All Entries in the "Social Bookmarking" Category
Furl Has Come Unfurled
We do a lot of social bookmarking, and one of our favorite sites is Furl. We like Furl for a number of reasons, one of which is because every bookmark provides a back link to your website. But that’s not the only reason to enjoy a bookmarking site. We also like StumbleUpon and SU bookmarks don’t provide back links (though your profile at SU does).
At any rate, we learned just yesterday that Furl is going away. It’s a sad day, but don’t utterly so. They are actually integrating with Diigo, which is fast becoming another one of our favorite sites.
You have to respect a website that does the right thing for the right reasons. That website is Furl. And Diigo is in good company in taking all of the Furl links under its own wings.
If you have a Furl account you’ll need to migrate all of your links to Diigo. If you don’t, they are lost forever. Look for me at Diigo with the user name Poetwarrior.
Traffic: The Single Most Important Thing To Do For Your Blog
You’ve set up your company blog and optimize every post to achieve high rankings in the search engines. Now what?
Don’t rest on your laurels. You need to market your blog. But how do you do that?
There are several ways you can market your blog and drive traffic to it. Here are a few that we recommend:
- Article marketing
- Social bookmarking
- Social networking
- Forum posting
- Pay per click advertising
- E-mail marketing
- Directory submissions
- Sending out link requests
Each of these methods of online marketing is effective in its own way. Article marketing is one of the oldest forms of marketing online and is great for driving traffic if you do it on a consistent basis.
Chances are, if you have a blog with Blog Content Provider then we’ve talked to you about social bookmarking. If we haven’t then you should give us a call because this is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your blog.
Social networking is different from social bookmarking in one aspect – the emphasis is on building relationships with people with similar interests in order to bring them to your website so that they can see what you are doing. Social bookmarking focuses on the content; social networking focuses on the relationships.
Forum posting is also effective in driving traffic to your website. The idea is to simply join a conversation and be a contributor. When people see how valuable you are in giving contributions to the group they will trust you more and visit your website.
PPC click marketing, aka pay per click, is very effective, especially for the short term, but it’s the only method of marketing mentioned here that requires a fee beyond any service provider that you hire to act on your behalf.
E-mail marketing is still effective and even in this day many people use e-mail without being fully connected to the Internet. We always recommend marketing your blog through RSS feeds, but you should also have a way for people to receive notice of your blog through e-mail such as a blog promotion newsletter (be sure to ask about Blog Content Provider’s newsletter services).
Directory submissions and link requests are on the bottom end of the spectrum for blog marketing, but I wouldn’t leave them. You never know how people will find you so you should give them every opportunity to do so.
You can rely entirely on SEO for blog marketing, but why limit yourself. While most of your blog traffic will come from search engines, there is a lot more potential out there for getting traffic to your blog. Some bloggers report that Twitter, StumbleUpon, or another social media source is the biggest driver of traffic to their blogs. By focusing on marketing your blog, you can increase your traffic and your conversions. Don’t just leave it to chance.
For more information about blogging, talk to a blog consultant.
Do You Mixx?
I love using Mixx. It’s one of my favorite social bookmarking communities. In fact, I moderate one of the Mixx groups – the Mortgage and Real Estate Mixx Group.
Recently, Mixx upgraded and added some cool features. Now, when you submit new bookmarks you will be taken to a page where you are asked to submit the bookmark to one of several categories. Then you will be told that your Mixxing is 50%. If you want your Mixxing to go up you just share your story with friends, leave a comment, which you can do on the initial Submit page, and add the Mixx to some groups.
This is a unique approach to bookmarking. I like these features as they are subtle reminders that bookmarking is more than just saving a page and moving on. You should also share it with friends and people with similar interests.
3 Social Services That Are A Must For Your Blog
If you blog for your business then I’d recommend the following three social media services at a very minimum:
- StumbleUpon
With Facebook, you can have your blog posts automatically filtered through your Facebook profile so that your fans can read each post from Facebook. Your fans that are avid Facebook users are more likely to visit your blog through Facebook than any other service, even an RSS feed. Using Facebook in conjunction with Twitter is a very valuable combination. Install Twitter Tools plugin into WordPress so that your blog posts automatically post to Twitter. And you can create your Facebook settings to sync with Twitter so that every time either your Facebook status or Twitter status changes then they are both updated. So that blog post you just made that suddenly updates your Twitter status also updates your Facebook status. Powerful! Instant promotion to all of your fans on both services.
StumbleUpon should be used for its traffic possibilities. There is no automation for SU, but you can submit your content to StumbleUpon and share it with a handful of friends. If it is content worth reading then they will vote on it and share it with their friends. For many bloggers, StumbleUpon is the highest or second highest source of traffic.
