Web 2.0, the ability of the user to contribute content and share information with other users, is adding new methods and strategies to effective internet marketing. Effective internet marketing in this environment is dependent upon having the users get excited about your product or content and want to share it with others. The fastest way this is done is something called social bookmarking.
You know how to add a site to your favorites list, right? You see a site that you like or that you plan to return to so you add it to your favorites list. There is one big drawback to this “old” system of listing your favorite sites. Your favorites list is locked onto your computer. There is no easy way to share your favorites list with your friends and associates.
What if, when you found a site you wanted to add to your favorites, instead of adding them to your favorites on your computer, you could add them to a list of your favorites that is on the internet. Then you could find your favorites no matter what computer you were using and you could direct your friends to your favorites list by sharing the web address with them.
This is in essence what social bookmarking is. Social bookmarking is creating a personalized list of your favorites on an internet site built specifically for this purpose. The site is constructed so that everyone who visits can see your favorites list and can visit the sites that you think are important.
Visitors to your social bookmark list not only can visit your favorite sites, they can add the sites that they like to their own social bookmark list. Then others can view their list and so on and so forth. A really interesting site could start to spread virally on these social bookmarking sites. That would be a tremendous benefit to anyone’s web traffic.
Another function of social bookmarking sites is to keep track of how many times a site is listed on someone’s favorites list. This number is used to rank the sites popularity. Of course the highest ranking sites are featured by the social bookmarking sites and of course that brings even more traffic to those sites.
How do you start getting listed on these social bookmarking sites? First you have to be listed at least once, so logically you set up your own list and put your sites on it. Some sites have buttons you can add to your site to allow readers the option of listing it on their social bookmark list. There are plugins for some blogs that can do this. Obviously the better and more useful your content the more likely your site is going to end up on readers lists.
The object is to get your site listed on as many social bookmark sites and lists as you can. A few popular sites are: del.ico-us, backflip, netvouz, Digg and stumbleupon.
Getting involved in social bookmarking is good internet marketing, taking advantage of the interactivity of Web 2.0. Social bookmarking is one more tool to use to boost your sites popularity and increase traffic.
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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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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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You’ve probably heard the buzz about social media marketing (SMM). One of the components of SMM is social bookmarking. With the right advice and the right strategy, you can use social bookmarking to boost links to your company site and increase your site’s relevance for the keywords that pertain to your business.
The Opportunities in Social Bookmarking
Inbound links to your website are tremendously important to your search engine ranking. In fact, most search engine marketing experts believe that Google’s ranking algorithm is weighted far more heavily towards links than it is to keywords.
SMM offers many ways to generate these links for little or no cost – articles, social media sites and blogs are just a few examples. Social bookmarking is another.
With bookmarking, you save bookmarks to blog posts, articles and web pages (including your own). You tag them with a “keyword” of your own choosing (preferably related to your business). You can then add a “tag cloud” to your website. The tag cloud contains the tags you have created and directs users to the bookmarks you have saved for that tag.
What is the benefit for your business? Each bookmark links to your website or blog. With tag clouds, each keyword appears on your site, increasing the site’s relevance. Between the bookmarking site and the tag cloud on your website, you have a really great cross-promotional tool that opens up myriad opportunities for people to find you.
Consider the website of a Toronto marketing firm. They have a tag cloud with words like Toronto, search marketing, social media, blogging and so on. Each time someone visits their site, that person can click a tag and find the company’s bookmarks. They can then share those bookmarks with other users, which will point those users back to the marketing firm’s site.
Going in the other direction, people searching a bookmarking site may find the marketing firm’s bookmarks. Seeing that the company has posted some interesting and valuable articles on online marketing, they decide to visit the company’s site and add it to their social bookmarking network.
The Challenges of Social Bookmarking for Businesses
Like any kind of social media marketing, social bookmarking is low-cost, at least in terms of money. Where the “costs” escalate is in time. To do social bookmarking right, you need time to evaluate the various sites, add your bookmarks, comment on them, and interact with other users who share your interests. It is a big job.
Let’s look at the first step – deciding which sites to use. If you do a search for the top social bookmarking sites, you’ll get a huge list, like the one published on ebizMBA. So which ones do you choose? Delicious is one of the biggest, but would it be better to go for a smaller site, like furl or faves.com? Is it better to use all three, plus some social news sites, like Digg or Reddit?
Once you have made that decision, you need to decide how and when you will create the content you want to bookmark. Blogs, articles – what is the right amount of content and how often do you need to create it? You can really only answer that question by looking at social bookmarking as part of your overall social media marketing plan.
Answers to Your Social Media Marketing Questions
Social bookmarking and social media marketing are powerful marketing tools. To make the most of them you need to devote a lot of attention to the sites and create content regularly. You also need a comprehensive social media marketing plan that incorporates all of your content initiatives and your efforts to create bookmarks that direct people to that content.
A marketing agency that specializes in SMM can get you started. They can help you navigate the sites, schedule your content and get involved in the social media sphere. Even if you just sign on for a short-term contract to get started, you will find the SMM firm an invaluable partner in your “new media” marketing plans.
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Social bookmarking is the habit or practice of saving bookmarks to a web site and “tagging”. Social bookmarking sites are a popular way to store, classify, share and search links. Social bookmarking started as a method for Internet users to keep bookmarks that can easily be accessed online and shared with other users in the Web. These bookmarks are given tags to label as well as organize them and the tags illustrate a glimpse of the main content for easier access.
In a social bookmarking system, internet users save links to web pages that they would like to remember and/or share. These social bookmarks are normally public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. Only the allowed people can view these social bookmarks sequentially, by category or tags, or via a search engine.
But don’t let the use of NoFollow fool you, the search engines are looking beyond the incoming links from social bookmarking sites to gauge their value to their search indexes. The external metadata compiled via user generated descriptions, tags, titles and classification is incredibly valued by the search engines, as in the same philosophy as anchored backlinks, descriptive content about a web site defined by the users of that site who are not associated with the marketing or coding of that site, can be extremely powerful in judging the importance and relevance of the content and tags which are used on that site.
Social bookmarking brings to the equation something that search engines can’t compete with the human touch. Just as the internet has millions of pages, so it also has millions of users, and if even a fraction of those users share the sites they’ve found interesting, useful or just plain bizarre with each other, there is suddenly a vast resource for anyone searching the web to tap into.
Social bookmarking allows you to share your bookmarks with other Internet users in a collaborative sort of way. Normally, social bookmarking takes place on sites where the users can create an account to add their bookmarks to. It’s also helpful to do it on sites that allow you to insert keywords for the types of bookmarks you add. That way, they all can be organized and set into categories that other users can easily search through.
Social bookmarking is a grassroots process that allows users to establish the value of a specific web page, article, podcast, or video. By bookmarking an item, individuals are casting a vote to endorse that specific resource. The idea is that social bookmarking gives a resource credibility; the more users who bookmark a specific item, the more valuable the resource is considered to be. Social bookmarking is all about the collective voice. Most of the social bookmarking networks increase the profile of items that receive a lot of bookmarks. It probably won’t be long before the major search engines begin to include social bookmarks as a part of their ranking algorithms.
Once you become a part of a social bookmarking site, you become a member of that community. You and all the other users are there for the same thing and you can help each other out in finding sites that will benefit all of you. It also makes searching the Web so much easier and quicker. Another great thing is that once you’re part of a site, you can access it from any computer and any browser. That way, you’re never limited in seeing the social bookmarks you’ve been waiting for.
So, the question, “Should you give any attention to social bookmarking?” And the answer is, make your site worthy of bookmarking. Bookmarks appear to web spiders as links to your page, and that makes them very valuable SEO tools. For some search engines, the more bookmarks that lead back to your site, the more “votes” you get! Links which are bookmarked by lots of users on social bookmarking web sites are effectively been “voted for” In fact Google has already started to feature StumbleUpon Reviews in its search results.
On the web-site side, be sure to include the code snippets provided by social bookmarking organizations that allow users to tag your site easily. Then, maintain it all. Don’t just forget your account completely. If you do, eventually it will disappear and all the advantage of having one will go as well. Instead, continue using social bookmarking. Over time, the rewards will be increased traffic to your web site.
Social bookmarking sites help you find great content on the internet. These websites allow users to post content that they like. They also allow them to list and share this content with other users. You need to become a member of these sites first. Some of them are very particular about admitting the right people to their sites, but generally it is quite easy to sign up. The best part is that these sites are free for all internet users.
Social bookmarking leverages the popular social software phenomenon of tagging. Users can apply tags, or keywords, to the bookmarks they save. In social bookmarking, tagging creates a grass-roots taxonomy for the shared bookmarks. Users can search by tags to find bookmarks relevant to their interests. Taxonomies created through bookmarking are called “folksonomies.”
The majority of Web users nowadays are familiar with the term bookmarking — formally known as social bookmarking. Every time you save a Web Site to your list of favorites, with the intent of visiting it again in the future, you are actually bookmarking it.
Social bookmarking is also a way of bringing additional traffic to your site as there are many users who look at the ‘what’s new’ page and decide what to click on. An easy way of tackling social bookmarking is to use Onlywire or Diigo, both of which submit to multiple social bookmarking sites. Once you’ve signed up, this will submit to all the sites except reddit and digg.
Social bookmarking is a way for people to store and organize bookmarks of certain web pages on the Internet with help of metadata. Social bookmarking is done by saving your links to particular web pages that you want to remember or perhaps, share with other users. Social bookmarking is an all-out phenomena and is growing at a sonic boom clip. Understanding social bookmarking gives you the ability to reach millions of users you might otherwise miss. Properly utilizing social bookmarking gives you an additional edge in more traditional search engine marketing.
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