An Experiment In Social Networking

In a recent post I discussed the usefulness of social networking sites in promoting your work. Today I am going to outline the strategy I have been using myself over the past couple of weeks in order to give those of you who are considering using this method yourself a little insight.

As most of you will know by now I like to use Yuwie purely because they share revenue with its users but there is no reason why the same strategies cannot be implimented with the likes of MySpace or Facebook.

The first thing I did was to search for clubs which were writing based but you can pretty much find one for anything, whichever happens to be most appropriate for your needs. The next thing I did was to set up one of my own. The theory behind this being that once promoted it would serve to raise my profile on the site.

Finding members was relatively straight forward, I simply poached them from the top ranking club by befriending them and inviting them to join my own. A top ranking site will attract new members purely because of its visibility and every time one signs up, I add them to my own. It has taken me about two weeks to reach the bottom of the front page. A couple more weeks and I should be able to leave it to promote itself.

I now have the opportunity to 'advertise' my site on the club message board as well as on my own profile. Technically, advertising is not permitted but I am simply informing my members of something which I know they are interested in. It is not blind.

The next step is to send all my new friends a 'comment' whenever I update or add something new. Comments appear on the members profile where anyone who visits it may see and as such is much better than a private message. Bear in mind that many of the people on these sites are getting their profiles viewed hundreds of times per day. I use my headline animator banner which you can see at the top right of my page. This is produced by feedburner and therefore allows me monitor how many times it is being viewed rather than just click through.

Do not expect this to bring you the kind of traffic that will overload your server but what it does produce is a core of highly targeted quality traffic plus a residual flow by virtue of increased visibility.

Perhaps what has been most satisfying is the fact that I have received many enquiries from very enthusiastic and even grateful followers.

social networking, writing, marketing, promotion