Karl M Foxley

In today’s post I want to share with you my quick way of discovering where to concentrate my advertising efforts. About a year ago everyone seemed to be talking about Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku etc and the question is, where do you as a marketer spend your time building your community?

It is foolish to even consider having the time to build communities at every popular site and then maintain them all every single day; you’d be spreading yourself very thin indeed. 

What you want to do is compare the popular sites and see which ones are of most value by the amount of traffic they get. Before we go on I must stress that this is only one way of gaining information, you need to test test test.

 Below you will see that I have gone to www.Alexa.com and in the boxes provided, typed in three websites that are of interest to me.

For this example I’ve compared Plurk.com, Jaiku.com and Twitter.com. Just looking at the graph you can see that 1 Twitter has a massive reach, more internet users are on Twitter than the other similar micro-blogging communities, and 2 Jaiku and Plurk are virtually level pegging.

This information would suggest that Twitter is easily the better place to concentrate your time and marketing efforts. Like I stated above, a website may be more popular but not have the sort of community that fits a ‘marketers’ needs so you will have to test and test again before you know which site is the better one for your needs.

With any site I would like to stress that you should be looking to build a community, a network, reciprocal relationships and NOT just aiming to sell your product as your success rate will be NIL!

You can use this method to compare forums to see how popular they are and blogging networks, well, you can compare any site you wish.

Dave Guindon has a very neat video series where he teaches you how to create your very own Twitter background for personal branding (you can promote your websites and affiliate promotions this way) and he shows you exactly how he finds the best people to follow and how to gain a wealth of followers. You can see my personal Twitter page at www.twitter.com/karlfoxley and you can see Dave’s at www.twitter.com/daveguindon.  To check out his video series then head-on-over to Daves Online Videos.

To your success, 

Karl