The magic art of seeding posts

Just so you can get more fully into the Social media loop, and take advantage of all those now abundant opportunities to put your stuff in front of all kinds of surfers, here’s a great overview of that.

Earlier this week I ran a post on an excellent article I found on successful blog launches. Yet, their comments on seeding your posts to bring in traffic from social book marking sites was so great, I decided to pull it out and run it right here. (You really need to read this launch article if you haven’t – it rocks!)

Here’s what they wrote:

Hundreds of thousands of content hungry readers are using social bookmarking sites every day, and many track specific keywords. By seeding your best articles, and by using a mixture of both popular and specific keywords as tags, you can bring a new crop of readers to your site on a weekly basis. The best way to select the tags for your article is to think of social bookmarking sites as a form of search engine. By including both broad keywords and narrower keywords you are certain to get a blend of both low quality/high volume readers (AdSense baby!) and high quality/low volume readers (links). The following is a list of the top 10 bookmarking sites which you should submit your top articles to:

1. Digg: Mammoth traffic; tech-focused; savvy users

2. Delicious: Pretty big traffic; somewhat tech/design-focused; a lot of bloggers browse Delicious for “things to link to”

3. Netscape: Pretty big traffic; a mix of topics; less savvy users

4. Stumbleupon: Medium traffic; weird stuff/literary articles; normal users.

5. Yahoo MyWeb: Medium traffic; general interest; normal users

6. Reddit: Lower traffic; politics/random stuff; normal users.

7. Furl: Lower traffic; tech-focused/some random stuff; normal users

8. Newsvine: Lower traffic; politics and news; normal users.

9. Lookmarks: Low traffic; gets spammed a lot; less savvy users

10. Blinklist: Low traffic; gets spammed a lot; less savvy users

Anyone have others to add to the list? Or more seeding ideas of your own? Has this worked for you?

Web Video Superstar: 34 million people can’t be wrong

Have you seen Jud Laipply’s ‘Evolution of Dance’ a web-based video on YouTube.com? Well, if not, you’re missing a treat, unlike the 34,743,985 people who’d seen it as of this writing.

Jud, a motivational speaker and actor, basically does a 6-minute video that takes us through the entire history of bad dance trends since the sixties, including the Pony, the chicken dance, the YMCA craze and an excellent Michael Jackson knock off. It’s hilarious stuff … really!

And it brilliantly demonstrates just why video sites like youtube and Google video are the new eye/brain candy on the Net. It’s just so fun to sit there and be entertained for six minutes – right at your computer – while you work.

So much easier, somehow, than carving out time to watch ‘your show’ on the T.V., or wade through a thousand car commercials, or flip vacantly through the 540 options trying to even find something to watch.

In this way, a friend (usually) sends you a video, you tune in and become mesmorized. A great little break! Please note, however, that much of what’s up on youtube, the video hosting site where many of these little videos are found, is junk. Seven second videos of guys bumping into doors, slick videos of surfers getting drunk, that kind of thing.

But … Jud has proven just how slickly this can work if you have something that’s truly great. His video is the #1 most watched video on youtube, where 30 million videos are downloaded every day. It’s been bookmarked as a favorite more than 90,000 times. And the media has noticed – CNN, Good Morning America, all the biggies are courting this guy.

So far he’s being touted by a big time speaker bureau and has a regular web-based ‘TV’ show in the works. Finding ways to monetize isn’t hard when you have this much popularity.

I’m interested in waiting and watching this guy, and learning at his knee.