site where the recipient is other people then you need to make damn sure that your content is relevant to that audience.
The way I see bookmarking is as a backlink building process and not a traffic building process. If you want traffic from Digg then that is a whole different beast and you might want to spend some time reading some of Skellie’s recent articles on that subject. If you want traffic from StumbleUpon then of course you’re enrolled on my course right? :-)
What I am trying to get across is that if you use an automated tool then make sure you do your homework first. If you are using that tool just to submit bookmarks to pure bookmarking sites with no recipient other than yourself then fine but if you start to include other sites then you are entering dangerous waters and this is where you need to make sure you know your audience and know that your content provides value to that audience or you can kiss your account goodbye!
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Stumble it!
Mark Mason
July 7, 2008
Caroline — you win the award for most compelling post title! I clicked on this right away from Twitter. Great article.
I have messed with automated tools with little success. My recommendation, pick a favorite site or two and become a popular guru. If you spread yourself too thin across the sites, you will not get the results you want.
Regards,
Mark
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