What is Social Networking?

Posted on by

Social networking sites are all about community. They are web sites designed typically for members to create and post their own content, often in the form of profile pages, with the purpose of communicating with one another.

Some examples of popular social networking sites include MySpace, Blogger, and Classmates. There are also a bunch of social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Reddit. And don’t forget the likes of YouTube.

Social networking sites are seeing remarkable growth and marketers are paying attention. Nielsen reported in 2006 that the top ten social networking sites experienced a 47% growth over the previous 12 months. And a new JupiterResearch report reveals as many as 48 percent of brand marketers will deploy marketing on social networking channels in 2007.

Emily Riley of JupiterResearch was quoted as saying, “30 percent of frequent social networkers trust their peers’ opinions when making a major purchase decision, but only 10 percent trust an advertisement.”

So how can you build traffic with social networks? You don’t necessarily have to purchase advertising on their network. Start by thinking creatively. Perhaps even a little outside the box.  Do you have a hilarious or creative video clip you could post to YouTube? Could you write a absolutely hot article and get thousands of users voting for it on Digg or Reddit? Could you build a blog with a huge following of readers?

More information on:
HTML clipboard Social Networking Sites

Social Bookmarking Sites

Social Networking Traffic Feb 2007

Article Marketing To Build Web Traffic

Posted on by

Article marketing involves writing articles and making them available for webmasters and editors to publish. The greatest exposure usually comes from listing the articles at article directories such as EzineArticles and IdeaMarketers. This allows anyone to publish the article without any fee to you, the author, provided they include your ‘Author Resource Box’ at the end of the article. Your author’s resource box should be a small paragraph or two about you including a direct link to your web site.

Article marketing is a great traffic building technique for several reasons.

First, there is an increase in name exposure and brand awareness as people read your articles all over the Internet. They will begin to recognize you as an expert in your topic.

Second, there is direct traffic to your web site from readers clicking through the link in your author’s resource box.

Third, there is the indirect benefit of backlinks increasing your search engine ranking. Backlinks are links on other web sites that point to your web page. Backlinks are important for search engine optimization because some search engines, especially Google, give more credit to web sites that have a good number of quality backlinks.

What Are Advertising Swaps?

Posted on by

Once you have a mailing list of your own with several thousand subscribers consider setting up ‘ad swaps’ with other newsletters. Make a list of possible newsletters that would make good swapping targets. This list might include newsletters on the very same topic as yours, but it could also include publications on closely related topics.

A newsletter on copywriting, for example, might do an ad swap with another copywriting newsletter. Or they might swap with newsletters on related topics such as advertising, editing, and freelance writing.

Swapping ads one of the most effective low cost techniques for building traffic. There is only the opportunity cost of not having paid advertising in those spots of your newsletter. I can assure you that the traffic growth will be worth more in the long term than a one-off advertising payment from someone for a classified ad.

See also Classified Advertising and Solo Mailings.