Cross-pollinating bookmarks between social communities you’re active in is rarely discussed and can be an effective technique. It’s especially powerful when using redirects to track outgoing traffic from social bookmarks to the actual posts you are promoting, a modus operandi we’ll discuss later in this post.
Bill Hartzer visited cross-pollination in his post, “Claim Your StumbleUpon Blog through Technorati“, which details how to increase links to your StumbleUpon blog and pass “link juice” to pages you add, review, or “Stumble”. There are a number of other C-P (cross-pollinating) protocols to consider between communities. These practices are white hat methods to share valuable content between groups of friends who tend congregate in different and/or multiple places.
Stumble Your Sphinn Bookmark.
Try bookmarking someone’s blog post in Sphinn and Stumbling the Sphinn story. If you like include an invitation to join Sphinn in your description. There are plenty of SU aficionados who have expressed an affinity for search marketing but don’t hang out in Sphinn. Also many active Sphinn participants are vital SU members. I’d rather have a good friend, who frequents the AIMCLEAR SU profile, discover a sphunn story as an SU bookmark rather than me sending an email to ask for a Sphinn-vote.
Use Your Imagination.
It works all over. Try drilling down to the comments thread of a Digg post, tagging it up, and bookmarking it in Delicious. Tag up a video on YouTube, tag it again with Technorati tags embedded in your blog post, bookmark the blog post on Sphinn, bookmark the Sphinn story on SU, etc…All of this cross-pollination-behavior plants viral seeds in fertile social media gardens to give content a greater chance to flare throughout your various networks of friends and associates.
Bonus Tip: Track Outbound Links from Your Social Media Profiles.
Of course it’s easy to see traffic to individual posts on your OWN blog using analytics. Have you ever wondered how much traffic you send OTHER blogs from your SU or other bookmarks?
Tracking outbound links from your social media bookmarks is easy to do. We’ve practiced this technique on a number of social media sites and have done so only to test effectiveness Cross-pollinating tactics. Here’s how it works:
1 Choose the post you want to bookmark: www. blog.com/post
2 On a domain you control create a sub domain or directory called http:// blogName-post-name .myDomain .com or www. myDomain.com/ blogName-post-name. Don’t use your main website because a number of social sites don’t like when you bookmark your own site over and over. SU will ban you from doing so after a while. The naming convention is just to make it look pretty as a bookmark.
3 In the directory create a redirect to the actual post you wish to bookmark.
4 Temporarily disable the redirect.
5 Bookmark the directory with either a toolbar function or by typing the link in SU, Del.icio.us, etc…
6 Re-enable the redirect.
You can track the redirected traffic however you like using a database, email to you etc… and WALA- you are tracking outbound links from your social media profiles. It should not matter to the social media site or community members because the final destination of the bookmark is honest. No harm…no foul.
We’ve tested this on a number of sites including StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, and others. Give it a whirl to confirm the effectiveness of your cross-pollination tactics. Happy gardening!
