**by Greg Finn**
One of the most common questions I hear is �But how can I make money
by using social media?� Well, if you are selling goods and can offer
up some great specials, there are some direct ways that social media
deal sites can help you promote your product to hungry customers.
Here are a few examples of social media voting deal sites. The main
factor that drives the content for these sites is user generated deals
and user voting that decides whether an offer becomes popular or not.
Deals Plus <http://dealspl.us/>
This is an extremely well built site by Ben Chui
<http://www.wisebread.com/the-man-behind-the-bargains-an-interview-with-ben-chui-founder-of-bensbargains-net>
, the man behind Bensbargins.net one of the oldest deal sites on the
web. This site allows you to vote by plusing deals that users submit
<http://dealspl.us/submit>
. If a deal gets enough votes then it is promoted from the upcoming
section <http://dealspl.us/cheap-deals>
to the main page, or Popular Deals section. There is also a �top 5
deals� section on the homepage for the most voted upon deals of the
day. Users can leave comments, and the site features a nice variety of
categories for easy browsing.
Woot Deals <http://deals.woot.com/>
Deals is a newly launched section of woot.com <http://www.woot.com/>
, the most popular �deal of the day� site. This site has a selection
of sponsored deals at the top and user submitted community deals
section underneath. One of the nice features of the site is that any
user with a Woot login <http://deals.woot.com/faq#q12>
can quickly vote, comment or submit deals to the site. The deals
with the most votes are promoted to the front page. Users can also
gain reputation points to build up their profile.
Dealigg <http://www.dealigg.com/>
This site is a scaled down voting site, that again has an upcoming
section and a front page for the best deals of the day. Commenting is
enabled (although not many users comment) and there is also a top
deals of the day column on the right hand side.
Dealighted <http://www.dealighted.com/>
This site is very similar to the others, as you the highest rated
deals from the upcoming section <http://www.dealighted.com/all>
make it to the popular section. However, this site actually
aggregates deals from major deal forums (slickdeals
<http://slickdeals.net>
, fatwallet <http://www.fatwallet.com/>
) and allows users to vote. Dealighted also includes information on
the views of each deal, and also offers some bookmarking options so
you can easily save deals. In the left hand column there is a �best of
the best� section for the hottest deals, and there is also a heavily
used forum <http://www.dealighted.com/forum/>
section for the community to interact.
While these sites may only appeal to a niche group of marketers, they
can be extremely effective in moving products and selling more stuff.
A few things to think about when participating in these communities:
Don�t be too promotional. Submit more than just your own deals and
really try to be part of the community.
Make sure the deal is easy to see from the submission. Trying to be
crafty and only showing percentages or generic sale information won�t
get you noticed. Make sure you show the sale pricing and the MSRP.
Offer affiliate commission. Having an incentive for site owners to
make money is one of the best ways to get visibility on manually
selected deal sites and won�t hurt your chances to get promoted to the
homepage of these social voting deal sites.
Use coupon codes. Codes allow for you to have more tracking for your
sales so you can really find out how well a sale worked by collecting
all orders attributed to a promotion. So if you submit a code for
social deal sites and it gets tossed around to other coupon-based
sites like retailmenot <http://www.retailmenot.com/>
, you will still have the tracking to attribute all sales to that
original code.
Have a really good sale. Even if it is a loss leader, the better the
deal you have, the better your chances are to get visibility. While
you might not break the bank selling one product, you will have
customers shopping on your site, and if you give them a good
experience
<http://searchengineland.com/12-social-media-new-years-resolutions-for-2010-31258>
they might become a raving fan.
So for your next sale, keep these deal sites in mind and try to kick
start your sales using social media!
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the author, and not
necessarily Search Engine Land.
Greg Finn
http://searchengineland.com/author/debra-mastal
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