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By -, March 13, 2010 12:39 pm

Most people that have websites know that one of the best ways to market it is by back links and social bookmarking. By definition, social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of meta data. The concept of shared online bookmarks dates back to April 1996 with the launch of itList the features of which included public and private bookmarks. Within the next three years, online bookmark services became competitive, with venture-backed companies such as Backflip, Blink, Clip2, ClickMarks, HotLinks, and others entering the market.

One of the main advantages of SMB is the fact that a lot of these social bookmarking sites have a lot of regular users and traffic which means that information on them tends to get better positioning. Also, links to your own website or blog when posted to a site like MySpace creates back links. Obviously search engines really value links to your site and it’s an indication of the popularity of your site. This also allows you to have a higher PR (page rank).

So how is something like this achieved? Well you could do it manually, one site at a time, over a period of time, but this can be quite time consuming! Another terrific alternative would be to get social bookmarking software which would pretty much automate every aspect. This would not only be easier but also less time consuming. A sort of, set it and forget it deal. This software not only automates social bookmarking but also automates other things such as news postings and video postings. It allows you to have complete control over the entire process without getting “slapped” on the wrist by Google. It does this by setting your back links at a “human” pace which is absolutely essential if you don’t want to raise red flags with Google!

For the amount of back links you would ultimately get with a piece of software like this, the price tag is well worth it. This isn’t saying you are going to have to pay hundreds of dollars for it however. So far, I’ve seen sites offering this software for around $197, which in my opinion is a really nice price for what you get. Remember, you won’t have to sit there for hours on end anymore, and you can simply set it and forget it!

If you would like more information on this type of software or more information about social bookmarking it’s a good idea to visit the following websites:

Wikipedia

Social Marker

YouTube

Top Rank Blog

Social Marking

If you would like to read some books, you can also visit places like Amazon and look into some titles, such as these:

- The Truth About Profiting from Social Networking (Truth About) by Patrice-Anne Rutledge

- Plug Your Business! Marketing on MySpace, YouTube, blogs and pod-casts and other Web 2.0 social networks by Steve Weber

- Social Marketing Success in Under 30 Minutes a Day by Andrea Kalli

- 7 Smart Ways to Use Social Bookmarking by Online Business Institute

- MySpace Marketing Secrets! by Rodney D. Jones

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By -, March 12, 2010 12:29 am

If you have ever investigated the various means of driving traffic to your website you’ll know that using social bookmarking sites is definitely one of the most effective.  The problem is that it is so very time consuming which was why I was pleased to discover some social bookmarking software – Socialbot version 3.

Social bookmark sites are a step beyond your favourites folder – they are online bookmarks that users can manage easily and more importantly share with other users.   The advantages of having your sites listed in the social bookmarking sites are numerous but they include obtaining backlinks from these bookmark sites to any sites you have listed, exposes these websites to other users of each sites (some of them have millions of users) and just generally just brings in more traffic.

However all this comes at a cost – to manually create accounts and add individual bookmarks to your sites can be extremely time consuming.   This is something you have to regularly put aside days for if you have any number of sites – believe me I’ve done it manually for some time but still think it’s worth the effort.  One of the other benefits to being listed in these bookmarking sites is the speed at which your pages get indexed from them – extremely quickly !

So Socialbot is a software program that runs under windows and automates many of the tasks that are involved in creating links to these bookmarking sites.    Here’s some of it’s features in no particular order -

Website Spidering – point Socialbot at one of your websites and will spider the whole site and list all the urls.  This is extremely useful as you can then simply select which sites to add.

Currently supports over 120 English language Social boookmarking sites

Automatically submits each selected page to any site you select

Allows multiple profiles – this is extremely important as you can submit to multiple accounts on each bookmark site – more links

The software installs very easily and is an attractive well written product.  I first tried spidering one of my main web sites and it scanned and listed the 200 pages very quickly.  There is also a filter setting which will allow to you specify pages to ignore in the spidering process.

You get a long list of web pages listed under each url ready to select and submit. The first thing you must do unfortunately is create user accounts at each of the social bookmarking sites as this is not done automatically.   This is quite time consuming – all the pages are listed and you just click and register at each site but it does take some time to do 120 of them – took me about 2 hours I think. 

To be  honest there’s no real way around this – I have used some very expensive software (about $900) which did automate this but it created  random user accounts which mostly ended up getting banned on the bookmark sites.   So you should build in this effort before you use socialbot – however this is a one off job for each profile so it’s not too bad.

After I had registered at all the social bookmarking sites I decided to use the software to start adding my links.   I specifically selected a group of my web pages from the spidered list and then selected all the social bookmarking sites.

Then it was just a matter of pressing the submit button – socialbot then went to each bookmarking site and registered each link.   Even automated it took quite a while but the advantage was I just let it get on with it whilst I did other things.

Socialbot registered my selected web pages and I logged in to a few random sites just to see they were all listed.  It’s a very useful program and well worth the investment I made in the product.   Remember though only add a few pages at a time to these sites – don’t spam them – I will never generally add more than 10 pages a day but I do use Socialbot now pretty much everyday to add mine and my customers pages.

The process definitely boosted my traffic and I’ve started to see quite a lot of visitors from these social bookmarking sites.  One of the most instant benefits I saw was indexing – any page added seem to get indexed almost immediately and my indexed pages under Yahoo and MSN jumped up almost overnight – I have hundreds more pages indexed now.

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By -, March 11, 2010 6:01 am

Social bookmarking has been around for as long as the Internet has existed. If you found a website or resource that you really liked and wanted others to know about it, you told your friends. The quickest way to tell them was to send them an email or post a message on a forum containing the link to that website so they could look at it and add it to their browser favorites list.

This marked it so it could be found again in the future. That was the old way to spread the word about the things that were new or exciting on the Internet. Now, there are some easier and much more effective social bookmarking tools you can use to get the word out about new things.

Social networking involves “tagging” a website of particular interest so that it can be easily accessed. The tag shows up in two places; one being the user’s profile or website, the second being the original homepage of the tagging bookmark. The tag can appear on a list of favorite websites posted on a blog or website, or it can be a special website designed specifically for these tags, called a bookmarking network. Examples of popular bookmarking networks are twitter, facebook, squidoo, flikr, and wetpaint.

Visitors to those sites can then rate the URL value according to how often a search occurs or that link is clicked on. Popular bookmarks remain at the top while less favorable links and spam are lost to new searches. Social bookmarking can be monitored for trends in the market and is used to introduce new and better products and ideas.

Many consumers, whether they realize it or not, use social bookmarking everyday to decide what products are worth investing in, where to shop, where to eat and other consumer decisions. This is because when they do a search online, the most popular searchable things that have had multiple tags come up first in the list. Tags can be a good way for consumers to gauge whether or not a product or company is legit by who manages the feeds and how often the website is tagged.

Here is a list of some great social bookmarking tools you can use today to boost your website visits and get the word out about new items of interest:

Twitter. Do you twitter? This seems like the most asked question recently by social networking people. This free social networking site works by people who become members and post short updates as they wish on anything in general. It’s advertised as a “service for family, friends and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick , frequent answers to the questions; What are you doing” (Twitter.com) The update feeds can then be posted on the person’s blogs, websites or anyplace else where they want people to know about what they’re doing and talking about. People often post their articles or other tidbits about their businesses with links included to get others to visit their website.

Facebook. This is an international social networking site whereby members sign up free and can post messages and updates whenever they wish. If they include links to their websites or other online items, members can go there to read more about them. Feeds are then available for adding to blogs or websites for real time updates. Facebook is growing in popularity among people who were typically participating in other social networking sites like MySpace, but its attracting more career- and business-oriented people.

Squidoo. This neat little social bookmarking site has nothing to do with sealife. In fact, not only is it a great way for people to interact and post updates, but it allows users to create simple websites called “lenses” for others to read about their special interests or topics. So if you are promoting a certain niche interest, an idea or something related to your business, you can create a page to promote this idea and include links back to your sites. Squidoo offers its members additional tools like forums to come up with ideas to promote their pages and highlights popular lenses all over the Internet.

Flikr. If you’re into sharing more than words and like to include images as part of your networking efforts, then you may like Flikr. This social bookmarking site allows users to post images for others to review. Users can also talk about their experiences by joining either private or public groups. So families can use Flikr to share personal photos, or public groups can share images and talk about things of interest. Each photo is assigned a tag which can be placed on user’s websites and blogs. Flikr rates images according to how many times they’ve been viewed and this list is posted on the community section for all to see.

Wetpaint. This is a Wiki format social bookmarking site that allows members to create a website about anything they are interested in or want to promote. It’s a similar concept to Squidoo, except that it is expanded to include the ability to integrate popular feeds into both your Wetpaint site and your blogs or other websites seamlessly. Wetpaint is supported by not only all the major search engines, but also by all primary news feeds and searches conducted by Internet users. This opens up the possibility that someone who may just be doing a general search will land on your Wetpaint site.

There are so many great tools out there that you can use to get the word out about your ideas and share your blogs and websites more effectively. In just a few minutes, you can be signed up and hooked into the best of what the Internet has to offer. Be sure to check out the above social bookmarking sites to get the most out of these services and increase your website’s searchability.

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By -, March 10, 2010 12:25 pm

Social bookmarking has finally got a foothold. Social bookmarking is being seen by many marketing experts as a cost effective method of augmenting distribution of content, branding and image building and marketing. According to a survey, it has been seen that almost 28% of users on the Internet on a normal day have been tagging online content while 7% of users on the Internet have been either tagging or categorizing content. This method is being seen as a highly successful idea and this can be seen with the amount of success achieved by http://Del.icio.us.

Del.icio.us had acquired their first million visitors in 3 years but they acquired the next 2 million visitors within a span of 6 months. So what is social bookmarking? Social bookmarking can be compared to linking. Social bookmarks are basically links that help an internet user to classify, share, store and even search for content using a process called tagging. Tags just make it easier for internet users to find the content they are looking for. You can apply social bookmarks to content or information in different formats like PDF, video, blogs, websites, images etc.

Some of the top social bookmarking websites include StumbleUpon, http://del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks and Furl. Reddit and Dig are two social news websites, which are also considered as social bookmarking sites. The idea is to create positive content about your services, products or overall business and then optimizing the content on these social bookmarking websites.

Social bookmarking is an interesting concept that can be used for enhancing the process of marketing and promotions. What marketers can really do is allow sharing of content by the visitors. As a result, the bookmarks encourage a kind of functionality that is most often referred to as forward-to-a-friend process. Apart from this, marketers can also post their own content on different social bookmarking websites, which will initiate movement of traffic to their sites. In a sense, this is an online version word of mouth advertising where surfers share their bookmarks.

But for social bookmarking to be a real success, you need to have engaging or interactive content, which users will find useful, interesting and entertaining. It should be the kind of content that most users can recommend to others or forward it. The content should attract users and this is where creativity plays an important role. You will have to look from the perspective of an internet user to gauge what he or she might be looking for and then provide it. There are certain tips you can follow to make social bookmarking a marketing success for your online business and they are:

Understand the requirement of your audience and try to focus on topics that will interest your readers, audience or users.

Content should be interesting and yet easy to read. The more heavy words and sentences you use, the more difficult and unfriendly it will be for the reader. Look at the blogs – most blogs have reader friendly and more personalized content. Apart from this, you can also add bold and colored or highlighted fonts to assist in increasing readability.

The title should be interesting and hint at what the article is all about. If you want to provide information only on Pay-per-click then there is no point having a title like “The best internet marketing tools.” Readers will think that this article encompasses all the methods and it will be useless for a reader who wants specialized information about Pay-per-click. On the other hand if you have a title like “Less money, more traffic using Pay-per-click” This title will attract the attention of readers looking for specialized information on Pay-per-click and other readers who want information on internet marketing methods.

Keywords are extremely important in bringing traffic to your website. Use of keywords is a key factor that drives search engine optimization. If you don’t use the required amount of keywords then internet users or readers might not be able to find your article using the Google or Yahoo search engines.

Using a content format that will ensure readability is important. If the size of your font is too small then it might be difficult for most of the readers to appreciate the content however important the information provided by you may be. If you want users to tag your content then it is important that you place buttons at the top or the bottom of your article. You can also avoid clutter by including bookmark option of only those social bookmarking communities that are best linked to your business.

These are some of the ways by which, you can use social bookmarking to your advantage.

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By -, March 8, 2010 11:54 pm

If you are new to Internet marketing you might not be aware of how much social marketing sites can do to boost the traffic coming to your Internet marketing start-up business. You may not even be aware of what social networking and social bookmarking sites are, or how to utilize them.

Sure, social sites give you a lot of interactivity and allow users to personalize their sites, compile a list of favourite links, videos, music, photos, documents and share it all with friends and visitors, but how exactly does that help you develop your Internet marketing start-up business?

Above all, you should be aware that social media marketing sites fall into two basic categories, bookmarking sites and networking sites, so you need to be clear about what you want to do?

Social Bookmarking Sites

Social bookmarking sites allow you to build and organize your favourite links (i.e. bookmarks) AND you can choose to restrict them to selected friends or make them public and share them with everybody on the Internet.

The big advantage of social bookmarking is that your favourite links are no longer tied to one specific browser accessible from just one computer in one location.

Social bookmarking services enable users to save bookmarks on a remote web server which can be accessed anywhere where there is an online connection.

Social bookmarking sites usually categorize links with a “tagging” system which allows users to choose keywords with which to “tag” their bookmarks. Sites can then be retrieved via the tags.

You may invite visitors to bookmark your posts. You can do this by adding a button to your page that links through to Stumbleupon, or Digg, or TwitThis and so on.

However, there are so many social bookmarking services, that if you added all their buttons you’d end up with more buttons than content on your page! Instead, use a service like addthis.com, which places one button on your site for a wide range of social bookmarking sites.

Social Networking Sites

Social networking sites offer a convenient method of connecting with people who share similar interests to you.

Sites like Facebook and MySpace allow you to post your advertisements and promote your products, as long as you do not simply (and stupidly) send out spam. Traffic will build on any site that has original, good quality, regularly updated content.

MySpace or Facebook?

It has recently been noised abroad that MySpace is no good for Internet marketing, but that is not so. It was simply a case of too many Internet marketers not knowing who their audience was.

The point is that MySpace tends to attract a younger age bracket with less money to spend than does Facebook. Get to know the sites and adapt your content to each one, don’t simply post the same stuff to both.

One other reason why social networking sites are sometimes dismissed as not being any good for business is that some people do little more than set up a profile. Then they get stuck, don’t know what to do, do nothing. Merely being there is not enough! Find ways to communicate with the people who are there on their terms, not yours.

Go careful, though, that you don’t go overboard with the crazy applications and the “late night partying confessions” stuff if it is not the sort of thing you want your clients to see!

Whereas social bookmarking sites are simply sites for you to collect and organize your favourite links, social networking sites, being more sociable, require more time and regular fresh content updates. With social networking sites you have to work on your image!

Search Engines Love Web 2:0!

Another reason why Internet marketers should build a presence on both social bookmarking and social networking sites is because search engines LOVE them!

Links posted on such sites are regularly followed by search engine spiders. So, by building up your links on these sites, your website backlinks will grow, and so will your search engine rankings, which is what you need if your Internet marketing start-up is to survive, grow and thrive.