Lost in Twitter, Digg & Co.

[aleks77]

Hi everyone,

I have been building a blog for a bit over a month now, and I am working on social marketing for the last three weeks. What I don't understand is, with the millions of users and bloggers, how are my updates and articles going to be found?

For example, recently I submitted an article to Digg, and within the three seconds that my browser too to reload the page, another 8 articles were submitted. All my attempts are just being flushed away in the quantity of other articles, and usually my articles won't get any tweets, diggs, or visitors from any of the social media sites.

How should I handle this?
Thanks.

[RateMyBlog]

Dont waste your time with Digg - as you found out your articles will be lost down the list in seconds.

What is your blogs USP? - thats unqiue selling point - what makes it different from all those other blog competeing for those readers? What is your subject matter? Are you an expert in that field? What does your blog offer its readers?

Once you have enough posts and can post a link to your blog it might be easier to offer some advice. Feel free to PM me your URL so I can take a look.

[annalaurabrown]

Twitter works great but you have to work it. That is you have to build up a targeted list of followers with whom you can share your blog and you also have to interact with and communicate with your followers.

[knubbl]

I have tried to use Digg several times. The problem is that you need people to digg your articles. I tried this through building a friends list on Digg but it didn't quite work out.

Twitter is actually pretty cool and you can get lots of people visiting your web site even without actively twittering. So you might try that out.

[mmueller1985]

we love twitter and digg and would never miss to use it.

[sandy2089]

Your post in any social network will be counted as a backlink if this site is do-follow but if I'm not mistaken Digg is a no-follow site so I think there's little use in posting there. users will have big problems in finding you there and Google will skip your post too.

[ChickenFreak]

I agree that you need that unique selling point. Your blog is well-written, coherent, and intelligent, but it's lost in the sea of _other_ well-written, coherent, intelligent blogs that cover exactly the same subject.

I'm not seeing any topics on your blog that aren't covered by hundreds of other articles on the web. That means that your article, out of those hundreds, is unlikely to get a lot of special attention, and even if you surface it in the various social media sites, it's likely to sink again.

And people who drop by your blog are not terribly likely to bookmark it, because even if they got a good piece of advice there, it was probably the same advice that they got from a few sites.

But again, you can write. So it's worth writing something that people want to read.

Is there a subset of your topic that you're particularly interested in, that you could cover with more depth? Or, can you make the blog much more personal? When I read your About, it sounds like this is a personal project to you, but everything about the blog suggests that you're trying to be very impersonal, rather generic and professional.

I just Googled "personal finance blogs", to get an idea of how many are out there, and found headlines like "Top 100 personal finance blogs". So there are a lot of them out there.

I also found the blog "My Open Wallet", which is an example of that very personal take. (Y'know, I'm having deja vu for the previous discussion about fitness blogs and Cranky Fitness...) It's apparently popular, because it came up on the first page of Google. It's very personal, very clearly an amateur's exploration of the issues, and that's pretty appealing.

Now, you may not want to be more personal - no doubt you had a reason for your dryer, less personal style. It's just one example. My main point is that you need something that makes you different from all, or at least most, of those other blogs out there. That's what will make people notice and remember your articles, bookmark you, eventually perhaps tell their friends about you, and slooooooowly grow your readership.

ChickenFreak

[londongeekgirl]

i wrote a good article on twitter, check my blog out, its right near the top