Posts Tagged "Media"

Social Bookmarking in Your Social Media Strategy

Article Submissions to Social Bookmarking Websites can Book you some Backlinks

Social bookmarking is a significant part of any social media strategy. Its methodology requires submitting an article with strikingly fresh content in a short span of time, a wide network of friends and associates, and immediate follow-up. Investing the time to submit articles to social bookmarking websites can give you a sharp spike in website traffic and some backlinks in the process.

Social bookmarking is one part of a social media strategy that can build your website traffic and optimise your website for search engines by providing a rich resource for backlinks. Submitting articles to social bookmarking websites as well as article submission websites provides your website with backlinks. A strategic goal of article submissions to article directories and social bookmarking websites is to not only gain a backlink from the website you submitted the article to, but to also gain backlinks from other websites that refer back to your original article. Reprints of your articles that lead back to your original post are not the duplicate content that search engines discourage. If you submit duplicate articles with a link to your website on multiple websites simultaneously in a short period of time without a logical linking chain, then the search engines may penalize the articles as duplicate content.

To submit articles to social bookmarking websites and article submission websites to gain backlinks, you must be the original source of the article, and your articles should have content that is within the scope of your website. The search engines will attempt to map out the original source of reprinted articles and give credit to the originating source. The article reprints will not be penalized, but the originating source of the article will carry the heaviest weight when the search engines evaluate websites for the search engine result pages.

Backlinks, however, are not the only reward of submitting articles to social bookmarking websites and article directories. Direct traffic from interested visitors that become lifetime customers is the ultimate reward. Investing time in social bookmarking can widen your audience, provide you with backlinks, and give you the opportunity to gain a strong readership following.

Networking is a crucial element to successful social bookmarking strategies. Before you begin networking, build up a credible profile for yourself. Your social bookmarking profile can be your actual self or a persona for your website. You or your persona can then bookmark articles on your website, create tags, and join groups.

You can begin networking with friends and business relationships you may have already forged. Once you have a profile and a network of contacts, you can begin building new social bookmarking relationships that offer the opportunity for reciprocal voting. Your networked relationship can also promote the article you bookmarked by contributing comments. Social bookmarking websites are fast-paced, and articles that aren”t followed up or don’t garner votes or comments will quickly become obsolete. Articles that don’t have intriguing headlines won’t be read.

Follow-up is necessary for successful social bookmarking. Asking your network for votes and comments in response to your bookmarked article, and taking the time to expand on reader comments, can give a push to your article’s popularity and increase your chances of gathering backlinks and website traffic. Readers are more inclined to click on an article that has already been proven to show interest.

Social bookmarking requires an almost instantaneous follow-up that submission to article submission directories don’t – however the time invested in that follow-up can provide an almost instantaneous increase in web traffic and backlinks. Social bookmarking strategies for website optimisation require a persona, networking, captivating content, and follow-up. With those four requirements in place, your social bookmarking strategies can captivate readers to visit your website, then you can follow-up on building your customer relationships.

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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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