These days, you’re just not “with the program” if you’re not involved with social bookmarking. Recently I have been trying to increase my Plug-in Profit Site’s traffic numbers to a certain daily level, and one way to do that is by getting into one of the newer internet trends – social bookmarking.
Social bookmarking is a neat way of saving websites, articles, and blog posts that you consider your favorites. Then you can easily get back to these posts, share these same sites with others on the web, add other saved sites to your list of saved sites, or subscribe to someone’s blog for example.
Usually we bookmark pages we like on our own computers, but social bookmarking allows us to save them on the web for others to see as well. The way we do this is by creating a title, description, and tags (which are the keywords we are targeting) for the pages we want to save. This should generate some new traffic for you fairly quickly from others who use social bookmarking sites and are looking for articles based on the tags you have chosen.
If you own a Plug-in Profit Site, it’s easy to start using social bookmarking sites. If you do a Google search for “social bookmarking sites” for example, you will find a list of the top social bookmarking sites. One of the most famous ones is called “del.icio.us”, and other popular ones are “Digg”, “Yahoo”, and “Furl”.
It doesn’t take long to set these up. But first you have to go to those social bookmarking sites, and create a free account with a username. Once you’ve done that, you are free to use the service to find topics that interest you, or post your own favorite pages.
When you set up an account, you will likely be given a choice of buttons you can add to your toolbar that you can simply copy and paste. Then when you visit a site you want to bookmark publicly, you can simply click on that button on your toolbar, type in a title, description, and tags for that page, and voila! You have saved a page that others can also access!
On your Plug-in Profit Site, there are a few ways to get more traffic using social bookmarking sites. One way is to write quality, original content on your blog, such as posting your own article. On your social bookmarking service, you should be able to find a piece of code to add to your Plug-in Profit Site’s HTML code which will be like the button on your toolbar for the different services.
For example, on my blog, I have four buttons at the end of each blog post which I added to my blog’s template code. These four buttons would lead a reader who like my post to Digg, Furl, Yahoo, and del.icio.us, where they can add a title, description, and tags to submit my post and bring me more traffic.
The nice thing for Plug-in Profit Sites, or any website for that matter is that it’s okay to do this for your own article posts, as long as you do not spam the social bookmarking services.
You don’t really want to send each and every post you make to your blog to one of these services in the attempt to get more traffic when maybe not all your posts are fantastically written, original content. You want to provide something of value to your readers just as you would do in the discussion forums you frequent, and not over-do it.
Some article directory sites now are allowing you to “Digg” your own articles. Again, if you do it slowly and in moderation, you won’t likely be accused of spamming. Be careful because if you do go overboard, some people have been known to get their websites banned from services like Digg.
Another way to boost your Plug-in Profit Site traffic with social bookmarking sites is to actually get yourself involved with these services and use them the way they are intended to be used – don’t just “Digg” your own posts. Find other posts that you like and add a comment, or save them in your own archived lists.
Last but not least, whenever you write an article or blog post for your Plug-in Profit Site business, be sure to use Technorati or other tags in your author bio-box at the end that link back to your main website. Look up information on “tag and ping” to find out the correct format and you will get more traffic quickly!
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I’ve been getting really excited lately about the whole social bookmarking trend in internet marketing. This is because I’m on a traffic kick, testing out new things to bring my website more traffic – something all webmasters want to do.
Social bookmarking is one of the top techniques that you can use to promote your website and build more traffic. If you’re not involved, it’s time to get with the program!
Social bookmarking started for me when I joined a few of the top social bookmarking sites. You may think this is all you need to do to get involved, but trust me – there is more to social bookmarking than simply joining the social bookmarking circles!
The first thing to do is visit a few of the top social bookmarking sites: Digg, del.ici.ous, Furl, and Yahoo, just for example. You can do a Google search for these to find them if you’ve never been there before.
Then, sign up for a free account with each of these. When signing up for an account, you will have the opportunity to select buttons that you can add to the end of each of your blog posts. This will allow readers of your blog to “Digg” your post over at the Digg social bookmarking site.
When someone clicks on your Digg button, it will bring them to the Digg site, where they would login with their account username and password. The blog post or article would then appear as a URL, and the person who clicked “Digg” will have the opportunity to post a comment about your post.
This can do nothing but good things for your website. If everyone gives your post a Digg, think of all the links in Digg you will have pointing back to your site. This will certainly increase your traffic when someone goes onto Digg looking for a post on a topic that interests them.
This is where I initially went wrong in my social bookmarking efforts. You don’t want to stop after just joining these social bookmarking sites and leaving a button on your blog posts for everyone else to find and click. You want to get actively involved in the social bookmarking process by becoming an active member of these sites.
What I mean by being “active” is that you want to visit these sites, and find topics of interest to you, or topics that relate to your online business. Once you find other posts on your topic of interest, then you have the opportunity to bookmark, or “favourite” those posts, and add a comment.
Doing this can really increase your traffic, as evidenced by my own increasing website stats just by doing this one thing alone. If you “favourite” other people’s sites and they “favourite” your site and you each comment on other’s posts, then you will soon have a network of links pointing back to your site.
This important piece of the social bookmarking puzzle is something I didn’t even realize myself until I got involved with my latest social bookmarking site called “Squidoo”. Apparently, Google just loves Squidoo at the moment, so I jumped on the bandwagon along with others I know joining the site.
The great thing about Squidoo and sites like MySpace is that you can create a “lens” which is just like a mini web page, or landing page that gives visitors to that lens a quick overview of what you have to offer. This will hopefully entice them to click your links and bring you more traffic.
I’ve made darn sure this time that after creating my lens I did not just leave it at that. I have visited other lenses on my topic of interest, added those lenses to my “favourites” list, and sent comments to others in hopes that others will visit my links as well. So far, this has increased my traffic very quickly and I may even reach a personal goal thanks to this technique alone!
Next, I am going to try creating more than one lens and link one to the other, which will hopefully entice visitors to read one of my lenses, and then click on to the other, increasing my traffic even more!
The thing to watch out for when using social bookmarking sites is that you don’t want to be a spammer who is out there just to get your links seen and clicked. As with anything in internet marketing, like forum posts, no one likes someone who is just there to advertise themselves. You want to offer valuable information, and make a valuable contribution by offering good advice, and great content.
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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.
If you found this article helpful you might like to visit http://grasp-the-nettle.com for more free articles on Internet marketing to help you master the net. You might also like to sign up to my FREE Internet Marketing Start-Up newsletter, which comes complete with a library of Internet marketing ebooks (worth a total of $136.75) for you to download free of charge. David Hurley lives in Japan, where he works as an English language consultant, editor, and Internet marketer.
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With the popularity of social networking sites, there has been a surge of social bookmarking sites too. Social networks revolve around the maintenance of relationships between members of the community. Social bookmarking, on the other hand, is responsible for connecting content that are made by its members. Because of its connectivity function, social bookmarking sites provide another business tool for site owners.
It is no longer uncommon to see icons at the bottom of blog posts and articles. When you hover the mouse, website names like Technorati, Digg, Furl or Delicious pop out. These are social bookmarking sites. A social bookmarking site is pretty much the same as an actual bookmark. Bookmarks are made to indicate a page or passage so it will be easy to locate. The same purpose goes for social bookmarking icons. A website can be marked for convenience. Others can also be directed to a site using a social bookmark.
There are many forms of social bookmarking sites. Squidoo deals with creating lenses that highlights a particular niche of the lens owner. Flickr’s specialization is on photos and images. Others deal with movie or music reviews.
For the business owner to utilize social bookmarks there is a need to choose the appropriate site. Always remember that traffic to the business site is the number one purpose. The content or information that is placed on the social bookmarking site should be interesting enough to let readers click on the website URL. The objective is to have the readers mark your page and make comments or inquiries. People will be interested in updates because they are informative and useful.
Content is very important. A business owner can have a following of readers and even have a higher search engine ranking because of the traffic. In order to have good content, visit popular bookmarking sites and observe the most popular sites that are being viewed. Analyze what others are reading and why they find the sites interesting and informative. Visit competitive sites and investigate how they are doing content and presentation. Be observant on what readers are commenting and what type of information that they are asking for.
With the use of social bookmarking sites, a business owner can increase visibility and makes it easy to get prospective clients. By adding social bookmarking icons to blogs or websites, it is an effective way to bring traffic to the business website and a strong possibility that the reader will add the URL to the favorite list on the browser.
Therese Prentice is a Social Networking Expert, Joint Venture Broker, Certified Marketing and Business Coach Tools and Resources for Lifestyle Entrepreneurs… http://www.socialnetworkingqueen.com http://www.inthelivingroom.com http://www.theoutsourcesquad.com
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SEO. Video marketing. Facebook. Article marketing. What is the very best Internet marketing trick you have up your sleeve? Each one of these as well as a plethora of others can bring great results, but there is one Internet marketing technique that seems to result in high search engine page ranks with very little effort sooner than the others. Got your attention now? It’s social bookmarking.
Sure, it’s been around for almost a decade now, but social bookmarking has really only caught on in the last few years. And even now there are many Internet marketers who just aren’t sure it is worth the effort. However, the ones who ARE using it know that it is totally worth the effort.
What’s so great about social bookmarking services?
These websites attract the search engine spiders. For whatever reason, Google and other search engines love the bookmarking sites. IMers have reported that a website registered with a top social bookmarking service can receive a higher search engine ranking within days-as opposed to weeks and even months like other methods.
Furthermore, social bookmarking is easy to use. Once you decide on a few online services to try, you will see for yourself how simple it really is. The learning curve is low, which means you are not going to have to spend hours figuring this thing out. Register on a few sites and then spend a little time learning about each site’s unique features and then start submitting your sites and articles.
Not sure where to start? You may want to spend some time comparing the different services to determine which one is right for you. Here are the top ten social bookmarking sites to get you started:
Digg.com
Propeller.com
StumbleUpon.com
Reddit.com
Del.icio.us.com
Newsvine.com
Fark.com
Blinklist.com
Clipmarks.com
Shoutwire.com
Social Bookmarking Tips
If you are convinced social bookmarking is for you (and you should be!) signing up for one or more of the above services is obviously your first step. What comes next?
The social aspect comes in when you submit your site to the service, and the search engine spiders begin to crawl your site. Your site is likely to then achieve a higher page rank, which will ultimately increase your site traffic.
If your website contains desired information or something that is of interest to a particular group, you may find that your website gets rated highly within the social bookmarking service. This can result in the kind of site traffic every IMer desires-targeted traffic.
While submitting your sites to the social bookmarking website is important, exchanging social bookmarks with others can really maximize your efforts. It multiplies the times your links are out there for others to see. Plus the more votes your bookmarked pages receive, the more traffic you are likely to entertain.
You no longer have a good reason to shy away from social bookmarking. It is a great tool to add to your IM arsenal, especially if you are looking for site traffic sooner than later. As Internet marketing becomes more and more competitive, it pays to have a variety of marketing methods, especially one that plugs you into the world of social marketing so quickly and effectively.
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