What is the benefit to submitting your business webpages and articles to social bookmarking websites?
Social Bookmarking your website drives more people to your business. Bookmarking=Traffic=People with Money and Needs = Sales = Increase in Revenue
Search Engine Optimization Technique: It boosts your search engine ranking very quickly if you do it correctly, and avoid "spamming" the internet. When customers search, they see your website, and "click" their way to giving you more sales. When customers see your article on a social bookmarking website it lends to your credibility.
Higher than normal returns on your marketing investment depending on the method you use.
Humanizing your website with articles. Submitting articles showing that you "care" about what humans care about makes you seem less like a computerized block of information and more like a "trusted life partner" in the game of internet searching and sales.
~~It creates backlinks which search engines use to determine how far up the rankings your website appears.
~~ Submitting your website to social bookmarking sites has a huge return on investment if done correctly compared to the cost of other competitive marketing techniques such as paying every time someone clicks on your banner, or risking not being seen in every nook and cranny of the internet.
~~Once your webpage, or webpages are submitted to a social bookmark website, it is there forever, and you spend far less time and money paying for clicks to drive in business. However you must manage it in order to continue to receive a high ranking instead of just a quick flashing tidal wave to your website.
~~Legitimacy and credibility is added to your articles and business as they are "ranked" higher by the foremost authorities such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Now that you know the benefits of adding your website and article information to social bookmarking websites, how will you go about submitting your information?
There are several factors to consider:
The time spent submitting-
If you have never done this before can be rediculous bordering on days, if not weeks of time for each submission. There are over thousands sites that you can submit to, although only about 100 are effective, and only about 30 are highly effective. Each submission must then be managed, and people must constantly credit the value of your article by "voting" on it. In order to gain ranking you will need to be voted upon positively many times, as well as post several articles. One article posts or posts that have only one link are not seen as being very legitimate, and more "markety". No one wants to be sold, you want to be seen as an "informant" or "friend".
Where to post-
There are thousands of social bookmarking sites on the internet, and growing. First of all, how do you know which is the most effective, and therefore where to post? There are thousands of social bookmarking websites vying for your attention, some which use dirty practices to boost their own search engine rankings. Attaching yourself to the wrong site can get you banned by the search engine gods who are often not forgiving enough to reinstate you. In addition knowing the right sites to start with in order to trigger the "snowball" effect can save you tons of time. These websites shift frequently, so hiring a true social marketing genius may be the best and most cost effective action you can take to boost your business.
Generating Friends-
You have posted your articles with links to your website, but how do you rise on the social bookmarking page without having friends to "vote" on your pages? Without votes your page will sink to the bottom of thousands of pages in no time.
Bloggers-
One of the best ways for your business website to flourish is for people to connect it to their blogs, creating thousands of backlinks which will up your search engine ranking like wild fire! Controversy or huge public interest are always the way to go here; the more you spark, the more people will read your article, and see your links.
What Do I Write About-
Think of a time in which you really needed information but were unable to find it. Write a "How to..." article based on that. Such as "How to Change a Tire" or "How to Remove Haircolor from your Hairline, Cheekbones, and Fingernail Beds". Thing of "crisis terms" that affect a majority of society but yet pertain to your business demographic. You can people to read your article and go to your business expecting a solution. Therefore if you are selling solar panels or other environmentally friendly products, do not write an article about "How to Pimp Out Your Gas Guzzler".
Keywords-
Do you know which keywords to use? Different businesses use different keywords. One of the easiest ways to boost your webpage ranking is to use the appropriate highly searched keywords. Do you know where to find these keywords? Keyword generators can be excellent but if you have something special to offer in your business, I would suggest that you integrate your own keywords into the predetermined keywords. The easiest way to get banned from a social bookmarking webpage is to use words that do not pertain to your article or webpage in order to boost the number of times your article is sourced on a social bookmarking site, or a search engine. Don't think the search engines won't notice if you put search terms such as "credi card counseling" as pertaining to your article about 'How to Save the World in Eight Easy Steps".
What is a Social Bookmarking Submitter?
A social bookmarking submitter can take on two main forms; software and human. I definitely prefer the human form but I will give you the benefit of deciding for yourself.
Software Options
There are software products specifically developed to automatically submit your information to hundreds of social bookmark website such as digg.com, reddit.com, and stumbleupon.com. These autosubmitting software programs seem like amazing marketing tools that save you time, but in all reality they can seriously hurt your business. Paying someone to manually submit your information to social bookmarking websites has a far higher return on investment, as well as the ability to avoid being suspended or banned from every search engine in existence.
There are several negatives to using an autosubmission software. With an automatic submitter you will always need to worry about:
- Autosubmitters often produce duplicate content which can result in being seen as "spamming" the internet and can get you permanently banned from being ranked on that search engine. Humans manually submit several articles linking back to your website which targets a larger demographic thus boosting your social bookmarking page rankings and gain you instant credibility.
- Poor article submissions; the way that you drive people to your website is by submitting excellent content including a catchy headline, catchy truthful summary of less than 125 words, exciting leading first paragraph that keeps the reader reading, and make sure to include some way that people can either vote on your article or bookmark it themselves using a link to other social bookmarking websites at the bottom of your article. Generally submitting three to five articles writen by humans is the best way to go.
- Having your page ranks submitted multiple times on the same social bookmarking website. Again, spammy and banishment by the search engine Gods.
- Submitting to social bookmarking websites that are considered "bad neighborhood" websites that can attach your business to a website that Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines view as negative. Not only will this cause your business to appear spammy to customers as well as backlinks are then created from your website to other bad websites on these social bookmarkers. Human manually managed social bookmarking campaigns run off of constant knowledge, research, and ever changing information. Humans have social understanding lacking in computerized software. They know when and where to post based on reputation. Computer programs can only determine "popularity" based on an algorhythm and often fall behind human intuition and heresay.
- Search engines can tell when you are using autosubmitters and frown upon them. A human being takes time to submit information, as opposed to blasting 100-800 sites, at the same time. A robot lacks the human touch needed for success.
- More is not always better. Would you rather have high quality submissions to the top 30 social bookmarking websites that will generate business, or low quality one time blasts of information to thousands of websites resulting in spamming, and potential banishment?
- Submitting your own information is frowned upon, as is having an autosubmitter submit it, but having a "friend" submit it gains you instant credibility. The best way to get a higher rank on a social bookmarking site is to post several links to others articles as well so make sure to pick a few that you did not write but like and attach them to your article either as an integrated part of your writing (at the risk of having them quit reading your article) or as additional resources at the end of your article. Computer programs are capable of doing this, but are not able to look at the popular topics on each social bookmarking page when your article is posted, and pick the articles that would be of the most interest.
- They don't use cooperation techniques. The way to make it to the top of these sites is to have friends on these sites which will click on your article and vote. You need between 10-60 votes in the first hour of each of these bookmark sites to ensure that your page makes it to, and stays on the top. The only way to do this is to recruit friends yourself or to pay your manual submitter to find you friends who will click on your articles. Finding friends is slightly more complicated on a social bookmarking website than it is on places like Facebook or Twitter.
- Faster is not better; tortoises beat out hares in this case. Autosubmitters often submit all of your information to hundreds or thousands of websites within two to five hours of receiving it. This creates a not-so-positive one second tidal wave of potential new customers to your website. The one second tidal wave may seem nice until your server overloads, and you start getting criticism abour your lack of response to emails and inquiries, as well as being flagged as "spamming" the internet, resulting in lower customer retention, and possible banishment from search engines. When your information is submitted over time it helps to generate a constant flow, not a one second tirade to your website.
- What time is it? Some general rules to follow if you decide to submit yourself are to submit no earlier than 8:00 a.m. PST and no later than 2:00 p.m. PST in order for your article to appear, even temporarily on the top of the bookmark website. If your website is about leisure activities posting later might be useful. Leisure activities would include gambling, game playing targeted towards bill paying individuals over the age of 18, or any webpage with adult content. Weekends are a fabulous time to post as there is far less competition as most businesses are only open and pay employees during the weekdays.
Pricing
Although using an autosubmitter may seem like the most cost effective way to blast your website articles onto hundreds if not thousands of social bookmarking websites there are several duties that an autosubmitter does not perform, and several detriments that can come from using such a submitter. Plus there is really no effect after you submit your information to useless, no-name sites. No-name sites will not increase your search engine rankings because no one goes there to "vote" on your articles. Paying to have your article submitted manually to the top 10-30 sites, and then managed is far more cost effective. Look for companies that can provide website submissions in conjunction with friends to vote on your articles and give you backlinks to blogs. If you are interested in finding out more about the specialized and individualized services that I provide in this arena please feel free to contact me at boerstlerfinancialsolutions@gmail.com
Happy Social Marketing!
Diane Boerstler
Boerstler Solutions
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