Posts Tagged "Links"

Social Media Marketing With Social Bookmarking Sites – Build Links For Free

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 An Easy Way To Increase Profits, Traffic, And Links

A bookmark is an item that you place into a paper book to mark the place where you stopped reading. This bookmark allows you to easily return to the exact spot you were before, without having to memorize the page number.

An online bookmark serves the same purpose. When you find an internet site you want to mark for later viewing, or that you’ll want to find again, you tell your browser to set a bookmark. These are also called favorites. This bookmark allows you to return exactly to the same site again and again, without ever having to memorize the link.

What Is Social Bookmarking

You’ve been using social bookmarking, even if you didn’t know it! When you forward a funny e-mail joke or picture to a friend, that’s a form of social bookmarking. You are socially sharing a bookmark to a website with a friend. That gives your friends exposure to websites they might never find on their own. They do the same for you when they send these informal social bookmarks to you.

Social Bookmarking Sites

Social bookmarking sites began as a way for web surfers to upload and save their personal browser bookmarks online. That way, web visitors are not limited to their own computers. By saving their personal social bookmarks online, they can access them from any computer.

The social aspect of social bookmarking is that everyone else saving their personal social bookmarks to these online sites can see and use everyone else’s bookmarks! The social bookmarking site essentially becomes a giant collection of bookmarks contributed by many users.

Social Bookmarking Tags

Social bookmarking sites are built and organized by humans. However, there needs to be some kind of organization. Humans provide that too. Each social bookmark is submitted with one or more tags. A tag is nothing more than a keyword that describes the site being submitted.

If you visit a social bookmarking website looking for information on cars, you might search for the words “car,” “cars,” or “automobiles.” The bookmarks with those tags will be shown in the search results. If you are looking for a specific type of car such as a Ferrari, bookmarks tagged with the word “Ferrari” will be shown. It’s that easy!

Making Money With Social Bookmarking

If you have a website that sells a product or service, why not submit that site to the major social bookmarking sites? When you submit your internet marketing site to social bookmarking sites, along with appropriate bookmarking tags, you are tapping into a huge, extremely targeted group of people looking for information – your information!

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