SMO - Good For Nothing Or Some Links?

Today on SEL I wrote about finding linking opportunities in the social media sites and associations. I'm a big believer in finding an established demographic and working it for links and contacts.

Overall the social media sites aren't good for much else when it comes to linking. Places like MySpace and Friendster allow a clean link in your profile or through their blogs but other than that, link opportunities don't exist. The power behind those sites comes in the community and networking and quite frankly, that takes way more time than I have.

Yes, you can build 50 MySpace profiles and each will have a clean outbound link but then again you have to BUILD them, and get others to link to them for those profiles to amount to any kind of link juice. Otherwise all you're doing to wasting time building a handful of MySpace pages no one will see.

Building profiles, lenses, pages or whatever you want to call them takes time, energy and resources few of us have. If you have a person solely dedicated to building your presence in the ever growing social space, forums, groups, webrings or whatever else is out there then power to you!! But if you're like the rest of us and don't have that kind of time, what do you do?

If you want to play in this space you need to pick a social community that's going to give you the biggest bang for your buck and work it. For example, if you think a weight loss site like LosingIt has the demographic you're targeting, get involved. Budget a couple hours a week to posting and going through the site until you can find an opportunity to build links. They're there , you just have to look.

And what about using Digg? It's been my experience that Digging articles and stories doesn't amount to much on the average. Yes, a ton of traffic will ensue but solid one-way links from credible sites doesn't happen often. The article gets added to scrapers or picked up on budding blogs but overall -I don't see credible news sites or business owners pick up what they find on Digg.

Does that mean you should skip Digg altogether? No. Every little bit helps but I wouldn't count on sites like Digg as your only linking tactic. Add the Digg effect to your linking arsenal but work the social media sites that can influence your sales for maximum, long term results.