I love these three articles by John Ryan at his site Buyersteps.com

If you want success in your online business, website or blog using what you’ll learn from Franco Gonzalez or Bob DeCecco in theTRAFFICplan, you’ll undoubtedly start to come across some, if not most of these sites.

Learn of them, use them, capitalize on them.

A Cheat Sheet to Sites We Should Know: Part One

There is so much going on in social media, it’s difficult to keep up. So I’m starting a series on different aspects of the social media landscape. We start with social networking and bookmarking sites. I tried to focus on the sites with the most traction so the articles don’t get unwieldy. If the reader feels like I missed a social networking or bookmarking site with more traffic along with stickiness, please let me know (john@buyersteps.com). I’ll be happy to update the list if I feel your argument has merit. Also, if I made any mistakes, please let me know. There were a lot of numbers here and I learned long ago that I am not infallible by any stretch of the imagination.

On the market research part of this, I used Alexa, Compete and Quantcast to reflect sometimes similar metrics and sometimes differing opinions. I put some description of these services at the end. Some of Quantcast’s estimates were rough which means the website hasn’t registered with Quantcast. The demographic profiles of the users also came from Quantcast so if they use a rough estimate, please weigh that into your analysis. I hope all sites register with Quantcast soon to improve all transparency for everyone. Congratulations to everyone on the list, it’s not easy to get this much traffic, that’s the first hurdle.
http://www.buyersteps.com/profiles/blogs/the-az-of-social-media

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