Monday, August 4, 2008

Social Bookmarking - Is It For You?

Social Marketing sites are sites primarily geared at user-created content. Examples include LiveJournal, Facebook, YouTube, and Digg. Many are obviously a huge success. These sites have created a fabulous opportunity for people to stay connected, find lost friends, learn from others more quickly, get news more quickly, and advertise for free! Notice the last thing I said: advertise for free. How can we benefit from this?

It's a well known fact that Google likes sites that have quality backlinks on them. When you write articles, record audio, or film something and point back to your site, you are creating links to your site and in the end, more eyes will see your links as well.

Case Study:

Vguitarlessons

Ben Lowrey is an entrepreneur from England who started Vguitarlessons and truly inspired me. He offers downloads of popular guitar lessons for $12.95. His client base? Over 30,000 students the last time I checked. He posted a free 12 part e-course for people to watch on YouTube, which including many great tips for beginning guitarists. This was all free advertising, and allowed his to become very successful in the process.

So I ask you, what videos can you make that will improve people's lives. What free e-course can you offer in return for an email? What articles will add a tremendous amount of value to other peoples' lives? These are the types of things you can post to social networking sites, and create a viral effect of the promotion of your website.

A great free tool you can use is socialmarker, which allows you to post to dozens of social networking sites at the same time. I advise you to check out this site as well as YouTube and consider posting free materials for all to see.

Some free Social Marketing sites to get you started:

Facebook
Hubpages
Squidoo
Ehow.com
Go Articles
Digg.

Busby SEO Challenge

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