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Social Bookmarking for Internet Marketers

March 18th, 2009

Social bookmarking is one of the hottest Web 2.0 online trends. The concept of social bookmarking is about 10 years old, but due to it’s recent explosive growth, it has just now become one of the new internet “buzz words”.

It’s important for internet marketers to understand social book marking and how it can help them promote their products and services.

So, what is social bookmarking? What is social bookmarking’s purpose? Why is social bookmarking important to internet marketers?

What is Social Bookmarking? You are probably already familiar with bookmarking web sites, that you want to visit again, using your Internet Explorer or Firefox web browser. The bookmarks you create to these sites are for your personal use and are stored on your computer.

Social Bookmarking is the next step in bookmarking, where you and others can share bookmarks to web sites you think may be of interest to others. This is done via Social Bookmarking services. After you have signed up for the Social Bookmarking service, you will be allowed to register a website, site description and tags (keywords) with the service – this is a bookmark. You will also be allowed to share this bookmark, or you can keep it private (depending on the service). This information is stored by the Social Bookmarking service, and is not stored on your computer.

What is Social Bookmarking’s Purpose? There are really two major purposes behind social bookmarking.

1. The main purpose of social bookmarking is to have people with like interests bookmarks sites that they think would be useful, or interesting, to others who have the same interests. For example, I love fly fishing. Let’s say I find a site that contains some great custom-built fly fishing rods for an inexpensive price. I would bookmark that site with one of several possible bookmarking services. I would give the site I’m bookmarking a title, a description and tags (keywords) related to inexpensive custom built fly fishing rods. I would make sure the bookmark is set to public so others could find it, and would then have have created a social bookmark.

Now when people search the social bookmarking service, using the tag words used to define the bookmarked sites, they are presented with a list of related sites. Using our fly fishing example above – When someone searches for “fly fishing rods” they would be given a list of related sites, including the custom fly fishing rod site we bookmarked. Most bookmarking services also have a rating system so the most popular sites are at the top of the list.

2. Another great benefit of social bookmarking is, once you have social bookmarked your favorite sites, you can easily find those bookmarked sites from any computer connected to the internet. You simply log into the online social bookmarking service and find the website you bookmarked. This can be very helpful if you have many websites you like to monitor, when you are away from home and you are not at your primary computer.

Why is social bookmarking important to internet marketers? Since social bookmarking sites are generally very popular sites that get a lot of traffic, they have high Google page ranks and are visited often by search engines. Submitting your site to the social bookmarking services, increases the chance your site will be crawled by the search engines. I have seen my sites crawled by Google only one day after registering my site to social bookmarking services.

Submitting to social bookmarking services is also a great way to get one way, incoming, high page rank links coming to your website which helps increase your page rank.

But most importantly, if your website is seen as having value to a group of people, your bookmark can be rated highly and can create a ton of very targeted traffic to your website.

Social bookmarking is growing at a phenomenal rate and if you want to market on the internet, you need to add social bookmarking to your set of internet marketing tools.

Mike Gates is a home business entrepreneur, specializing in creating multiple income streams using information products, affiliate programs and network marketing. Mike Gates is the author of the popular affiliate marketing tips guide AffiliatePayDay. Mike teaches affiliate marketers how to earn residual monthly income from residual affiliate programs.

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Posted in Social Bookmarking | No Comments »

Blog and Ping – A Search Engine Traffic Bonanza

March 18th, 2009

Everyone is talking about blogs these days as the magic money-making marketing tool. Some of the hype may actually be true, but I suggest you cut through most of what you read about blogs just long enough to understand why every business needs a blog.

Right now, that’s not to say this won’t change, search engines are in love with real blogs. By real blogs I mean blogs that are set-up and run by businesses that offer useful content on them. Like every successful marketing method there are people out there setting up fake blogs and dumping garbage, but keyword rich, content into them in order to trick the search engines into ranking the content highly. [Please resist the urge to add to this form of search engine spam as it may actually get you banned by a search engine.]

When you understand a little about how blog software works you get a better understanding about why search engines love blogs. Here are the top reasons that business blogs and search engines go hand in hand.

Lots of Pages

Each blog entry is shown in chronological order on a blog’s homepage but, each entry is in reality its own web page, with its own unique URL and title. So, an active blogger can create hundreds of keyword rich web pages in a matter of months.

Change Is Good

In order to claim your place at the blogging table you must commit to making posts often – 4 or 5 times a week perhaps. This commitment means that you are creating, updating, changing some portion of your site several times a week. The typical small business web site is lucky to receive an update several times a year. Search engines like change.

Wake Up Call

Because search engines love changing content, they are ever ready to visit a site when it is updated. One feature unique to blog software is something called a pinging. Basically, what you are doing is sending out a message to various blog directories to come and visit you site because it has been updated. Once a search engine has located your site, this is like a personal invitation to come back and get the new stuff. I use a site called Ping-O-Matic to send pings to multiple services. Some blog software can be configured to do this automatically.

RSS Directories

Blogs also have a built in distribution method known as RSS. This allows you to push your updated content out to people who subscribe through an RSS reader such as Bloglines or FeedDemon as well as Yahoo and MSN. This ability allows you to communicate directly with subscribers but it can also help get your main site noticed and indexed by the major search engines. Yahoo, for example, allows people (including you) to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed. On the day you create your blog, you can subscribe to it via a free MyYahoo account and Yahoo will visit and index your blog for free. It has no choice.

Linking Is Key

Part of the blogging culture is the predisposition to link to and from quality content that relates to the subject your are blogging about. In other words, bloggers like to link. Links from other high quality blogs will send traffic and get your blog and web site noticed.

So, your blog marketing strategy a little like this: Set-up a blog and start posting. Ping each time your make a new entry. Submit your blog to the major blog and RSS directories. Start looking for link partners. Repeat

In the last few weeks I set-up blogs for an attorney, a label manufacturer, and a remodeling contractor. In each case, the blogs were indexed and spidered by the major search engines within 48 hours. Traffic to the main web sites for these businesses (although a bit meager to start with) has already doubled or tripled. Traffic from each of the major search engines is now showing up for a large number of important search terms and phrases.

Who knows how long this blog traffic bonanza will last but at this moment a blog has never made more sense.

If you’re convinced that you need a blog but don’t want to hassle with setting it up and learning how to promote it properly, check out my basic blog coaching package. I do the work, you’re up and blogging and promoting your blog in a matter of days.

John Jantsch is a marketing consultant based in Kansas City, Mo. He writes frequently on real world small business marketing tactics and is the creator of “Duct Tape Marketing” a turn-key small business marketing system. Check out his blog at www.bloggingbusiness.com

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Posted in Blog Software | No Comments »

Differences between Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign

March 18th, 2009

Having worked for an Adobe Authorized Training Center for the last 10 years I often get asked from students what the difference is between Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Firstly, let me say that all three programs are in fact owned and developed by the same company, Adobe Systems, the World leader in Web development, graphic design and E-learning software. All three programs are also bundled together into Adobe’s Creative Suite, which is a great and affordable way to purchase this software.

I think part of the confusion, is that certain tasks can be done in more than one of these programs. For example you can find vector-drawing tools available inside Photoshop and InDesign, even though Illustrator is the predominant vector drawing program. The key to getting the most out of these three programs is to understand what their key functions are and how they can be used together.

Okay so lets look at each program separately. We’ll start with Adobe Photoshop, which is probably the best known out of the three. Photoshop is a professional image editing software primarily used for editing bitmap images and image manipulation. Bitmap images are images, which are defined by their pixel structure. In other words digital bitmaps can be broken down into millions of tiny pixels and each pixel has its own attributes. Bitmap images are sometimes also referred to as raster images. The most common type of bitmap image is a photographic image. Whether shot on film and scanned into the computer or whether digitally shot, photos are made up of millions of tiny pixels. So simply put Photoshop is a tool used to edit photographic images. It also has the ability to do lots of other things but the core function of Photoshop is to edit Photographic images. If you go down to your local newsagent and pick up any magazine, chances are very good that the images in that magazine would have been edited or altered using Photoshop. Sometimes the adjustments can be minor such as subtle lighting or sharpening adjustments, and other times they could be major like applying a filter or special effect. Photoshop is used for retouching – ever wonder why the models and movie stars never have any cellulite or a double chin – the answer is Photoshop. Often an image can comprise of a few different images with have been merged together to form a montage. This effect can also be created in Photoshop.

Adobe Illustrator on the other hand is a vector-drawing program. Vector images are the other main type of digital image. Unlike bitmaps, vectors are made up of a series of lines and shapes, which are defined as mathematical formulae. Vectors are very good for creating images, which contain large sections of the same color. So for example a navigation button on your web site, your company logo, or any non-photographic image would be better off created as a vector. Illustrator is the World’s premiere vector drawing tool, so if you were tasked with creating any kind of ‘flat’ art, such as a corporate profile, including logos, sign work, letterheads etc, chances are you would use Adobe Illustrator. Adobe InDesign is the newest out of the three programs and is a page layout or publishing program. InDesign is used for putting together stuff like corporate brochures, documents, magazines, newsletters or advertisements. InDesign’s specialty is working with documents that contain a large amount of type or text. Often designers will use all three programs on the same project. For example we recently created some new course outlines so we used Illustrator to create our logo and a few other vector graphics, we used Photoshop to apply a special shadow effect to some bitmap images, and finally we imported all those elements from Illustrator and Photoshop into InDesign where we added the copy and defined the layout.

Quality graphic design can make or break any company’s image. Adobe Creative Suite which includes Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign plus a little training can give you the vital edge to succeeding in a very competitive world.

Billy Gee is the Director of Training for Training Connection. Providing outstanding instructor led training in Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign in the Chicago and Los Angeles metro areas.

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Posted in Website Design and Hosting | No Comments »

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