Marketing to Social Networking Sites

 
 

Tuesday, 16 May 2006

Social bookmarking sites are a fairly new phenomenon on the internet. The idea of social bookmarking is that you can add a webpage that you found interesting, this makes the page public to all others using the site and they can then add this page to their favorites.

There are many advantages to using social bookmark sites over using your favorites or bookmarks in Internet Explorer or Firefox but at this point I myself only use them some and they are far from replacing my favorites on my PC or laptop so they will still take a little getting used to. The advantages of these bookmarks is access, you save these websites from your local computer and then no matter where you go, what browser you use and what operating system you have you can still get to these sites with any internet connection.

As a marketer you can put up information on the internet that is very interesting to you and your customers and then bookmark the page and let others see if they find it interesting or not. If others do find this interesting then you can potentially get an avalanche of traffic to your site. The most important thing at this time is to have a good subject and some kind of technological bent to your article to make it interesting to all of us geeks out there.

One extension of this concept is the new Web 2.0 style news sites such as Digg, Reddit, and Shoutwire and these post may be picked up by newsvine or tailrank, just add a .com to the end of these names to reach the site. With these new news sites you can post the address and maybe some info about your page and then the whole group of people will recommend up or down the page and this can send you traffic instantly over a few hours or not if people do not like the content.

I need to be very clear as I write this that there is no way that you can abuse the concept of content with this new style of social bookmarking sites as your article will be banned and people will immediately moderate your post down so that it is never seen. The most important thing on these sites is quality of content. Another thing to know about these social bookmarking sites is that the people that frequent these sites can be a very fickle crowd. In the past I have put up high quality and not so high quality articles about many different subjects and sometimes people visit in droves while with other articles you can sometimes be completely ignored.

Be assured that if you need a good web host using these programs as things move very quickly and can bring you great traffic but if you do not have a good host then you can easily be taken down by a storm of traffic. With my best articles I have had 6,000 to 10,000 visitors in a single day.

These are my top tips to get people interested in reading your article

1. Make a list like a top 7 or top 10 or top 20 type list. People like lists and this system goes a long way to getting people interested in taking the time to click the link.
2. Make your title interesting to readers. How does this benefit them? Will this information make them feel better, smarter or soothe their ego? Is this an article that may change their lives? It is critical to make sure the title is good as on a site like Reddit this is all people have to see to decide to visit.
3. If you can have a description like with Digg then make sure you make the most out of two or three sentences. You may be able to use more space but remember people at this site are scanning through 50 or so stories and will just glaze over after they read the first sentence.

Now you would probably like to check these sites out for yourself and you will find that with almost all of these sites you can sign up and start to use them instantly and have to give them only a username, password and an email address. To start with you can try the following popular sites. For purely bookmarking services you can try delicious and delirious and for news type sites my favorites are Digg, Reddit and Shoutwire.

Bill Nadraszky is a Systems Analyst and runs several websites. For more information you can visit internet marketing articles. For Realtor Marketing you can visit the best Realtor marketing weblog

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