SpicyPage Social Networking Review
There are a bunch of social networking sites out there these days. There must be some good sound reasons for their popularity and indeed there are.
The well designed social networking sites allow you to quickly flock to the birds of your choice, you know the ones with feathers similar to yours, and to join communities comprised of the Internet birds who have interests similar to yours. So if you are into yoga, social networking, politics, or just about anything else that’s legal, you can find an active group to join and with a bit of work grow an impressive contact list.
The traffic that you will receive by being active in a large community (probably communities as you can join multiple groups of interest) can be considerable. And it is targeted traffic as the other folks in your groups share your interests to at least some degree.
Since you can join most of these social networking sites for free you can tap into a load of free traffic. This can save you a ton or two of money by bypassing PPC search engine sites, avoid the hassle and dangers of mailing to email lists, and depend a lot less on free search engine traffic which can come and go.
Mind you that you still need good content to make your social networking site sticky and to bring visitors back for more. On the Internet content will always be KING. With web 2.0 well underway your fellow surfers will in most cases decide just how good your content and site is. The power of the vote is upon us. Your peers will decide if your site’s content is up to the king label standard of excellence.
As your site gets more votes it will move up in the site rankings gaining ever more visibility. You will also gain back links that will help you to move up in the search engines. So this process reinforces itself as time goes by. The popular sites will get stronger and the weaker sites, well they will be largely ignored.
One great thing about social networking sites is that they give the little guy and gal with a well designed site and with good content the opportunity to compete with the big dogs with deep pockets. A one person site may just knock the socks off a fortune 500 companies site as determined by the surfers votes.
A good example of a fun and effective social networking site is SpicyPage Spicypage has some very slick programing that allows you to use widgets to help you build your communities. Take a look at the right hand margin of Article Discovery to see the Spicypage widget in action.
As my sidebar on my blog home page at Article Discovery was already a bit crowded with the great MyBlogLog and the new Explode widget I placed the Spicypage widget on the index home page. I may move the widgets around a bit as I move forward with these social networking sites but so far I can tell you they are super traffic builders. I do wish there was a size in between wide and thin as the wide widget I’m using looks a bit too wide and the thin one is a bit too thin.
But a small design flaw is a small price to pay for good free traffic.Â
Don’t forget to fully benefit from social networking sites you must be active in your communities by joining communities, commenting, responding to comments, and generally making yourself known within your communities. You must visit other folks sites and show genuine interest in what they are saying and doing.
Give generously of your time to the community and with a good site your business will benefit in a natural and long lasting way.
