Social networking is a phenomena defined by linking people to each other in some way. Digg is a popular example of a social network. It allows you to interact with people online in a social way that a website would not.

Social bookmarking is the ability to save and categorize a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. For example you can post an article in your blog and then go to Stumbleupon and bookmark it for everyone to read. This is a great way to get traffic to your blog.

If you are a social person to person by nature than creating a profile in a social directory such as My Space or Facebook is a great way to get started with social networking. These are very good because you are able to meet people on the Internet with similar interests to yours.

It’s a great way to make new friends, and eliminate some of the loneliness that comes with Internet marketing. It is also a great way to make future business contacts for your business and potential joint ventures.

Social Bookmarking is really easy when you use plug-ins for examples on WordPress for a blog post. Onlywire.com is a service where you can bookmark to over 20 social directories with one click.

If you write your blog post so that they target a specific keyword phrase than social bookmarking can be great for search engine bait as well. You can easily do this by putting your keyword phrase in your title, in the first and last paragraph of your blog article, and then using variations of it in the body itself.

When you bookmark your post, the title tells your readers and the search engines what your blog article is about. Search engines will spider popular social directories such as Propeller, Reddit, Digg, and so on more often than they would spider your own blog.

Therefore it is a great way for the search engines to quickly find you again amongst the billions of blogs and websites online.

This is a quick overview on the difference between social networking and social bookmarking. They both can be great for your business, and should become a part of your overall marketing mix.

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Social networking is nothing new. It is a method of finding more qualified prospects for your business. In the business world before and outside of the Internet, networking involves joining groups such as a local racquetball club or anything that revolves around something that interests you, and then making friends and making yourself and your services known within those groups over time. By interacting in a friendly way with people with mutually shared interests, you build trust and a reputation for expertise in your professional area. As people within the groups become convinced that they might need or want your services, they come to you willingly for help; these same people are also far more likely to give you referrals, which along with repeat sales are the lifeblood of all business owners.

With Social Bookmarking, you blog or you or write articles and get these articles published at online content sites; then you bookmark your blog entries, articles you write for your website(s), and articles you publish at content sites at bookmarking websites. There is quite an abundance of these and their number continues to grow as their value becomes better known and they come more and more into demand.

The bookmarking websites are places where you share content that you find useful, well-written, or informative. These sites facilitate linking back to the original content and most of them also facilitate commentary. These sites are designed to give people all over the Net access to quality information in a targeted, organized way; consequently they virtually all have categories under which you index your content. You can bookmark any content that you like, but in this case it goes without saying that the content you are bookmarking is your own.

The idea is to create social “buzz” about yourself through your content at these networking bookmark sites and get people to access the links to your content, blogs, and website(s). By indexing your content using placement under appropriate site categories and adding keyword tags, you begin to draw the attention of people who might be interested in your offerings. You can greatly enhance your visibility by taking part in the socializing aspects of these bookmarking sites, by which you make online friends and add and get subscribers to your bookmarks and content. These people don’t buy a subscription, but they do become automatic regular followers of your posts, getting them “hooked” on you and greatly upping the chances that they will eventually become a customer.

Targeted traffic is vastly more valuable than traffic you get from the “shotgun approach”. It is a great waste of time to offer your services to just anybody when you could instead find people who already probably have some degree of interest in what you offer. In business, time is money, and when you waste time you lose money. But by constantly writing on a topic such as “how to get rich working from home” and socially bookmarking and networking with your content online, you become known, trusted, and seen as relevant to a certain group of people.

One of the most effective social bookmarking and networking websites is StumbleUpon. This is both a networking site and a web browser plug-in where you download the StumbleUpon toolbar to your desktop and it becomes part of your web browser. You find different websites when you click the “Stumble!” button on the toolbar. The website chooses which new page to show based on your ratings of previous pages, ratings by your online site friends, and by the ratings of other Internet users who have similar interests using a “thumbs-up/thumbs-down” display system. It also has one-click blogging built into it. The ramifications for your business should be obvious.

Another great site is Yahoo! Answers. Here you create a profile and then answer people’s questions on specific topics. (You can also ask them.) Eventually you can become a Trusted Reporter for frequently sharing valuable answers, which greatly increases your profile at the site. You can post links to your website(s) in your answers and your profile, and post parts from your articles as answers. Yahoo! Answers is more frequently used all the time because people feel they are getting “friendly” and “earthy” advice from people with real experiences, making it a perfect fit for a social networker.

For targeting youthful prospects (teens and adults under 25), the fast-rising BEBO is perfect. BEBO is modeled on and similar to Facebook and early in 2008 was named the top performing Website of its kind in a report published in ‘Computing Which?’. The editor commented, “No matter what age you are or what interests you have, there is a social networking site out there for you.”

Yes, in fact, there is–and you as an Internet marketer want to take advantage of all the opportunities made possible with social bookmarking and networking.

Technorati Tags: Bookmarking, building, List, Networking, Social, Targeted

Sure, social sites give you a lot of interactivity and allow users to personalize their sites, compile a list of favourite links, videos, music, photos, documents and share it all with friends and visitors, but how exactly does that help you develop your Internet marketing start-up business?

Above all, you should be aware that social media marketing sites fall into two basic categories, bookmarking sites and networking sites, so you need to be clear about what you want to do?

Social Bookmarking Sites

Social bookmarking sites allow you to build and organize your favourite links (i.e. bookmarks) AND you can choose to restrict them to selected friends or make them public and share them with everybody on the Internet.

The big advantage of Social Bookmarking is that your favourite links are no longer tied to one specific browser accessible from just one computer in one location.

Social bookmarking services enable users to save bookmarks on a remote web server which can be accessed anywhere where there is an online connection.

Social bookmarking sites usually categorize links with a “tagging” system which allows users to choose keywords with which to “tag” their bookmarks. Sites can then be retrieved via the tags.

You may invite visitors to bookmark your posts. You can do this by adding a button to your page that links through to Stumbleupon, or Digg, or TwitThis and so on.

However, there are so many social bookmarking services, that if you added all their buttons you’d end up with more buttons than content on your page! Instead, use a service like addthis.com, which places one button on your site for a wide range of social bookmarking sites.

Social Networking Sites

Social networking sites offer a convenient method of connecting with people who share similar interests to you.

Sites like Facebook and MySpace allow you to post your advertisements and promote your products, as long as you do not simply (and stupidly) send out spam. Traffic will build on any site that has original, good quality, regularly updated content.

MySpace or Facebook?

It has recently been noised abroad that MySpace is no good for Internet marketing, but that is not so. It was simply a case of too many Internet marketers not knowing who their audience was.

The point is that MySpace tends to attract a younger age bracket with less money to spend than does Facebook. Get to know the sites and adapt your content to each one, don’t simply post the same stuff to both.

One other reason why social networking sites are sometimes dismissed as not being any good for business is that some people do little more than set up a profile. Then they get stuck, don’t know what to do, do nothing. Merely being there is not enough! Find ways to communicate with the people who are there on their terms, not yours.

Go careful, though, that you don’t go overboard with the crazy applications and the “late night partying confessions” stuff if it is not the sort of thing you want your clients to see!

Whereas social bookmarking sites are simply sites for you to collect and organize your favourite links, social networking sites, being more sociable, require more time and regular fresh content updates. With social networking sites you have to work on your image!

Search Engines Love Web 2:0!

Another reason why Internet marketers should build a presence on both social bookmarking and social networking sites is because search engines LOVE them!

Links posted on such sites are regularly followed by search engine spiders. So, by building up your links on these sites, your website backlinks will grow, and so will your search engine rankings, which is what you need if your Internet marketing start-up is to survive, grow and thrive.

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In the past my best backlink tool was the use of article marketing. I generated backlinks using article marketing by submitting 3 articles to a minimum of 50 directories every week. Using this strategy I was able to triple my backlinks because many of the articles that I submitted was picked by other directories or website owners looking for content for their websites. The process of generating backlinks while using article marketing generally takes few months. Lately with the use of a social bookmarking software, I am able to generate hundreds of backlinks daily.

The social bookmarking software I am talking about is able to post to hundreds of social networking and Social Bookmarking websites like Digg, Facebook, Sphinn with just one click. Being able to submit to so many high PR ranking social networks is like having the best of both worlds. One benefit is that you will receive high quality backlinks and the other hand you will also generate more traffic to your website. I use these social networks to announce every time I submit a new blog post or article to the directories.

In addition to the obvious possibilities of traffic generation and backlink building, there are other advantages to social networking websites. If you are lucky enough to have your article or blog post make the front page of some of these social networks, you just might need a new server. There have been many stories of servers crashing due to too much traffic from social networks such as Digg, Sphinn and Stumble Upon.

It took me a while to learn how to take advantage of these social networking websites, but I am glad I took time out to catch up with the rest of the world. Web 2.0 strategies has introduced internet marketing to whole new masses of people, adding these strategies to my backlink building arsenal has created better results with less time.

Technorati Tags: backlinks, Build, free, Great, Networking, Quality, Social

The most common method of getting more backlinks to your website or blog is to research other similar websites that have high page ranks and solicit them for a reciprocal link. A reciprocal link is when you agree to add another marketer’s link on your website in return they will advertise your link. This method can be time consuming and very difficult because someone with a high page rank is usually not interested in a link exchange, especially from a lesser page rank website. If you still want to pursue this method you should send the website owner an email stating your interest in a reciprocal link and patiently wait for a response.

Forums are great sources to get thousands of backlinks. Forums are indexed by the search engines on a regular basis, so when you make a post to your favorite forum, it gets picked by the search engines. Make sure that when you sign up for a forum to leave your website or you business opportunities in your forum signature. The advantages of a creating a forum signature is, when someone clicks on a forum topic that was indexed by the search engines, they will have a direct link to your website from your forum signature. The more post you make to different topics, the more backlinks you will create to your website.

Writing articles on topics relating to your website and submitting your articles to article directories will also help to get more backlinks. The key to article writing is to write to write in a way that your audience understands; it doesn’t have to be very technical. Most newbie marketers get intimidated by this method, but it is actually one of the simplest and best producing methods you can use to get thousands of backlinks. The most popular article directories are Goarticles and Ezine articles. Before you submit your article, read their instructions carefully, they do have some guidelines that are mandatory.

Web 2.0 is the new wave that is taking the internet into the next generation of Advertising. The main ingredient of the Web 2.0 concept is social networking websites. Social networking sites are quickly becoming the most popular and effective way to get thousands of backlinks to your website. Basically Web 2.0 sites like Digg, Reddit, and Sphinn provide high pr backlinks to your website. Social networking sites are very Google friendly and you do not have to write a 500 word article to create a backlink. There are literally thousands of social networking and bookmarking sites popping up everyday. Internet marketers are taking advantage of the social marketing phenomenon by generating thousands of backlinks to their perspective sites. Currently there are bookmarking softwares that allow you post to hundreds social networking websites with just one click.

The next time you are thinking of bringing more visitors to your website or increasing your page rankings remember these methods. The internet changes everyday but core is always a constant, getting thousands of relevant backlinks to your website will you’re your website relevance with the search engines..

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