Building a Successful Niche Social Media Website: An Interview With Andrew Egenes of Design Float

Published January 2nd, 2008 in Social Media - 32 Comments

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you have probably seen that I have an interest in niche social media websites. However, the problem with niche social sites is that most of them have only a handful of users and they provide very little potential for marketing your website or blog. That makes the good ones even more valuable.

If you are a web designer or if you enjoy reading web design-related articles, hopefully you’ve already come across Design Float. Those of us in the web design industry are fortunate that there are several useful design-related social media sites. If you’re looking for a place to promote your own content and find other items of interest, I think you’ll like Design Float.

Unlike many other niche sites, Design Float sends a significant amount of traffic to popular submissions (in fact, today I’ve received well over 300 visitors from Design Float). And as its community grows I only expect it to get better.

I had the opportunity to interview Andrew Egenes, the owner of Design Float, about his experience with creating a successful niche social media site. Andrew has a great deal of insight that many of us can learn from. In just a few months he has accomplished the very daunting task of getting a niche social media website off the ground. I hope you’ll enjoy Andrew’s insight as much as I have.

StumbleUpon: Interesting Results Examined

Published December 27th, 2007 in Social Media - 21 Comments

Last week I published a post that did pretty well with a few social media sites, but I saw some interesting results from StumbleUpon that I thought were worth sharing. I normally don’t send pages to my StumbleUpon friends through the SU toolbar to ask for a thumbs up, but I did for this post and it seems like that may have restricted the amount of traffic the post received from SU.

To look at the situation I’m going to compare the stats from that post to stats from another post that had similar success with social media last month. Both posts received very similar traffic from DZone, del.icio.us, popurls, and CSS Globe.

StumbleUpon vs. Digg

Published November 25th, 2007 in Social Media - 23 Comments

Since I started consistently posting on this blog in July the top two sources of traffic have been StumbleUpon and Digg. Much is written about each of these popular social media websites, so I thought it would be interesting to compare the traffic that each has sent.

From July 1st to November 24th, 2007:
- StumbleUpon sent a total of 90,485 visitors.
- Digg sent a total of 61,274 visitors.

The four posts that have made it to the front page of Digg have also been 4 of the top 6 posts in terms of StumbleUpon traffic. This isn’t very surprising to me, as large waves of traffic from one site will logically result in votes at the other site from a certain number of visitors.

Del.icio.us: An Underrated Link Building Tool

Published November 19th, 2007 in Social Media - 34 Comments

On the subject of social media, Digg and StumbleUpon seem to get almost all of the attention right now. While the traffic potential for these two is considerably higher than other social media sites, Del.icio.us can be one of the most powerful resources for your link building efforts. Quick Overview of Del.icio.us Del.icio.us is a [...]

Building Consistent Traffic With Social Media

Published November 18th, 2007 in Social Media - 45 Comments

Social media is without a doubt one of the most powerful and significant sources of traffic for bloggers. However, it’s easy to get frustrated with social media traffic because it can be so inconsistent. One day you may get thousands of visitors, but it can dry up quickly. For this reason a lot of bloggers [...]

A Digg Clone That Might Actually Make It

Published November 14th, 2007 in Social Media - 43 Comments

Every day new social media websites are launched. Unfortunately, most of them never gain enough users to thrive or even compete. The vast majority of social media users stick with the major contenders like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit. Some newer sites are able to succeed by targeting a specific niche, like the 5 web design-related [...]

3 Days Left to Submit Your Social Media Articles

Published November 6th, 2007 in Social Media - 3 Comments

Just a quick reminder about the social media group writing project. You have until the end of the day on Friday to submit links to your blog posts (can be new or old). It’s an easy way to get a link! Get more details and submit links here.

A Call for Your Articles About Social Media

Published October 31st, 2007 in Social Media - 25 Comments

I’m compiling a list of blog posts about social media and I’m asking you, my readers and visitors, to submit your work (if you cover the topic of social media). I’d like to work together to create a great list of resources that can benefit everyone. Here’s how it will work: – Submissions will be [...]

What is Your Social Media Plan?

Published October 25th, 2007 in Social Media - 16 Comments

If you are a blogger or website owner, chances are you’re getting traffic from, or at least hoping to get traffic from, social media websites. Have you developed a plan to use social media to help you achieve your goals, or are you blindly using these sites with no real direction? If you don’t have [...]

Case Study of the Mullet Link Bait Strategy

Published October 18th, 2007 in Social Media - 26 Comments

A few weeks ago Maki from DoshDosh wrote an article about the mullet link bait strategy. The mullet strategy that Maki covers in exceptional detail is when you use a page outside the normal flow of your blog or website specifically for link bait content. This is used for content that for whatever reason you [...]