Targeted List Building With Social Bookmarking and Networking

If you’re looking for a way to get rich from home and you want to run or already run your own Internet business, one of the best tools you can make use of is social bookmarking. Social bookmarking is a method of social networking to increase your flow of targeted traffic to your website(s). It has been made possible by the Internet.

Social networking is nothing new. It is a method of finding more qualified prospects for your business. In the business world before and outside of the Internet, networking involves joining groups such as a local racquetball club or anything that revolves around something that interests you, and then making friends and making yourself and your services known within those groups over time. By interacting in a friendly way with people with mutually shared interests, you build trust and a reputation for expertise in your professional area. As people within the groups become convinced that they might need or want your services, they come to you willingly for help; these same people are also far more likely to give you referrals, which along with repeat sales are the lifeblood of all business owners.

With social bookmarking, you blog or you or write articles and get these articles published at online content sites; then you bookmark your blog entries, articles you write for your website(s), and articles you publish at content sites at bookmarking websites. There is quite an abundance of these and their number continues to grow as their value becomes better known and they come more and more into demand.

The bookmarking websites are places where you share content that you find useful, well-written, or informative. These sites facilitate linking back to the original content and most of them also facilitate commentary. These sites are designed to give people all over the Net access to quality information in a targeted, organized way; consequently they virtually all have categories under which you index your content. You can bookmark any content that you like, but in this case it goes without saying that the content you are bookmarking is your own.

The idea is to create social “buzz” about yourself through your content at these networking bookmark sites and get people to access the links to your content, blogs, and website(s). By indexing your content using placement under appropriate site categories and adding keyword tags, you begin to draw the attention of people who might be interested in your offerings. You can greatly enhance your visibility by taking part in the socializing aspects of these bookmarking sites, by which you make online friends and add and get subscribers to your bookmarks and content. These people don’t buy a subscription, but they do become automatic regular followers of your posts, getting them “hooked” on you and greatly upping the chances that they will eventually become a customer.

Targeted traffic is vastly more valuable than traffic you get from the “shotgun approach”. It is a great waste of time to offer your services to just anybody when you could instead find people who already probably have some degree of interest in what you offer. In business, time is money, and when you waste time you lose money. But by constantly writing on a topic such as “how to get rich working from home” and socially bookmarking and networking with your content online, you become known, trusted, and seen as relevant to a certain group of people.

One of the most effective social bookmarking and networking websites is StumbleUpon. This is both a networking site and a web browser plug-in where you download the StumbleUpon toolbar to your desktop and it becomes part of your web browser. You find different websites when you click the “Stumble!” button on the toolbar. The website chooses which new page to show based on your ratings of previous pages, ratings by your online site friends, and by the ratings of other Internet users who have similar interests using a “thumbs-up/thumbs-down” display system. It also has one-click blogging built into it. The ramifications for your business should be obvious.

Another great site is Yahoo! Answers. Here you create a profile and then answer people’s questions on specific topics. (You can also ask them.) Eventually you can become a Trusted Reporter for frequently sharing valuable answers, which greatly increases your profile at the site. You can post links to your website(s) in your answers and your profile, and post parts from your articles as answers. Yahoo! Answers is more frequently used all the time because people feel they are getting “friendly” and “earthy” advice from people with real experiences, making it a perfect fit for a social networker.

For targeting youthful prospects (teens and adults under 25), the fast-rising BEBO is perfect. BEBO is modeled on and similar to Facebook and early in 2008 was named the top performing Website of its kind in a report published in ‘Computing Which?’. The editor commented, “No matter what age you are or what interests you have, there is a social networking site out there for you.”

Yes, in fact, there is–and you as an Internet marketer want to take advantage of all the opportunities made possible with social bookmarking and networking.

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Social Bookmarking Software – Socialbot V 3.0

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.

Want to Live a much longer life?