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If you use social bookmarking and social networking sites for very long then you’ll eventually run into a situation where you are banned or threatened with banishment for not following the website’s guidelines. It behooves you to learn the guidelines of the sites that you use before that situation arises. I myself have been banned from one site and I have a friend who was banned at the same site just a few weeks later. Neither of knows what offense we committed to be banned.

Propeller is one site in particular that will ban you for offenses and not give you any indication as to what the offense was that got you banned. If you inadvertently break a guideline or someone reports you for behavior that you thought was acceptable then you have no recurse for appeal. They make it difficult for you to contact site administrators to inquire about your dismissal. Your account is simply closed and the next time you go in to log in you find that you can’t. All you can do is go back and read the site guidelines to try to figure out what you did wrong. And in many cases it is simply an innocent mistake that could have been avoided by being more familiar with site guidelines.

Every social site has its own guidelines and they vary from one site to the next. What may be acceptable at one social site may not be acceptable at the next one. If you are going to be active at the social sites then you need to familiarize yourself with the guidelines at each site and make sure that you behavior on the site conforms with their policies, guidelines, and terms of use. Otherwise, you could find yourself on the outside looking in.

Much has been said about using a blog as a marketing tool but most people writing about this subject don’t really get into specifics. I think it’s necessary to define the purpose for your blog before you begin. Is it going to be a traffic tool where you send traffic to your website then close the sale? Is it going to be a way that you draw people to subscribe to your e-zine? Are you trying to sell through the blog? It’s important to define what you want it to do before you begin.

One of the legitimate purposes for a blog is to use it as a lead generation tool. There are several ways to do that, but they all involve writing compelling content that draws people to read. Then, every blog post you write needs to focus on helping you obtain that overall goal.

Two aspects of blogging that you will use to draw traffic to your blog are SEO and social media marketing. The SEO part is the use of keywords and links to get your blog posts to rank in the search engines for words that you think people will use to find you. If you do that part successfully then you’ll draw more traffic to your blog from organic search rankings. But just because you appear in the SERPs doesn’t mean they’ll click on your link.

Your blog post title will go a long way to getting people to click the link. You want it to be compelling. It must contain your primary keyword and it must get people to click your link in the SERPs to read your blog post. Then your blog post must contain some great content that gets people to take the next course of action: Opt in to your e-zine, visit your website, etc. Make sure that you pick one thing for each blog post that is the goal for that blog post. What do you want people to do? Define the action you want readers of that blog post to take then write the blog post toward that end. This is lead generation. You are leading your readers to a specific course of action.

In November, I mentioned on this blog a social bookmarking tool called SocialMarker. I recommended it then and I recommend it now.

At that time SocialMarker had 18 or 20 sites that you can bookmark at. I don’t remember exactly how many. But they’ve expanded their list now to 46 websites. That’s a great list!

The good thing about SocialMarker is that you can select only news sites, only bookmarking sites, just the “best” sites, or sites that give you link juice. But I did find one error. When I click on the Dofollow button to select those sites that offer link juice, it doesn’t check Propeller for me. The last time I checked, Propeller does offer link juice so you might want to click on Propeller to select it too if you decide to use SocialMarker.

I like SocialMarker and I commend them for being interested in continuous improvement. A lot of times these types of websites go up then it seems like the owners forget about them. But not SocialMarker. They seem to have to right attitude.

One of my customers recently received a comment on her blog that I was responsible for putting there. But I didn’t write it.

The comment came from a woman who discovered my client’s blog on StumbleUpon when she came across my profile. You see, I had stumbled my client’s blog and the woman had discovered my client through that stumble. She clicked through from my StumbleUpon profile to my client’s blog, left a comment, then stumbled the blog post herself. And she added me as a friend. That’s one powerful tool!

The sweet thing is, my client has another reader, one which she would not have had if I hadn’t bookmarked her blog post. StumbleUpon is just one of the many social communities online that allow bloggers and other online marketers the opportunity to make such connections and attract loyal readers. If you have an interest in expanding your network of blog readers, let us know. You have have your blog bookmarked every day at one of several bookmarking and social communities online (a different one every day) for as low as $100, even if you are not a customer of our blog ghostwriting service. Take advantage of this powerful viral marketing tool today. You never know when the price may go up!

I recently discovered two social media websites that are absolutely invaluable for any website in any industry and I highly recommend them. One of them is a lifestream website that will organize all of your social media efforts under one umbrella. Lifestreaming is becoming popular now in ways that a few years ago were unimaginable.

Lifestreaming is all about keep tracking of your online life. If you have accounts at several social media websites (and who doesn’t?) then it can get quite complicated trying to keep track of them. That’s where Profilactic comes in.

Profilactic is the best lifestreaming tool available. It’s totally free and will help you keep track of 142 social sites. You can add your blog URLs and RSS feeds to them as well. In fact, if a site isn’t listed with Profilactic then you can add that site to your account settings and Profilactic will track your activity and your friends’ activities. Instead of visiting every single site every day to see what is happening, you can view them all in one interface at Profilactic and visit only the sites that you need to visit when you have new activity on them. This is a huge time saver and a worthwhile tool.

The second tool that I recommend is StumbleUpon Exchange. If you have a StumbleUpon account, this is an incredible tool. When you sign up you are give five points and you are allowed to add as many sites that you want to the exchange. You spend three points for each site you add so you can only add one site initially, but you do earn a point for every site in the database that you stumble. And there are thousands of sites in the database!

The idea is to stumble the sites of other members of the exchange and they in turn will stumble yours. This is one incredible tool. It is perhaps the easiest, fastest way to ensure that you get your websites stumbled and I can’t think of any other tool that benefits users the way that StumbleUpon Exchange can.

You can also earn 10 stumble points through the exchange by referring other users. Click my link from this blog and I’ll get 10 stumble points. Then you can join and recruit your friends. Market your website and your blogs through StumbleUpon Exchange.

I encourage you to sign up for these two web sites today. Login right now before you forget:

Blog Marketing Journal wrote a great blog post about social bookmarking sites that use do follow links instead of no follow. At the risk of spoiling it for you, I’d like to let the cat out of the bag:

• Furl
• Digg
• Propeller
• Technorati
• Slashdot

I can vouch for these, but I’d also like to say that social bookmarking is not necessarily about the links. At least, not the links that you can get from the social bookmarking site.

Link popularity is one of the most important measurements that you can make as a website owner. Link popularity is defined as the aggregate number of inbound links your website has pointing to it as reported by the various search engines. Most link popularity reports focus on the Big Three: Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Although MSN, for the last year, has been unreliable and may report its links, or not, from one month to the next. That leaves us with Google and Yahoo!

Yahoo! is much more liberal in its link reporting policy than Google is. In many ways, Google, the primary motivator in the development of link popularity as a website metric, has clamped down on inbound link credits in recent years. Google is very concerned with link quality whereas Yahoo! seems to be much more concerned about link relevance - the actual relationship in topical value between a linking website and its link partner.

When checking link popularity, you take what each of the search engines report for your inbound links and add them together. So if Yahoo! reports that you have 4,531 inbound links and Google reports 123 - a disparity that is not at all uncommon - then your link popularity will be 4,531 + 123, or 4,654. A website with at least 5,000 inbound links is just starting to gain some link notoriety. A website with at least 20,000 inbound links is well on its way to becoming a powerhouse and a noteworthy authority in its niche. That’s how important link popularity is.

Social Bookmarking’s Real Value
Social bookmarking has the potential to help you increase your link popularity. If you focused entirely on the sites that gave you link value for your inbound links then you’d only bookmark your website or blog posts at five social bookmarking sites, but that would be a huge error. I repeat, that would be an outstanding miscalculation on the scale of Coca Cola changing its formula.

The real value of social bookmarking comes in getting your bookmarked items noticed by a community of interested persons who like your content. One bookmark at a well trafficked website like Digg or Propeller - or even StumbleUpon or del.icio.us, both very popular sites that do not give you any direct link value - can boost your link popularity by thousands of links within a single month. The way that happens is by making your content popular enough that people share it with their friends. Each person that visits your website or blog is a potential blogger. Every blogger that likes your content enough not only to bookmark it but also to write about it on his or her own blog becomes a one-way link partner for you and assists you in developing your link popularity.

I had an article on my poetry website last month, for instance, that drew more than 2,000 visitors. Before that, my daily traffic count was in the 40-50 range. But I had one blog post, bookmarked at StumbleUpon, that drew thousands of visitors because of its topical subject matter. That one blog post subsequently attracted hundreds of inbound links from other poetry bloggers who linked to my blog post, giving me additional link popularity. Seeing as how there are only a couple of thousand poetry bloggers, that’s not a bad run for one blog post. Now multiply that by hundreds of blog posts over the course of a year or two.

Of course, not every blog post can be that popular. But one very popular blog post in the midst of hundreds of blog posts with average or moderate link and traffic attention can give you a huge edge over the competition.

Social bookmarking is the new article marketing. Article marketing has long been a great way to develop inbound links and gain new traffic to a website. Social bookmarking offers the same benefits on a much bigger, grander scale. It’s article marketing on viagra. You can get more links faster and watch your link popularity soar! I’ve seen it and so have the clients who use our social bookmarking service for their blog content. If you try it, I know you’ll it too.

Social bookmarking has taken on a life of its own. Thanks to Pligg and a couple of other open source platforms, social bookmarking sites are springing up all over the place. Just like article directories a few years ago, social bookmarking sites are a dime a dozen and now starting to gather in niches - just like articles directories in 2002.

The benefit to this is that blog marketers looking to expand their audiences now have the ability to do through so vertical marketing strategies that focus on building off site relationships that lead to on site relationships that lead to sales. Your social bookmarking initiatives can now be rolled into your marketing funnel, which allows you to caster a wider net. People will find your blog and website through a different avenue and it is likely that you will attract people to your blog and website that never would have found you otherwise - all because of a little social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking has two primary benefits: Link building and traffic generation. But keep in mind that many social bookmarking sites now use nofollow tags in their links and therefore you won’t get any Google juice out of them. But some, like Digg, do not. So you’ll get some link benefit out of social bookmarking, but the true value is in the traffic generation that can develop as a result of people seeing your articles and blog entries that might not encounter them any other way. If you aren’t using social bookmarking right now to drive new traffic to your website then you should start thinking about it.

(Source) But the “select publishers” are not just mainstream media outlets, there’s also a good bit of content pulled from smaller sites like Make Magazine and WordPress blogs. Overall Buzz strikes a good balance between the big news sites and smaller sources.

Does this mean that bloggers will be allowed to submit stories to Yahoo! Buzz? I’m not sure if that is what it is saying or not. It does appear to be saying that Yahoo! will allow certain publishers that are not mainstream big news outlets submit their stories, but what will be the criteria for becoming one of those “select publishers?” That’s the question of the day.

This article does provide a good overview of the social news phenomenon. Propeller has achieved some moderate success, but nothing quite like Digg. Wired is certainly right about that. But Ask.com has also launched its own social news site, though it is still too new to know whether it will compete well with Digg and other sites. Yahoo! is more along the lines of Ask’s BigNews than anything else. It may be fun to vote up stories, but if I don’t get any benefit out of it as a webmaster then I don’t really have the time to kill. Good luck to Yahoo! Buzz.

BlogCatalog has announced that it will be introducing a new social marketing tool. They’re calling it the Social Dashboard. The idea is to aggregate users’ social networking and social bookmarking accounts.

I just logged into my account and was hit with the Dashboard face, which is pretty blank right now. But it looks like a good tool. Right away, I see the social aspects of it:

The first thing I see is the big red BlogCatlog box in the upper left corner of my browser. Then, below that is the Dashboard header and a little red Beta next to it. Good clue!

Below the two sentence introduction to the Dashboard there are five tabs labeled News Feed, Discussions, Groups, Broadcasts, and Neighborhoods. Below that are two links: “Try adding some friends” and “updating your subscriptions.”

I haven’t been very active on BlogCatalog, but I may start being more active now. It looks like it could actually be a more effective tool for bloggers than Facebook, which is a bit more social than anything else. At least with BlogCatalog you can choose your friends based on whether or not their blog is in the same industry as yours. Facebook is a little more difficult as you have to select your friends based on a collection of interests or geographical location. Neither of those are really very helpful for business bloggers.

What I like about BlogCatalog is you can consolidate your friends and interests from various social sites like:

• Flickr
• Twitter
• MySpace
• StumbleUpon
• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Technorati
• MyBlogLog

Personally, I think the list is incomplete. There are other social sites out there could be rolled into BlogCatalog for greater effectiveness, but I do like that MyBlogLog, Flickr, Technorati, and StumbleUpon are included in the list. I think Facebook is more helpful than MySpace, and YouTube would be a nice addition.

Anyways, it does look like a useful application and I’m looking forward to playing around with it. Gotta go now. I’ve got a lot of BlogCatalog friends to make.

This video is about a tool you can use to social bookmark your blog posts more effectively. It’s not an autosubmitter. There is some work involved. You have to join the social bookmarking websites. You have to join social poster as well. Above all, you do have to follow directions because there is some setup involved.

But in the long run, once everything is set up, this tool could save you a lot of time with your social bookmarking duties.

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