All Entries in the "Social Bookmarking" Category

Enjoy These Do-Follow Social Bookmarking Sites

Social bookmarking is one way to promote your blog. The following list of social bookmarking websites offer do-follow links:

http://rapidpicks.com/
http://blogmarks.net/
http://buddymarks.com/
http://digg.com/
http://ez4u.net/
http://ma.gnolia.com/
http://mylinkvault.com/
http://spurl.net/
http://a1-webmarks.com/
http://backflip.com/
http://bibsonomy.org/
http://blogmemes.net/
http://bmaccess.net/
http://bookmarktracker.com/bt/home
http://connectedy.com/index.php
http://corank.com/
http://furl.net/
http://givealink.org/cgi-pub/bookmarklet/bookmarkletLogin.cgi
http://mister-wong.com/
http://mixx.com/
http://mypip.com/index.html
http://myvmarks.com/
http://newsvine.com/
http://oyax.com/
http://plugim.com/
http://propeller.com/
http://shoutwire.com/
http://squidoo.com/
http://syncone.net/
http://tedigo.net/index.cfm
http://www.spicybookmark.com

Now, keep in mind that social bookmarking is not about the links. It’s about marketing your blog in such a way that people with similar interests can find you easily. But getting inbound links that pass off link juice is a nice bonus.

November 13, 2008 | Allen | Comments 6

Myth Busting: John Kreiss Destroys 5 Blogging Myths

You’ll love this guest article or my name isn’t John Kreiss.

Actually, it’s not. But the author of great article on blogging myths is named John Kreiss and you’d better listen because he knows what he’s talking about.

Five Myths About Blogging and Social Media

By John Kreiss

Based on information obtained by the 2008 Social Media Survey of Real Estate and Construction professionals published by MorganSullivan, Inc., social media are not widely used nor understood by many professionals currently working in these industries. Here are a few perceptions or myths held by some of the survey respondents:

Most bloggers are under 30 years old. According to Technorati’s annual blogosphere report, 58% of bloggers are 35 or older. There are business benefits to blogging and many marketers are starting to understand the benefits.

Blogging is for geeks and is a waste of time. David Meerman Scott’s recent example of how blogging brought Century 21 Real Estate to the top page of the Google search engine is a pretty good example of how quickly a firm can position itself for very little cost. How could positioning your company to get inquiries from clients be a waste of time? When people search for products and services today, they often use search engines like Google. Getting your company on the top page improves your chances of getting inquiries for new business. Blogging is not just for geeks anymore either. Knowledge of HTML code (universal language of the Internet) might be helpful, but it is not required. There are many successful bloggers who don’t know how to write HTML code and don’t need to because blog hosting providers including WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, and many more, make it quite easy and user friendly to build and operate blogs.

Blogging is time consuming. Some blogs can be time consuming, but many blogs get high traffic with postings of 500 words or less and some tasks including newsletters and press releases can be rolled into blogging allowing smart companies to gain efficiencies in marketing and PR activities.

Social Media would not work in construction or real estate. According to the MorganSullivan survey, many real estate and construction companies rely on word of mouth marketing to win new work. Social media are ways to use the Internet to capitalize on word of mouth marketing. If word of mouth marketing is successful, social media should be successful.

There is no way to track ROI with blogging and Social Media. This one is difficult to prove, but it’s also difficult to prove with print advertising, direct mail, and other marketing communication including press releases. Many real estate and construction companies, however, use these old tools because they’re confident that they will produce results. Start blogging and include social media sites like digg, diigo, and delicious, and see your web site traffic spike. Getting more clients to come to you seems like ROI to me.

John P. Kreiss

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=John_Kreiss

John Kreiss – EzineArticles Expert Author

Our clients get great results using these methods of marketing: Blogging and social media marketing. Why not join their ranks?

October 22, 2008 | Allen | Comments 0

Does Social Media Traffic Bounce?

If you’ve been blogging and bookmarking for any time at all you’ve likely heard that social media traffic receives a high bounce rate. I have seen that in some cases, but I recently checked my traffic at some of the social media sites that I frequent and I’ve found that just the opposite is true. The following statistics represent traffic from popular social media sites within the last month for a blog that I write for poetry, a popular blog within that niche.

All of these bounce rates are well below the average for blogs, which tend to have high bounce rates by nature. Most blogs are around 80% bounce rate due to people just reading one post and moving on. It’s interesting to note that my bounce rate from Technorati and BlogCatalog are both considerably higher – 71.43% at each site. Likewise, at forums targeted specifically to the poetry niche market, I have higher bounce rates (75% at one), and my bounce rate from other poetry blogs are also high, some of them reaching to 75% or 80%. What gives?

I’d also like to note that my bounce rate at Digg is 100%, but I’ve only had one visit from Digg in the last month (I’ve concluded that Digg is not a good place for bookmarking my poetry site).

Traffic Figures Unveiled
Before moving on, I’d like to point out what my traffic numbers at these sites are (you’ll see that some of them are quite low):

You could argue that the sampling from most of these sites is too small to be really analyze the data effectively, but I disagree. One would expect that the higher the traffic number from any traffic source would increase the bounce right, but that hasn’t been the case at StumbleUpon. In fact, I’ve historically received high traffic numbers from the StumbleUpon community. But I’ve seen my bounce rate get lower and lower. I think that’s very significant.

LitMixx is a new social community that I started within the Mixx umbrella. It’s focus of course is on literary bookmarking – poetry, fiction, journalism, nonfiction, etc. It’s only about a week-and-a-half old so the data is very fresh and I don’t have a full month of data to analyze, but what I do have is significant, particularly since there are only 6 members in the community right now. I’ve only just started promoting it.

My big surprises are with Reddit and Furl. I really did not expect to get as much traffic from Furl as from other sources such as Delicious and Mixx. I consider those communities much more interested in arts and literary topics. I guess not. But Reddit is the real surprise because it’s mostly a news site and if I got any traffic from it at all I’d be happy. What I sense from these numbers is that Reddit users will only click a link to visit a site if they’re really interested in the topic, but if they click on a link and read the material then they are more likely to stick around if they like something. Reddit users, in other words, are more conscientious. I’m going to have to do more experimenting with Reddit.

Critical Factors For Social Bloggers
I believe my lowering bounce rate at StumbleUpon can be credited to just one thing: Consistency. I have been a consistent poetry blogger for almost a year now. And during that 11 months I have Stumbled blog posts on a regular basis. I have attracted the following of several of my friends who vote on and comment on many of the posts. Even people who are not regular readers of poetry blogs like my blog because

It’s attractive
I write interesting posts
Though I write on literary topics, I do not write “stuffy” literati stuff that is over the average layperson’s head
I write every day, but only Stumble posts occasionally (in other words, I don’t spam them)

I think these are critical factors. If you have an attractive blog with interesting writing then you’ll attract more followers. Social media users in particular care about the writing style of your blog posts. I’m talking about people are interested in more than just “share yours and I’ll share mine.” I’m talking about people who care about real content that is interesting, lively, and well written. The StumbleUpon community is largely made of people who are there because they like the interaction with other people who care about good content. The same with the Mixx community; that’s why I’m excited about the new literary community I’ve created in LitMixx. I’m anxious to see how well it does.

New Visits And Average Time On Site
A study of the new visitors and the time they spend on my blog is just as interesting as the traffic and the bounce rate are. Consider these numbers:

Again, I’m surprised by Reddit. All five of my visitors from that site within the last month had visited the blog before. Either they are subscribers (which I have no way of knowing), or they are friends of mine from another social site, or they have visited the site before from a link saved to Reddit. Whichever the case, they spent a lot of time on the site. Only one of them bounced (left the blog without sticking around to read more than one post) and the average pages the five visited was 3.0. Incredible!

Note that these numbers only reflect a modest number of bookmarks at each site. For instance, since July 9, I’ve bookmarked at each of the above sites this many times:

While these numbers represent how many times my poetry blog has been knowingly saved at these sites by myself or someone else, they do not represent how much time I’ve spent voting for other sites submitted by others or making friends and networking. The time I spend at StumbleUpon on those activities is far more than what it is at any of the others, though this may change since the start of LitMixx.

StumbleUpon, I’m convinced, is the best place to go if you want new visitors to your website, but be prepared for those visitors not sticking around very long. I see StumbleUpon as much like sending out a direct mail piece. You might send out a lot of mailers and get just a meager response. But from those who do respond, if your content is solid then you’ll see some fabulous results. That’s been my experience.

Looking at the bounce rate of the poetry-related forums and blogs that I comment on, I’d say that the small amount of traffic that I get from those is due to the trust that other bloggers have with their readers. But the high bounce rate can be attributed to a higher degree of discrimination with regard to tastes among those who have a higher interest in the topic. In other words, poets tend to know more about what they like and don’t like with regard to poetic commentary whereas non-poets who read about literary topics may enjoy reading an in-depth analysis of a topic even if they are not as familiar with it because they’ll have less to disagree with.

Conclusions
Bottom line conclusion: I think social media bookmarking works if you do it consistently long-term. Most people still only bookmark their content occasionally. I bookmark my content somewhere every day, though I don’t bookmark it at the same place everyday (and I think that is vitally important). Another thing that makes a big difference is the number of friends you make at the social sites you frequent. At those sites where you have fewer friends, you’ll likely get less traffic and higher bounce rates. At those sites where you have more (and more loyal) friends, you are more likely to get more traffic and lower bounce rates.

These results may reflect what literary blogs are capable of, but one other aspect to consider in bookmarking is making sure you approach the right target. Where you bookmark makes a huge difference. Diggers have less interest in poetry, for instance, than Mixxers and Stumblers. They have a greater interest, however, in technical topics. And I’d always consider that.

Learn how you can have your blog bookmarked
at a different site every day for $100.

August 09, 2008 | Allen | Comments 0

StumbleUpon Is Nixing Its Friends Limit

My favorite social website is StumbleUpon. I like it because it is so easy to use, especially if you have the SU toolbar. I can save a website that I like with one click and share it with a handful of friends very seamlessly. Plus, it’s fun to see what others are bookmarking too. Unfortunately, StumbleUpon has limited its users to only 200 friends. If you want more, you can’t have them so you’d better choose your friends selectively. This policy favors those who are less popular at the expense of those who are most popular. Is it fair?

Well, that’s a question for others to answer, but I’m happy to see that StumbleUpon has changed its policy. StumbleUpon is nixing its 200-friend limit.

Other changes are occuring at SU as well. I like the fact that StumbleUpon is deleting useless friends, known as “ghosts.” I blasted Propeller last week for making changes to its site and dropping half of my friends. In this case, if I lose a few friends at StumbleUpon, I’ll be quite glad. There are some users of SU who are just there to promote themselves and it’s really annoying. But it’s a time consuming process to go through all of your friends and delete the undesirables. So SU has offered to do that for me.

I’m anxious to see how the new changes at StumbleUpon will affect my experience there. I have high hopes and big expectations. Here’s to hoping StumbleUpon doesn’t let me down.

August 07, 2008 | Allen | Comments 0