Much has been written on the topic of how to utilize social bookmarking and networking sites to promote your own blog posts. Submitting your posts to sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit - posting about your posts on Twitter and Plurk….

All of these techniques can work to drive significant traffic to your blog - however there’s another tactic that can be quite powerful that I’ve not seen many people write about. It’s similar to the idea of submitting your posts to social media sites:

• It still involves social media sites
• It still can result in significant traffic being driven to your blog

However there’s one main difference. It involves submitting other people’s posts to social media sites.

Let me give you a live example of how promoting another blogger’s post drove significant traffic to my blog:

Yesterday I noticed a little traffic coming to my post on my switch to Gmail and using it drastically reduced my email workload. The traffic was coming from another blog who had picked up and extended my ideas. The post was good and the blogger had generously linked back to my own post quite prominently in the opening paragraph.

Many bloggers would see a post like this linking to them and feel happy about it - but leave it at that. But what I decided to do was to promote it heavily via my own social media networks. I immediately dugg it (it had already had a few diggs), voted for it in StumbleUpon (again it had already been submitted) - but then decided to ’sneeze’ the link out to my networks.

I Twittered and Plurked it and also shot the email to a few other key bloggers who I thought would find the post helpful (one linked up on their blog and another couple Twittered it too).

An hour later the post was on the front page of Digg and had quite a few extra Stumbles. The result was quite a bit of traffic coming over to my post from the link in the first paragraph. By no means was it as much traffic as the post itself would be getting but it was still significant.

I didn’t ask anyone else to vote for it on Digg - but knew that by promoting it it would naturally get Dugg as the post has a Digg button prominently on it. I also don’t think that it was my efforts alone that got the post popular on Digg - the article was good quality and deserved some attention - I just gave it a little help.

The Benefits

This practice is one that has multiple benefits.

• Obviously the first one is that you drive some traffic to your own blog indirectly.
• You also build some good will with the blogger that you’re promoting. Helping someone achieve a front page article on Digg is something people generally get excited about.
• SEO - there are some secondary and longer terms SEO benefits from being linked to by another blog that gets on the front page of Digg. A post getting to the front page of Digg gets a lot of other blogs linking up to it in addition to the link from Digg. This means that that post gets some good ‘Google Juice’. This of course flows onto your own post. Even if it doesn’t go ‘popular’ even your extra links on Twitter and Plurk can give the page a little ‘juice’ that can have flow on effects.

A Few Words of Advice and Warning

• I should say that I don’t do this for every post that links to me. I only select the best posts and ones that I think add value to those in my network. I don’t purely do this in the hope of getting traffic - I do it with the goal of linking to good content for my network and building relationships with other bloggers.
• Don’t just share links to your own posts or posts that link to you via Twitter or Plurk. Regularly share posts that add value to your network from lots of sites. Otherwise you’ll get a reputation as being too self centered and spammy. Your followers and friends will begin to see you as a valuable resource if you provide them with genuine value over time.

Ways to Promote Other People’s Content

There are a variety of things that you can do to promote other people’s posts in this way:

• Submit them to Social Bookmarking Sites
• Share the links on Twitter/Plurk/Pownce
• Share the links on Facebook/Myspace etc
• Promote the post to other relevant bloggers
• Blog about their Posts
• Share the link on Google Reader

Feel free to share some of your own ideas on how you’d go about promoting other people’s content.

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