I post to this blog every Tuesday and Thursday. On Tuesdays, I will discuss ways to get unlimited traffic to your website. On Thursdays, I will review and discuss social bookmarking software, bookmarking tips and tools. I am always looking for topics and input. My email address is in the next paragraph.
If you want to subscribe to this blog, please use the RSS feed link just below this post and/or add yourself to my email list just above this post, so that I can notify you of new social bookmarking tools and tips. In addition, please join my Facebook fanpage. In the upper right hand corner, you can join this community of social bookmarking enthusiasts by simply clicking the link. If you have any comments or questions feel free to email me at admin@automarker.net.
Social bookmarking is the link building tool of today. None of the other ways to build links bring in the same amount of traffic to your website or blog that social bookmarking does.
Social bookmarks make it very easy to retrieve a webpage of your liking at a later date, regardless of the computer you are on. What holds true for you, also holds true for the readers of your blog. In order to encourage your readers to bookmark your posts, it is wise to make it easy for them to do so. The best way to accomplish this is by providing buttons underneath the article that your reader can simply click on.
If you are using a wordpress blog you can simply add a social bookmarking plugin. There are many plugins available. These are the ones I use:
Onlywire. Believe it or not, but I am not a very big fan of Only wire. They were one of the first social bookmarking tools (if not THE first), so they do have a nice market share. I just don’t like how they have evolved over the years. However, a large group of social bookmarkers does use it, so I offer it.
Digg Digg. I use this plugin a lot because of the flexibility where to place the icons. As you can see on this blog, you have the ability to place the icons in a prime location. The reader cannot miss them. I have choosen Digg, Facebook and Twitter. You see all three icons next to every post. It gives the reader focus. They know I would like them to pick from those three rather than the selection at the bottom of the post.
Sociable. I like sociable because you have great flexibility in how you arrange your buttons. You can even add your own sites. Furthermore, it has a button to turn your post into a print friendly version.
AddThis. This plugin has the advantage that it offers a very sophisticated analytics feature, similar to Google Analytics. Since tracking is critical in online business, this is a really neat feature.
I am not recommending one of these plugins over any of the others. It is truly a matter of personal preference which one(s) to pick. Which social bookmarking plugin are you using? Are you using one of the above 4 or are you using another one. Share your experience with us.
When you are using article marketing to get traffic to your site, the first step is one that is often overlooked. I am talking about keyword research. The more competitive your niche, the more important it is that you target the right keyword phrase. I am deliberately talking about keyword phrase, rather than keyword. In any, even remotely, competitive niche it is extremely hard to rank high for a single relevant keyword. That is why we choose to go for “long tail keywords”. Let me illustrate this with an example.
Let’s look at an extremely competitive niche, that has a high demand for the products and/or services in its niche. A good example is “weight loss”. Your goal should be to find keyword phrases in the “weight loss” niche, that pass the following criteria:
• Less than 25,000 Google competitors
• Less than 5000, when searching with the operator: intitle:”long tail keywords”
• A minimum of 50 daily search results
Now you know what keyword phrases to look for. Right…. Relax. I am going to show you exactly how to find long tail keywords that meet the above criteria. The first tool we use is the keyword research tool within SEObook. This is a great source for many SEO tools. There keyword tool is just one of the many. Just type in “weight loss pills” and you will get a long list of keyword phrases. One of them is “best proven weight loss pills”. The daily search count is 386.
Next step is to type your keyword phrase in close quotes into Google’s search box. In this case that would be “weight loss through hypnosis”. You will find that there are 15,300 competitors using the same keyword phrase.
Next you will want to find out how many of those use your exact phrase in the title. You can find this out by typing intitle: “weight loss through hypnosis” in the google search box. When you do this you will find a result of about 206. This means that you only have 206 competitors that use the same keyword phrase in the title.
Based on your research you know that this keyword phrase is not very competitive and will easily rank high in the search engines. With 386 people searching for that specific term during the course of one day, this can be a very profitable phrase to rank high for. After all, you have very little competition.
Without your research you might have choosen “best weight loss pills” instead. This phrase has 1,111 daily searches on average. However when you look at the competition using the above technique you will find that for this slightly different phrase you would be competing with 186,000 others, of which 14,300 have the exact same phrase in the title of their content publication.
So, next time you wonder why one article has gotten you massive amounts of traffic, whereas an other one did not, you may want to check the competition for your choosen keyword(s).
Social bookmarking was developed to be able to keep track of information that you would come across while surfing the net. Subsequently, it became a great way to get your website indexed within a matter of hours and to build quality one-way backlinks to your site.
There is another reason for using social bookmarking and that is to establish yourself as an expert in your niche. If you want to achieve this status, here are the strategies you need to apply:
Become a "guru" in your niche
Be the first to bookmark content in your niche. Oftentimes people will shy away from being the first to bookmark content. It is much easier for most people to simply follow others, rather than to set the tone and be the first to bookmark a piece of content. But if you want to become an expert in your field, this is exactly what you need to do. Show others you’re a leader, by offering others quality content.
Become a person of influence in your field through the content that you publish. You don’t have to present totally unique content all the time, but if you want to become an influencer in your field, you should be able to provide original, high quality, content on a regular basis.
Once a piece of content has been published on a social bookmarking site, others can show their approval of the info by voting for it. The more votes you get the more weight the bookmark gets in Google and other search engines. The more votes the better. In order to get high search engine rankings it is more powerful to have one social bookmark with 25 votes for it, than to have your content on 25 social bookmarking sites with no votes from others. After all, the 25 votes represent the appreciation of 25 individuals for your piece of information.
Make a start by getting into the habit of bookmarking every piece of content that you enjoyed reading, regardless whether you are the first or not.
As you know, the combination of article marketing and social bookmarking is a devastatingly effective method to drive unlimited free traffic.
If you are a regular visitor to my website you know that I love to write about social bookmarking. Social bookmarking is my favorite, because it is such a great and easy to execute compliment to writing content. This may be the reason that I have received several questions regarding article marketing, recently. It made me realize that it may be helpful to you to get an overview of the details of creating attention attracting articles.
If you follow the tips on article marketing, as I will give them to you in the upcoming weeks, and you combine those with the social bookmarking tips that I have been giving (and will continue to give you), you will find that your traffic will increase significantly. You will also discover that it is not a complicated process. It does take commitment however, which is why so many people are still not executing article marketing they way it should be done.
I will post a new article in this article marketing series every Tuesday for the next nine weeks. I will cover the following topics:
What keywords to target when you write your articles.
How to write high quality articles that get read & make money
How to research for article creation and distribution in the easiest
and fastest way possible.
How to create articles that take you to top spots in search engines
How to get your article published in high traffic websites.
How to create more articles in a short period of time.
Apart from that, I will explain to you how to get traffic from these articles to your website. I hope that this article series will help you understand how to set up a winning strategy that works in any niche.
Whether you sell online or offline, you know that it is much easier to close the sale when the buyer knows and trusts you. A good example is when you look at a tv commercial, where someone describes a product that solves a problem you may have. Even though it sounds great, you will, most likely, be reluctant to buy the product. After all, you don’t know whether you can trust that the claims made, are accurate.
However, if you subsequently come across a friend, colleague or acquaintance who bought the product, and this person is raving about it, you are much more likely to make the purchase. You know how to interpret his/her words and that makes it much easier for you to make your decision.
When the sales process moved online, this so-called “know-like-trust” factor became a real issue. After all, it used to be very difficult to figure out who the person is behind the product you are interested in. I believe that that is the reason that social media has become so popular so quickly. After all, social media has made it possible again, to profile yourself to the public and to engage in conversation with your visitors.
As a result, people will have the opportunity to figure out who you are and what you stand for. By taking the time, you have the opportunity for others to get to know you, start linking you and finally start trusting you. You have effectively established the “know-like-trust” factor.
The same concept holds true in social bookmarking. If all you do is bookmark your sales pages, nobody is interested in you. It is obvious that all you are there for, is to make money. However, if you bookmark all kinds of content related to your niche, others in your niche will get to know, like and finally trust you.
This all sounds so obvious, but if you go to the social bookmarking sites, you will be amazed how many people only submit their own sales pages. Hopefully, this article will make you realize one more time, how counter-productive this approach really is.
All approved comments you submit will have the no-follow tags removed! What this means is that all your comments will result in a one-way link back to your web page.
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Social bookmarking is the link building tool of today. None of the other ways to build links bring in the same amount of traffic to your website or blog that social bookmarking does.
