Having worked in SEO department for some time, I found out lots of interesting and extremely useful things about traditional SEO. However, I thought I could enrich my knowledge, and started looking for some other effective ways of getting traffic to sites, which together with traditional methods could contribute to my site’s promotion. What I discovered is a peculiar branch of Internet marketing, which is Social Marketing.
The idea of Social Marketing is in using a variety of Internet resources (weblogs, social networking sites and communities, social bookmarking sites) in order to increase popularity of your sites.
Many of us have heard of blogs. In fact, blogs can be found anywhere on the Web now. However, few people know exactly what a blog is and what it is used for, except for expressing thoughts… My personal vision of a blog is that this is a personal journal on the Web, and its main difference from the site is that it is updated frequently, displaying its content in chronological dated entries. Most blogs allow readers to post comments to posts, and link from their blog to your posts. Besides, readers can subscribe to your blog (with the help of an RSS feed), and automatically receive updates.
There are 5 most popular types of blogs: Wordpress, Blogger,Movable Type, TypePad and My Space. To create a blog you just need to sign up for a free account, set up the blog, customize it to improve your blog’s usability, and start posting. When setting up, make sure that you incorporate an XML feed which allows you to say that you can share an RSS feed with others. Besides, using an RSS feed will enable you to ping the blog each time you update your content. Pinging is another process unfamiliar to many. By pinging, you alert the various services that there is some new content on the blog, which needs to be crawled and indexed. If the content on the blog is updated regularly, the popularity of the blog is rising. If you want to profit from your blog, keep it alive!
I think that My Space is of special significance for internet marketers. It can be called a huge Internet community with millions of registered users. This is your unique Internet space, where you can write about yourself, promote your products, brands, or sites in your own blog, make thousands of friends, with whom you can share your product’s or site’s info, post bulletins announcing your product, or site, and thus increase your site’s traffic. Making My Space friends has become easier with availability of a number of friends’ adding tools (i.e. Adder Robot), which allow you to automatically send out more than a hundred friend requests a day! What’s more, My Space is crawled by Google all the time, meaning that your sites will be indexed faster.
Another step is to start your own interest group within My Space. If you do that, you can bring together a group of people interested in the same thing (i.e. in the topic of your website), recruit affiliates, network and promote you site. If your group counts over 20,000 members, you can easily create your social network and promote your site within the network.
Digging blogs, their life and functioning, I eventually had to deal with Technorati. In fact, creating a blog and simply posting it will lead to nothing unless you let other people know about it. For this purpose, you can use Technorati, which is one of the best traffic providers for bloggers. Its main function is to make your blog easier to find when people search by technorati tags. Tag is a very important term in Internet Marketing. Simply put, this is a category, under which you publish your site on a social bookmarking site. As a rule, this is a keyword, or better say, a set of keywords, preferably 8-15. Your site will be stored in the site’s database under the categories you will point as tags, and people are most likely to find your site by tags.
Besides, Technorati is often called a large blog ranking engine. Your blog is ranked depending on the number of links to your blog from various websites. It is similar to a Page Rank for the site: the higher your blog ranks the easier your blog is to find among others. To create your own account, and find out more about Technorati, go to http://www.technorati.com.
Now, let’s shift away from Technorati, and talk about the largest social bookmarking service which I found quite useful – del.icio.us. By creating your account, and submitting your site to del.icio.us with correspondent one-word (!) tags, you allow millions of other users view your favorite sites, bookmark them, and comment on them. This service offers users a unique opportunity not only to store their links online, but also to share them with others.
By the way, you can submit your sites manually from the social bookmarking site, or if you have a blog, namely, WordPress, you can install an Auto Social Poster plugin, which would auto submit your post’s link to del.icio.us, furl, simpy, spurl, blinklist and several other bookmarking sites each time a new post appears on the blog. In your blog’s admin area (Plugin’s options) you can point the tags you want your post to be published for. Besides, the plugin automatically converts your tags to Technorati links.
Of course, Social Marketing is not limitted only to what I have just described. I will get back to this topic in my future posts, trying to focus on more specific things rather than talking in general.
Tags: blog, internet marketing, social bookmarking sites, social marketing, technorati
Posted in internet marketing | 4 Comments »
