Why Does My Business Need Social Bookmarking?

Firstly, what is social bookmarking?

To be successful on the internet, people, customers, prospects, have to be able to find you. To find you they often use a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing to look for the "thing" they are interested in. To be found on the first page of a search engine is vitally important as most people, actually more than 95% of people never look at more than the first 3 pages of results. Some of the popular social bookmarking sites are Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Facebook and Twitter. 

How is this relevant to social bookmarking?

Well, in short if you have provided items of value, like an article, a book, a video and put it on the internet then the more references there are to that piece of content the better. The social book marking sites, and there's more than 150 of them, create a link back to your article. The search engines love to see this link, they give you credit for having all these links to your content, and presto you climb up the list of results in the search engines. We want our business to be as high up on this list of results as possible, preferably the first page. This isn't an article about search engines or SEO but it is very relevant.

Lets look at this in a bit more detail.

Social bookmarking is a way of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs online.  You might have the best product in the world, but if you can’t generate the traffic you’ve just got a nice website on your hands with no customers.  Even if you have a loyal mailing list you will still need to constantly update this by attracting new online visitors.  

There are many options for making connections on social bookmarking sites.  To find the best you need to take your time and surf around.  Once you have researched the best start to set up some social bookmarking accounts that you can use regularly.  

StumbleUpon is one of the most popular of the social bookmarking sites which is both powerful and easy to use. First you need to create an account and then create a toolbar interface.  All that’s left to do is click on the Thumbs Up icon (which is found on your browser after you install the StumbleUpon tool) in order to recommend a website.  This can be done for any websites you own and you can also ask your friends to give you the Thumbs Up.  In addition to these ratings you can also add comments about your website.  

Can you Digg it?  Sounds like a line from a 70s song, but it is actually a very popular social bookmarking site. Digg works very much like StumbleUpon in that users are allowed to push up the ratings for a particular site so that it reaches the front page.  If you can make it to the front page you will be presenting yourself to thousands of potential visitors and more and more people will start hitting your site to see what you are all about.  

To assist you in publishing your information out onto the web there are a number of services available to you. There are both free and paid services and those listed here are the free services. They require a bit of effort from your business to maintain but the effort pays off over time. You will need to register yourself or your business to each of the social sites you want to be profiled on. This can take a little time at the beginning, though once done you don't have to worry about again.

• Clipmarks markets itself as “scissors for web pages.”  This site lets you submit items that are transmitted to the Internet – including to an iPhone and to Facebook.  It provides a one stop shop and can save a lot of time.
• You can sign up with services like OnlyWire to get similiar capability to Clipmarks. OnlyWire has a free and a paid option. 
• Another option is to use a site called Socialmarker. Using your social site accounts it steps your through the creation process of entries in each of these sites. You would repeat this process for each new piece of information that you want to promote out onto the internet.  
• Alternatively you can use ping.fm to connect to all your social media accounts. 

Some of these services provide a small application for your browser. Just install one or more of these plugins for your browser. These "plugins" allow you to carry out a multitude of functions such as clicking once to submit your item to many sites in one go.  In order for this to work, you will need to join any social bookmarking sites you want to use.  

You will need to ensure that visitors to your site know how they can rate your site.  It is not possible to bribe or reward them for bookmarking your site.  This is the social bookmarking equivalent to stuffing the ballot box.  

You can publish links to bookmarking sites as a gentle and polite reminder to your visitors.  Don’t be coy about submitting any updated information to these networks yourself.  You will just need to ensure that you do it in such a way that it doesn’t appear as spam.  If you tell people what you have got and where they can find it there is a good chance they will pass this information on to others.

In the spirit of this article there's a button just below that says "Share / Save". Go on, click and and social bookmark this article and see how it works.

Consistently Following Up Your Prospects?

Do Your Potential Customers Forget About You?

Posted by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

Your web business probably gets product inquiries from potential customers around the globe. Inquiries come via e-mail and your web site, and you try to send information to each hot prospect as quickly as you can. You know that you can drastically increase the likelihood of making a sale by satisfying each person’s need for information quickly!

But, after you’ve delivered that first bit of information to your prospect, do you send them any further information?

If you are like most business owners, you don’t.

When you don’t follow that initial message with additional information later on, you let a valuable prospect slip from your grasp! This is a potential customer who may have been very interested in your products, but who lost your contact information, or was too busy to make a purchase when your first message reached him.

Often, a prospect will purposely put off making a purchase, to see if you find him important enough to follow up with later. When he doesn’t receive a follow up message from you, he will take his business elsewhere.

Are you losing profits due to inconsistent and ineffective follow up?

Following up with leads is more than just a process – it’s an art. In order to be effective, you need to design a follow up system, and stick to it, EVERY DAY! If you don’t follow up with your prospects consistently, INDIVIDUALLY, and in a timely fashion, then you might as well forget the whole follow up process. (more…)

Ever Publish Something With A Wrong Or Broken Link?

Don’t make this mistake again!

Never put a link into an electronic document that isn’t accurate or correctly formatted. It loses you all the benefits of prospective clients and interested readers from finding the information you intended for them. It will cost you sales.

Build it, Test it, Deploy it! RightLinker from The KIX Group provides you this capability, whether on a PC or a Mac, or any platform supported by Adobe Air.

It’s simple to use:

1. Enter the web address (URL) where you want your readers to end up.
2. Next, put in the text your readers will see in your document / article or post.
3. Click the “Make The Link” and the correctly formatted link is created. The link is displayed along with a test link shown in blue.
4. To put the generated code on the Clipboard, click the “Copy To Clipboard” button.
5. To test the link click on the blue link below the formatted code.
6. To clear the form to start fresh click the “Start Again” button.

It’s done! No more hassles or mistakes.

Oh did I mention it’s yours FREE – register NOW!

PS. Many Internet Marketers and casual users have already started using this simple tool. Why not you too?