Social networks such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and YouTube receive millions of daily visits. They are a huge source of traffic and in many ways can become your leading source of referral based traffic to your on blog, web site or landing page which promotes an affiliated based product or service. This month my focus is providing advice and tips on how affiliate marketers can increase traffic. You might want to take a moment to also read my previous article titled, How Commenting On Other Blogs Can Help Increase Traffic.

Digg, at a minimum, is an excellent place to score a search engine friendly backlink. I am not sure if you know what the rel=nofollow is, but in short it is a tag that most all social network sites use to prevent web crawlers — especially Googlebots — from passing through to the linked site. In other words, this special tag puts a block on the link and makes it so that it can’t be accessed by search engines. With that said, most social networks use the rel=nofollow tag so that they can hoard all the search engine web crawler traffic. Digg, however, does not use this special tag and when you submit content into their network, at a minimum, you score a search engine friendly backlink.

Aside from scoring a search engine friendly backlink, Digg is just like any other social network. If you manage to build up your reputation and make a lot of friends, these people can be used towards increasing the number of votes on your submissions which then lead to a higher ranking within the network, which as you can imagine, help increase even more traffic. The key to being successful with Digg is in writing and submitting content into their network that targets the interest of the community. My advice would be to study the categories and study the items being submitted and reaching high ranks.

StumbleUpon is an excellent social network. However, it’s effectiveness to drive large amounts of traffic depend on the number of active and contributing friends you have within the network. If you have a lot of friends who are active and willing to cast their vote, the result can literally send your submitted page thousands of visitors within hours. StumbleUpon is very known as being a social network where friends of friends vote up the submissions. So the more people you get to vote on your submissions the more compounding the voting effects ripple within the network.

The key to success with StumbleUpon is the same with any other social network, you have to figure out the topics that of mainstream interest and you have to write content geared towards attracting the people within the network. Twitter and YouTube are both similar to the social networks mentioned above. However, each network — and even more not listed here — have their unique characteristics and traits. It is your job to identify how you can take the most from these social networks and how you can convert this massive amount of traffic into sales.

Best Regards,
Garry Conn
www.GarryConn.com