Social Blogging

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Even though submitting your own content first hand is a practical way of getting some immediate results, it will not work in the long term. Ideally, you will set up a system where fans and visitors are voluntarily submitting content that they find on your site. If a story is on your site, you will want to have a friend submit it on your behalf. Remember that anonymity is difficult to keep on maintain on most social bookmarking sites, and it is better to be a participant as a social bookmarker with relevant links than actively promoting your own. The idea is to create a positive presence within the community of your target market; the chances of interactivity are much higher, and you won’t be breaking any community guidelines as a result.

Buying votes has become a popular way for many ’successes’ of content on social bookmarking sites, but will not necessarily help you grow authentically. A large part of successful networking is the organic growth involved; this means you need to put time and effort into community-building, and the success of your site will largely depend on the quality content you create and the frequency of visitors.

It is essential to avoid spamming in any way or form at all costs; spamming will break community guidelines and possibly have your website delisted from the network-for life. You’ll want to participate positively and build a reputation so that you do not become vulnerable to spamming as often as possible.

Be generous about linking. You can do this by including links in articles, linking out to sources, and even including links within a blog. AS you develop fresh content, make sure to send a quick e-mail to the article owners that you link to; this can create an instant new fan or prospective customer, and will help with building business relations overall.

After a significant amount of time and effort, you can become a top user on a variety of sites. Gaining this status in different communities will provide additional exposure, and thus increase the likelihood of others linking to you. If you can submit quality content on a regular basis, it will help you build a reputation that’s hard to break!

Stimulating traffic by using social bookmarking leverage is a very effective way to grow your online business. The key benefits of using social media in this way are to:

1. Become linked on as many social bookmarking sites as possible
2. Create a pool of new subscribers
3. Obtain backlinks from authority sites-these will naturally drive traffic with little direct marketing effort
4. Comparable return on investment from e-mail marketing and direct SEO

Keep in mind that there are five main sites to focus on when you first start out: Digg, StumbleUpon, Netscape, Reddit, and Del.icio.us. Furl and Yahoo MyWeb are two others that offer some benefits, but you will need to take some time to review their potential.

Apart from the active work of submitting each piece of content, it’s important to pay attention to the type of content that you are developing on the website.

Quality is even more important today as search engines are only indexing relevant and appropriate content that is balanced in keywords. The days of excessive keywords and even SEO-based content are declining, and search engines are becoming much smarter at recognizing and identifying information that is relevant to a site, subject, or topic. As a result, it’s important to create content that is both informative and search engine friendly.

By providing useful content on a regular basis, you are building site popularity, encouraging new visitors, and giving search engines a chance to index your site on the top ranks.

Technorati Tags: social bookmarking, submitting content, content submission, bookmarking tips, social bookmarker

MAKING SURE YOU DON’T SPAM

Social bookmarking offers you a lot of freedom, and can help you drive traffic to your website overnight. Still, abusing this freedom can lower the credibility of your business, your brand, and your company name. Moving beyond the potential for spamming will help you to build a strong and regular community, instead of being kicked off a social bookmarking network.

It’s important to review your submissions to make sure you’re not overusing keywords. Keyword overuse is a turnoff for readers anyway, and you should aim for a keyword density between 6-8% at the maximum level. Most readers will easily pick up on articles that simply do not make sense, and this will limit your ability to promote quality work. Instead of focusing exclusively on SEO, create something unique with an attractive headline instead.

Google and Yahoo! are also becoming vigilant about catching spam-type articles and you will lower your chances of indexing as a result. The most important factors for indexing by Google include:

1. Publishing content that is relevant to the heading or topic
2. Quality formatting
3. Appropriate links and references
4. Appropriate amount of keywords

Reading all terms of use and guidelines will ensure that you can make the most of your participation, and grow with your community so you are developing a strong presence.

Avoiding Becoming A Spammer If You’re Using Duplicate Content.

Duplicate content makes it easier for you to write about your topic of choice, giving you a pre-researched format and guideline. Still, it’s important to make many changes to the article, and obtain permission rights from the author when necessary. A single sentence or paragraph that is copied word for word can be detrimental to your search engine placement, and may even lead to copyright infringement.

THE SOFTWARE QUESTION: TO BUY, OR NOT TO BUY

You’ll find a variety of submission directory software packages and applications available on the web today, but it’s important to review the risks involved with using an automated service. Since many of these can be blocked by spam filters, the efforts may not be worth your time. These software packages are designed to submit your content and information on multiple sites in one simple step.

Some social bookmarking submission software packages are designed to be compatible with multiple websites, but you may find that some of your content simply becomes pushed onto spamming sites and bogs. This is why submitting to quality directories and sites is even more important today. Automation does not necessarily guarantee quality, and only you can make the decision on whether this is appropriate for your business, your blog, or your website.

Still, you may find some value in free sites such as Socializer 2.0. Socializer is free web service from eKstreme.com that allows you submit one link to several social bookmarking websites by adding some code to your site. The company has also developed customizable Wordpress and Movable Type plugins and you can find instructions on downloading this information directly from the website.

You can book mark your articles to one folder in your IE Favorites, export it to it’s own folder and import all book marks in that folder to Del.icou.us and them tag/label them. Many of the other Social Bookmarking Sites have features that will allow you to import those favorites directly into your account from Del.icio.us.

IMPORTANT: Remember to mark all your bookmarks in all Social Bookmarking Sites as public. When you import bookmarks, most sites will automatically or by default mark them as private. When they are marked as private, no one including search engines can find of view your bookmarks. If you leave them marked as private, it of course then defeats the purpose of Social Bookmarking from a marketing standpoint.

Technorati Tags: social bookmarking, tagging, bookmarking, seo, social bookmarking submission, bookmarking services