Why should you do Social Bookmarking on your own and other people’s blog posts, to be a part of the Social Network Marketing community?

First of all, what is Social Bookmarking?

You already know that a bookmark is a way of marking a place in a book, so you can return to it a later time. That’s the meaning of your own personal browser bookmarks also – so you can find them easily when you want them.

Social Bookmarking is a way of sharing a web property (webpage, video, blog post, article, or something else on the World Wide Web) with others. It’s a way to mark an important resource so you and other people can find it in the future.

Here are 3 Good Reasons to Socially Bookmark your Blog Posts, Videos, Articles, or whatever content you’ve created.  Once you’ve read these reasons for Socially Bookmarking your web properties, it’s very Important to bookmark other sites that you DO NOT own.  Read down further to discover why.

1) To Get Good Quality Backlinks

Social Bookmarking is an important “off-page” search engine optimisation method, because it provides backlinks (inbound links) to your web property. One of the things search engines consider when deciding where to rank your web property, is the number of quality websites linking to your web property.

There are many good quality and highly trafficked Social Bookmarking sites which will provide backlinks to your web property, and rank you higher in the search engines for a specific keyword (or tag).

The website listed Below has a list of 65 High Quality Do-Follow Social Bookmarking sites plust 5 Social Bookmarking sites that are very popular. Social Bookmarking Sites

2) Social Bookmarking sites can Give You Targeted Traffic and Extra Traffic

When submitting a URL to a Social Bookmarking sites, you will need to add some descriptions and tags, along with the URL.  So, a person discovering this link will get a good idea of what it’s about, and click on it if they are interested. This is a good way to achieve targeted traffic because visitors from Social Bookmarking sites will only visit your site if they find your content interesting or valuable to them.

You will get extra traffic to your websites because of your higher ranking in the search engines.  Plus  social bookmarking sites like  Stumble Upon, where people actually “stumble upon” your website,  may give you a  LOT of extra traffic.  The amount of traffic depends on which keywords you use when bookmarking and how many people are actually stumbling on  sites within your niche.

3) Use Social Bookmarking to Get Repeat Visitors

If you ask people to socially bookmark your article, they are more likely to come back to your site again because they can find it easily. If you’ve written a valuable article, you should ask readers to bookmark it so they can easily find it again.

4) You can Easily Share your bookmarks with others

Some Social Bookmarking sites allow you to share your bookmarks through an RSS Feed. Delicious.com and Digg.com allows you to do this. You can provide the RSS feed to people, and if they put that feed into a Feed Reader (Google Reader for example), they can easily see the Web properties you’ve been bookmarking.

Reasons for You to Socially Bookmark Other People’s Web Properties.

1)  To Ensure that You Meet Terms of Service of the Social Bookmarking sites

The Social Bookmarking sites were designed for you to Bookmark interesting web properties you come across, so you can easily find them again. So, if the ONLY web properties you bookmark are your own, it’s highly likely that your social bookmarking account will be shut down. This is terrible especially if it’s an old account that you have  a lot of links on.

A really good thing to do is to log into your Social bookmarking accounts and bookmark other people’s sites that you don’t own. You can either bookmark sites that haven’t been submitted yet, or search popular posts/pages on the Social bookmarking account that have already been submitted, and give them another boost.

You can do that on many of the bookmarking accounts like Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Delicious, Propeller, Twitter and many more.

2)  To Promote Members of Your Tribe Community and To Reciprocate

If you belong to a Tribe community, bookmarking your tribe’s web properties helps them get traffic and backlinks.  This is all part of the syndication process, and it will assist you with NOT getting your account banned by the social bookmarking sites.

Who knows, if one of your sites or your tribes’ sites gets onto the first page of Digg.com you could get a LOT of traffic from that.

NOTE: ONLY bookmark web properties  you like, and feel comfortable recommending to your followers or friends on these social sites.

Reasons NOT to Use Automatic Bookmarking Software.

1.  Your Social Bookmarking account might get shut down if you edit your blog post a number of times.

Be very careful about using Plugins on your blog that automatically bookmark your site everytime you make a post.

Some of the plugins will attempt to bookmark the same blog post everytime you make a change (edit) the post.  This can occur without you knowing about it, and your bookmarking account can be shut down for violating their terms of service.

2.  Should Use Unique Description and Specific Tags for Each Social bookmarking site

When Using a Service like Social Bookmarker or Onlywire, you only specify one lot of Tags (keywords) and one description for ALL the bookmarking sites you send your URL to.

This means ALL the sites receive your description and keywords at the same time, and it can look like “spam” to the search engines.

In addition, many of the bookmarking sites accept “Tags” and “keywords” in different formats, some use commas, some use spaces. If your tags are all submitted in the same format, they won’t appear as you want them to on some of the bookmarking sites.

For example, if the following tags are submitted to Delicious.com like this:

network marketing opportunities, mlm lead, opportunity, home business, internet, internet marketing success, marketers

They will actually appear as tags like the following, because in Delicious the tags are separated by a space (not a comma):

network marketing opportunities mlm lead opportunity home business internet internet marketing success marketers

You don’t really want the tag “home” or “success” for a bookmark do you?

I’ve given a number of reasons why you should bookmark your own web properties and other people’s web properties. Do YOU have any reasons for or against Social Bookmarking?

Technorati Tags: social bookmarking, social network marketing

Yesterday was my birthday, and I have so many “happy birthday” wishes at Facebook, I can’t even count them! This is just one of the fun things of belonging somewhere online. By the way, the cake you see on the right was the beautiful cake my daughter made for her daughter’s first birthday! Sorry, I don’t have a photo of my first birthday cake:-)

Anyway, getting back to Facebook, I thought for a minute about whether it matters that many of my facebook friends are not people I know all that well. And, I decided that it doesn’t matter.

It’s sort of like when I was at school and all my classmates said happy birthday, but I didn’t know all of them that well, and they certainly weren’t all my “real” friends.

A few Facebook members have built up a large number of friends and then one day decided they only wanted “real” friends, so they took away the people they didn’t really know. I know that’s their choice and they didn’t for their own reasons.

However, I really like having facebook friends I don’t know and people I’m really close to, and others I know a little bit. I think it all adds to the mystery and fun of being part of a community online.

Besides, you never know when one of those friends is going to post something you really wanted to hear about, or one of those people might have something in common with you, and you end up forming a collaboration or partnership with that person.

And…. you never know when one of those friends’ friends might have something you really want, or you show them something they really want.

One way to group your friends on Facebook is to make lists. For example, I have one list which is just family, and I can click on a news feed to see ONLY the things my family have posted about.

Create a List of Friends

To create a list for your friends on Facebook, log into Facebook and click on “Friends” from the left hand side menu.

Look up the top of the screen, in the middle section, and you’ll see a button labelled “Create a List”. See the image below if you can’t find the “Create a List” button.

Create a List for Specific Friends in Facebook

Once you click on the “Create a List” button, enter your “List name” into the box and select your friends for the list.

To Add New Friends to a List

Add Facebook Friend to List

I hope you love Facebook as much as I do. Please write a comment below if you do love it, and tell me what you love most about it!

Have a terrific day or evening whichever it is for you!

Julieanne

Technorati Tags: facebook, Social Marketing

What do you do when you’ve previously seen a post on someone’s Facebook page and you just can’t find it again. As you know, Facebook pages do not really have good navigation.

Say you’ve been to my Internet Network Marketing Training Facebook page in the past and saw a post about Reasons for using WordPress on your blog. You go back to the page a few weeks later, and the post is buried on an old page.

How do you find the post without going through all the pages one by one?

You do this – go to google.com and in the search box type:

“keyword(s)” site:facebook.com/FanPageName    

To find posts about “wordpress” on my fanpage, you would type in the following, in the google search box:

wordpress site:facebook.com/mlminternetnetworkmarketingtraining

As usual, I love your feedback. Write below in the comments to let me know if this tip helps you find your way around Facebook pages. Let me know of any tips you have on your blog or facebook page, that will help everyone.

Technorati Tags: facebook, Social Marketing

There are a number of commenting systems emerging for Blogs lately. The Disqus commenting system is a service and tool for web comments and discussions.

There are lots of good reasons for using Disqus and here are just 5 of them:

1) Disqus makes commenting more interactive and easier for those who have a Disqus account and for those who have a Twitter, Facebook or Open ID account.

If you’re at a blog where Disqus is installed, quickly log in to one of your existing accounts, and you can comment in a jiffy! Or, if you want, just type in your name and post your comment.

This kind of commenting system will save you time and save the time of people who comment on your blog.

2) Disqus connects websites and people who are commenting, to make similar discussions easier to find throughout a community. You can even comment on another person’s blog which has Disqus, and your comment will show up on your blog.

3) If you’re using Disqus, the commenting system will find all the tweets that have been linked back to your blog post, and will display them underneath your blog posts. This makes it easier for people to see tweets and retweets about your blog post.

4) Here are the services supported that Disqus finds:

• Blogger posts linking to the source post and comments on those posts
• Finds submission(s) to Digg linking to the source post and comments on that submission
• Finds comments / text on Flickr linking to the source post
• Finds links from Friend Feed to the source post and also comments on those links. You can even synchronise your Friend Feed comments with your Blog post comments.
• Finds blog posts on Movable Type, linking to the source post and comments on those posts
• Finds comments linking to the source post on Picasa
• Finds blog posts on Type Pad linking to the source post and comments on those posts
• Finds comments on Vimeo linking to the source post
• Finds blog posts on WordPress linking to the source post and comments on those posts
• Finds comments on YouTube linking to the source post
• Finds comments on Facebook linking to the source post

5) For those who love video, you can even post your own video comments. Or, your followers may want to post their video comments on your blog.

Technorati Tags: disqus, social media

Do you think it’s easier to build trust and respect for someone through Social Media?

Who’s MLM business would you rather join? Someone who’s called and emailed you, or someone you’ve grown to like, trust and respect on Twitter, Facebook or video?

The internet has evolved in huge leaps and bounds over the years. It was only about 7 or 8 years ago, when the only way you could get to know someone on the internet, was by visiting their website, meeting them on a forum, speaking in a chat room or talking over the telephone.

I loved it when people started putting their photos online (even before Flickr existed) and I could get to know people by seeing their photos. And, we used to encourage people in our team back then, to have a “Face page”, which was a page about themselves.

Now, with all the social media networks, it’s so much easier to get to “know, like and trust” people.

Say you’re looking for someone you’d like to do business with, which is your most favored Social media place to get to know them?

Do you start off with Twitter? You might come across someone on Twitter who keeps sending you really valuable information you’re interested in. You might find that this person is helping you a lot.

However, you’d really like to see more of this person, so you go off to facebook and find them there. They are interacting and communicating with a lot of people, and you start interacting so this person can get to know you.

While you’re at Facebook, you make friends with your Twitter person’s friends, and one of them has some videos you watch on YouTube. Now, video is probably the best social media form (for most people anyway), where you grow to trust people. Especially if the video is of the person looking at you directly. You feel like they’re in the same room with you, and they’re speaking to you personally.

So, which Social Media platform do you like best for getting to know someone?

Technorati Tags: facebook, social media, twitter, video marketing, youtube

The Online Media daily reports on some Forrester research of social computing prediction for 2010. Research found that “marketers will need to start justifying social marketing plans with business cases, objectives and metrics” reports the ONLINE Media Daily on Tuesday Dec 22, 2009. 2010 is going to be the year when Social Marketing gets really serious.

Another recent report from MarketingSherpa also believes that social marketing will blossom a lot more next year. Their report ranked “an increase in Website traffic” as the number 1 objective, with “improving brand or product reputation” as number 5 objective. You can read more on these 2 reports here

It will be interesting to see if Network marketers start getting more serious about social marketing. For network marketers to have success with this kind of marketing, you really need to have an understanding of building relationships online and also some patience in attracting people to business rather than “selling” to people in the more traditional way.

So…. what’s your opinion on the way Social Marketing will be used for Network Marketing in 2010?

Technorati Tags: facebook, Network Marketing, Social Marketing, twitter

I would love to be a “fly on the wall” and watch how people use twitter and facebook in the work place. It would be interesting!

Originally posted as a comment
by julieannevanzyl
on Mashable – The Social Media Guide using DISQUS.

Technorati Tags: social media

This is a very comprehensive list of actions to take for small business people. I can understand if business people who already have hectic schedules, can get overwhelmed with doing all these things. However there are some very good consultants who can help do many of these tasks.

Originally posted as a comment
by julieannevanzyl
on Mashable – The Social Media Guide using DISQUS.

Technorati Tags: social media

Great post Brandon, and it’s really got me thinking. I think Godin’s street is better for a business just starting out using Social Marketing. For example, say a photographer wants to use social marketing to brand him/her self. He/She builds a list of followers who are interested in having their photographs taken, or perhaps they are going to get married or they are models wanting a portfolio. There are LOTS of different niches within this “market of photography”.

So… the photographer would most likely be better off to go down the Godin street and look for followers interested in these niches. If he/she went after the crowd, it’s going to be harder to get listed in the search engines.

And… on the other hand (I’m brainstorming our loud here:-), the photographer has advantages with getting a large crowd – because who knows when someone all of a sudden becomes interested in having photographs taken. Or.. they might know someone who wants photographs taken, and they may contact their own list who has someone on it who is interested.

Now I see the benefits of both “streets”.

Originally posted as a comment
by julieannevanzyl
on Mashable – The Social Media Guide using DISQUS.

Technorati Tags: social media

I can’t find any building blocks that you’ve missed out on Chris. Its interesting to watch posts on Twitter and Facebook, and see how people listen to others, and others just “talk” all the time. Amazing how social sites reflect what people are actually like offline also. (sorry about my empty comment – Disqus didn’t seem to like Google Chrome browser:-)

Originally posted as a comment
by julieannevanzyl
on Chris Brogan using DISQUS.

Technorati Tags: social media