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If you haven’t yet added social bookmarking to your arsenal of marketing tools, you’ve been willfully giving away money to your competitors. Why? It’s simple: using social bookmarking is one of the easiest and fastest ways to drive traffic to your site.

However, in order to use social bookmarking successfully, you must have a good handle on the basics; and you must be willing to put in a sufficient amount of time to make it work. Even though it is relatively, it will take some patience to make it work. I’ll explain why later.

Before you do anything else, you will want to create a blog. If you don’t already have a blog, you can create one through Blogger; or, if your site’s control panel has Fantastico, you can create a WordPress blog by installing the plugin.

Once you’ve setup your blog, you will want to start looking for some good categories for your blog entries. When you add a blog entry to a category on your blog, you will “tag” it with that a keyword that matches the blog entry. You can find a good list of categories by going to social bookmarking sites, such as Technorati, and jotting down keywords that are relevant to your site and that fall on the top 100 list for your given category.

Once you have created your list of categories and have added it to your blog, it’s time to start creating some high-quality content. This is where you will have to be patient - or at least moreso than you generally are when you create content.

Why do you have to be patient? Because you cannot use social bookmarking effectively without creating high-quality, viral content. When you submit your blog entry to social bookmarking sites, it will immediately be ranked #1 for that particular tag; however, from there, it’s positioning will depend on the amount of votes it receives from visitors. In order to get more traffic, people have to see your entry as noteworthy.

How can you ensure that your entry is noteworthy? You can use screencaptures and videos; and include relevant, high-quality content. Additionally, if you can write something that is funny, absurd, or unusually insightful, you will have a far greater chance of getting your entry seen and bumped.

Now, once you finish creating and tagging your content, you will want to submit it to various social bookmarking sites. Luckily, this nowhere near as annoying as submitting articles to directories. All you have to do is “ping” your entries by submitting your blog’s URL to a single site. You can do this at a place like PingGoat or Ping-O-Matic. All you have to do is select the sites you want to ping (by checking off boxes) and submit your URL. The script will handle the rest.

And there you have it: a brief summary of how to use social bookmarking to your advantage. All you have to do is come up with great content, tag it (i.e. place it in categories), and then submit it to social bookmarking sites by pinging.

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Tags: blogs, social bookmarking

While every Internet marketing start-up could benefit from social marketing sites, many newbie Internet marketers are still not sure how to utilize them.

Sure, social sites give you a lot of interactivity and allow users to personalize their sites, compile a list of favorite 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?

The first thing to understand is that there are two basic types of social networking sites, so you will need to be clear in your own mind about what it is you want to do - bookmark or network?

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 can encourage others to bookmark your articles, blogs or webpages by adding a Digg, Stumbleupon, TwitThis or other button on your page.

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. A good site with regularly updated original content will attract traffic.

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.

Another reason why some people don’t think social networking sites are good for business is that they do no 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 favorite 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!

Search engine spiders regularly follow links posted on these sites. 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.

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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.

Tags: social bookmarking, social media, social networking, Web 2.0

Before discussing the use of social bookmarking as a business tool, we should first have a quick look at the phenomenon and discuss why it has become so popular. By understanding that, then it will become easier to understand potential business uses. The uses outlined here are just that: outlines, since the particular applications to which these sites can be put will be specific to your type of online business.

The original intention of social bookmarking is to enable you to store websites and pages that you have found and want to refer to later, and also to refer them to others that you think might benefit from them or just enjoy visiting them. You can bookmark any type of web content from articles to blogs to videos, and to start doing so you have first to register with one or more social bookmarking sites.

Among the more popular of such services are Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Blink, Furl and StumbleUpon. They are easy to join, and having done so all you have to do to make a bookmark is simply to add a button or chicklet linking to the specific social bookmarking site, and click on it. The URL of the page you are viewing will be added to your bookmarks and you can categorize it by means of tags. Tags are no more than the keywords that you feel best describe the page you are viewing. You can use just the one tag or a number of them.

All of your bookmarks within each site are accessible by clicking on one of the tags in your “tag cloud”, which is basically a list of tags, although it is possible to categorize them in order to make it easier to find bookmarks on specific topics.

So how can you use social bookmarking as a business tool? For a start it is a way to increase the visibility of your blogs, websites and even your affiliate programs, and increased visibility leads to more visitors. Social bookmarking sites can provide you with back-links that will improve your Google PageRank: this in turn can improve your search engine results position. Because they are free you have nothing to lose by using these sites in this way, unless you overdo it and are regarded as a spammer.

Here are the steps needed to use bookmarking sites effectively for your business while avoiding the spamming trap.

Let’s assume that you have registered with a social bookmarking site such as del.icio.us, and are ready to go. The same steps here will apply to the others, and like most other aspects of an online business, best results will be obtained by using as many social bookmarking sites as you can find. Repetition brings best results.

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Tags: social bookmarking, Web 2.0

Tagging used to refer just to the tags that you placed in your web site’s HTML to indicate certain types of formatting or commands. Tagging today often refers to something entirely different. When you hear the terms “tagged” or “tagging” in conversation today, it could very well refer to a phenomenon called social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, share, classify, and search Internet bookmarks. There is some debate over how important social bookmarking is in SEO, but the consensus seems to be leaning toward the idea that social bookmarking, along with many other social media optimization (SMO) strategies, is quickly becoming a serious consideration for SEO. So let’s look at social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking is provided by services such as de.icio.us, Digg, Technorati, StumbleUpon, and Furl.net, which are taking the Internet by storm. They’re often referred to as Web 2.0 services, because they involve a high level of social interaction, which is the fastest growing element of the Internet today.

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Tags: RSS, social bookmarking, tagging, tags