Copyright (c) 2008 Sean S Sampson

Blogs offer countless opportunities for launching your business into the social media networks, and they can be designed as an extension of an existing website, or simply stand alone. Blogging is moving far beyond the casual journal style of the initial growth stages, allowing businesses and large companies to develop a fresh identity.

Blogging culture allows you to take part in a conversational style of marketing, reaching hundreds and thousands of visitors on a daily basis, and even creating a following. Providing high quality content is an important component of your blog; without good articles and content, your readers will simply move elsewhere.

A blog can be used as a platform for your social bookmarking efforts since each and every link to an article can be shared independently. This is why you need to implement a social bookmarking badge or link on your site, since the times that you are not independently marketing yourself, another visitor may go ahead and do it for you!

Blogs are an easy way to break apart your website into different subjects and categories. Even a well-organized website can be limited when it does not offer comments or space for feedback. While many websites are being designed in this way, the benefits of launching a blog along with your site are a valuable opportunity to generate higher readership.

Blogs also give you an option to implement an RSS subscription service. Since many people simply do not have the time to visit multiple sites in a given day, an RSS feed can deliver new content to their e-mail box or other RSS reader. This gives you a chance to share the link with each and every subscriber, and every time you publish, you increase the chances of someone simply submitting your content to a social bookmarking site or network.

SETTING UP YOUR BLOG TO BE SOCIAL MEDIA FRIENDLY

Your blog may be setup through a variety of services including Blogger, WordPress, or TypePad. Whichever format you choose, it’s a good idea to look for widgets and code that can add social bookmarking buttons to the site immediately. Remember that this makes it very easy and efficient for your readers to start submitting something they read to multiple social bookmarking networks and search engines; all you have to do during these stages is provide quality content on a regular basis, and work on generating a large amount of traffic. Traffic will build on itself, and the more-established your blog becomes, the higher the chances that it will be discovered.

As your content starts to join the networks such as StumbleUpon and Digg, you’ll notice immediate surges in traffic. Traffic is driven largely by the number of interested visitors who rate and vote on your site, and how valuable the content is to a variety of readers. Not only do you need to focus on creating evergreen and valuable content on a regular basis, but it’s important to make it easy for search engine rankings with the appropriate amount of keywords.

INCREASING YOUR BLOG’S POPULARITY WITH SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

The only way to effectively increase your blog’s popularity with social bookmarking is to spread out your endeavors across multiple social media sites. This may include Technorati, Google Links, Del.ici.ous, and Yahoo! Links where your individual articles and submissions are mentioned either within another blog, or standing alone in a particular category.

Tools such as SocialMeter can help you keep track of how well your blog or webstie is doing in the social bookmarking networks at any given time. SocialMeter scans the largest social websites and ranks them against each other based on how many times your link or website is indexed in each one. You just type in your URL and the results will run a search on each site to give you a final tally.

Badges and ‘chiclets’, the tools that you can add to your blog or website are very effective ways to develop your social bookmarking activity. Your blog’s popularity will instantly increase because you are:

1. Providing users increased interaction. You’ll be surprised how many static sites that make this shift can start building traffic with very little direct marketing. Once the news spreads that you are offering this added value to your website, you can look forward to increased traffic on a regular basis.

2. Making it easy to reach Digg and other social bookmarking networks hat allow users to vote. Voting and rating articles is becoming a very popular activity on the web, and if you write something particularly compelling you can start to create a traffic boost overnight.

3. Increasing your exposure naturally in the social networking hemisphere. Social networking and bookmarking gives you a chance to increase your exposure tenfold; visitors who find an article worth sharing will help you reach a much more targeted and refined audience than simply publishing a website and hoping to get readers. You will be delivering your news and information with a much stronger reach.

In addition to promoting yourself on social bookmarking sites, there are some effective ways to market the blog itself. Again, this will encourage your visitors to share the ‘news’ from your blog on their own. Some effective strategies for blog promotion may include:

1. Join an RSS submission network. These will help you submit to an even larger listing of sites, all from the RSS feeds that you create. Syndication allows you to reach a much larger audience, and building a steady list of subscribers can increase traffic flow instantly.

2. Post announcements about your blog and website on forums, bulletins, and community boards. When you have identified your specific channels, start promoting yourself with news announcements, new articles, or simply an introduction to community members. Include your link and you’ll easily start to drive traffic.

3. Join discussion groups and forums about your industry or topic, and leave a link to your blog or website in your profile every time you post.

Be consistent with these efforts and they will pay off big time.



By: Sean S Sampson

About the Author:

Early in the days of Internet browsing, someone got the bright idea of keeping placeholders, or bookmarks for web sites we’ve visited and enjoyed. It was a great way to keep track of things. Before long, someone else got the brilliant idea there should be a way to share these bookmarks with our friends.

Suddenly, a world of social bookmarking came into existence. But how can you, the internet marketer, tap into this social network? Is there a way social bookmarking can build traffic for your site? This article will discuss a few methods of putting social bookmarking to work for you, bringing new visitors to your site.

Since any web page can be bookmarked, any web page can be shared with friends. This is the premise behind using social bookmarking as a marketing technique. As you may have guessed, the idea is to get people who visit your site to bookmark and share it. Of course your visitors could simply email a link to their friends, but they might not think of that option on their own. It is not only your job then to remind them of this option, but to make it as easy as possible for them to do so.

Fortunately, since the entire blog community has a long and rich history of sharing links, with millions of “check this out” type posts, there have been several tools to help you make it easy for your visitors to share a link to your site. For example, if you happen to build your site on the WordPress blog platform you can find half a dozen excellent programs which provide a “share this” link with every post you make.

Not only will most of these plug-ins allow your visitors to email a link to a friend, they can add your site to the major social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us (http://www.del.icio.us), Digg (http://www.digg.com), Technorati (http://www.technorati.com), and StumbleUpon (http://www.stumbleupon.com).

At these social bookmarking sites your visitors can also post reviews and say just what they like about your site, thereby attracting others who find the information.

Now, who is to say that you can’t post your own articles, blog posts and web pages to these social bookmarking sites yourself? If you post your entries, you expose it to thousands of visitors at the social bookmarking sites who might be interested in what you have to offer.

If you have an exceptionally interesting post, and place it on a social bookmarking site, you open the door to a viral marketing effect and free exposure you probably could have never otherwise afforded.



By: Steve Renner

About the Author:

It’s probably the dream of every social bookmarking network’s user to have their submitted stories and articles make it to the front page of the site. Why? Because making it to the front page (and not just in the “just submitted” category) means that a lot of people voted positive on this article. It only follows that they like the article because they voted positive for it. By liking it, it means they have read it. By reading the article, it means they have visited your site. This is very rewarding in terms of traffic and, more importantly, in potential income.

If you have a site and/or a blog, you should know how the basics of making money off them goes. It’s either one or all of these money-making strategies:

* People buy your service or product

* People click on your affiliate links and other advertisements and purchase from them

* The page views and page loads that you get is converted into money by some ad servers

This is, of course, impossible without traffic and attention from potential visitors which is why social bookmarking can help especially if you’re just starting out with your business or site. In order to achieve good traffic from these bookmarking sites, you must first learn how to attract people into voting for your articles and making them popular for more people to see.

Listed here are a few tips and tricks (depending on how you call them) on how to create that popular article to promote your site:

1. Offer something unique

I know, I know. Being unique these days is either overrated or too hard to do. My vote is on the latter. With so many “unique” stories popping out everywhere on the internet, people’s attention are divided into the many different unique articles being submitted into social bookmarking sites. Try to scour the web for something that you think would make it big; if it’s not there, you can bet that it’s your time to shine, and if it is, think of some ways on how to beat that existing article that you found.

2. Offer something useful and informative

It always helps to offer up an article that other people will find useful. Be it a technique on how to fix a software bug, a review on a newly released gadget or the latest news on nuclear warfare, people tend to flock to something that will give them more information about their daily lives and the world around them.

3. Titles and descriptions make a big difference

There are some members of social bookmarking sites who rarely read the stories being submitted. These people are more into the “social” part rather than the “bookmarking” side of these networking sites. One common characteristic that these kinds of users have though is that they vote on stories based on the titles and descriptions. Even if the story is really dull and boring, they wouldn’t care (and neither would they know) because they didn’t read past the title and description. So make sure that you have this really great title that people will quickly notice among a sea of other titles and write a description that will complement the title.

4. Voting for other stories may be a good thing

Some users will be kind enough to reciprocate story votes in bookmarking sites. You shouldn’t just submit your stories – you should also vote for others. It would give you more exposure to the social network that you belong to.

5. Make friends

Don’t be shy to invite other people to become a part of your friends’ list. The tendency is that they might opt to get an update of the stories that you submit, or at the very least, visit your page every now and then to see if you have something that they might be interested in. You get to have more votes this way. Being a network that this is, their friends will see the stories that they voted on and there is a chance that they would vote for your story too. This is the endless cycle of bookmarking sites.



By: Phpfox

About the Author:

Many people use social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Stumbleupon or Propeller on a daily basis. This technique allows them to bring floods of traffic to their sites. But what is the purpose of this traffic? Of course money. However for affiliate marketers social bookmarking(SB) isn’t the best decision. Why? I will tell you in this article.

There is one important rule: targeted traffic = sale. If your traffic is untargeted it won’t convert. In our case, SB traffic contains of people, who are surfing the Internet looking for news. They see your submission on the first page and even if they are not interested in your niche they will check it.

However each disadvantage has advantage. For example SB provides you with additional links, which will positively reflect on your rankings. If you have adsense blocks on your page, SB traffic will generate some profit. And finally, using SB my sites get indexed in Google, Yahoo and MSN in less then 24 hours.

So what is the verdict? Social Bookmarking is undoubtedly worth using as one of your link building strategies. Even if you won’t get sales, you will get good backlinks. Every time you write a new post on your blog or add content to your site, submit it to digg, stumbleupon and propeller. Those are the biggest and most popular social bookmarking sites. I hope you found this information useful. If you want to get free video lessons, reports and case studies related to affiliate marketing and seo, please visit the site below. Good luck.



By: Sergey

About the Author:

You have probably heard a lot about social bookmarking lately. As a matter of fact, you can spend lots of time and effort today just to find out what Social Bookmarking is all about. Well, not here. I am giving you this information.

I have done the hard part of the research and found this to be a super way to get more traffic to your site. While social bookmarking is a good hobby imagine if you could replace the website option with blogs? There are thousands of blogs out on the web there is no doubt about that and the most popular ones will be very hard to find. The best news is, it’s 100% FREE!

To demonstrate the differences between Social Bookmarking sites to normal search engines - let’s talk about Google for example as a search engine and how it works compared to Social Bookmarking site such as Furl or Delicious. In any social bookmarking site -your screen will show a range of tags which are in different colors size and intensity which marks the popularity of the tag. These Social Bookmark sites provide a great means of sharing quality content sites - so start bookmarking today!.

We all spend more and more time on the Internet- whether we’re researching; looking for work; or just browsing for fun. If you are looking for a great blog to read in the morning then you will love the chance to find out the most popular blog via your favorite bookmarking site!. Social bookmarks are usually public- hence the ’social’ and they also allow other users to comment on the links you have saved.

Social bookmarking saves uploading a bunch of urls to your domain or remembering to send them to your Aunt Sally before you visit on the off chance you’ll need to remember that special something while you’re away. I get a goodly amount of traffic from social bookmarking sites like technorati as well but I would call that site a business bookmarking site so I’m not going to mention it here. Check out http://www.trafficwebsecrets.com/socialbookmarking/bookmarking_demon.html.

But remember; in the final analysis others will make the decision on whether your way of bookmarking is ethical and useful or spam. A good way to make social bookmarking more useful is to use the notes or comments fields when tagging pages. The simplicity of Social bookmarking websites allow you to save bookmarks online and Tag/Categorize them with keywords instead of saving them as bookmarks in the favorite’s list of your browser: Put Social Bookmarking on Autopilot!



By: Greg Haehl

About the Author: