Each and every marketer is constantly trying to find answers to the question of how to increase his sales even more. For thousands of web designers and eBusiness owners sales are to be closely connected with traffic their web site get. Some succeed, some never do. However, most of marketers ignore one simple fact.
Human society has often been compared to a living organism. And like any living organism the human society has its nerve system responsible for transmission of information on the outer and inner world of the society itself. In the modern world the role of such nerve system centers is played mainly by mass media (such as TV, radio and Internet channels) and also by various communication services, such as cellular phone services, online instant messaging, e-mail services etc.
Human society constantly evolves and its nerve system evolves with it. Older nerve centers just do not cope with their task any more. Mass media channels, for instance, in spite of their seeming abundance, do not provide people with sufficient information as
• most of the information blocks they provide are of the same type
• most of its information does not meet the needs of every individual person
• most of its information is prepaid by a rather small group of large financial corporations and political parties.
Thus, the society is left in desperate need of new effective ways for communication. As any self-regulating living organism the human society compensates for the lack of existing nerve centers by growing new ones.
One of such new effective communication "nerve" centers is social networks.
A social network is a social structure made of nodes which are generally individuals or organizations. It indicates the ways in which they are connected through various social familiarities ranging from casual acquaintance to close familial bonds. (Quoted from Wikipedia, which itself is a great example of a social network). Thus, any individual can get fast access to the information he really is interested in. This is one of the main reasons of social networks' popularity.
The key social network are:
blogs
community sites
social bookmarking and tagging services
Now how is this all related to marketing?
The key to making your marketing strategy effective enough is not to let your ideas drown in this sea of information. To keep your business on top you must constantly seek for new ways of promotion. You must use latest tendencies to your advantage and discover new effective promotion channels before everybody else does!
And one of such channels today is the networks of Social Bookmarking and Tagging.
These networks can easily become a source of high quality massive everyday traffic. Actually, they are already. How does it work? Social Bookmarking Services are online services that let you save your bookmarks to access them on their sites, in many cases import them from your browser's favorites, sort them, tag them, etc. What makes them social is the option for user interaction - you can make your bookmarks public and then other users can search through them, often rate them, add them to their own bookmarks and so on. Tagging is a way of marking what some item (be it blog post, saved bookmark or anything else) is about.
Search engines like such services to a great extent. Why? The way most social bookmarking services work is based on social interaction and public opinion rather than smart algorithmic filtering. Therefore, the search results obtained via social bookmarking systems are the most relevant ones.
Do you need some proof?
Here you go: Yahoo has recently bought Del.Icio.us and Flickr - two sites with large communities and growing popularity, and Furl, another social bookmarking service, is now owned by LookSmart. I think, Yahoo and LookSmart know what they are doing.
Conclusion? Every far-seeing web marketer should definitely regard social bookmarking services as a new way of promoting his business. You should use these channels, but the secret is you should use them effectively.
No matter how obvious that may seem, effectively is the keyword here, and the following are the ways of achieving it:
forming a database of social bookmarking sites so you’d know what you are going to work with
submitting your information to as many sites as you can handle
spending as little time on the two previous items as it is possible
It is not as difficult to achieve as it may seem. The secret is to find a way to automate the whole process. And the good news is that such a way exists. There is a way for driving a huge stream of totally free and quality traffic with very little efforts on your part. There are several effective tools available on the market automate and boost social networks submission process, which usually takes up too much time and effort. A bit of Google search will reveal such tools. Choose the tool you like best and join Social Networking racket wich ivolves more and more players as time passes.
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Konstantin Artemev, Web 2.0 Marketing Expert, developer of Maverick Socializer – unique tool for submitting your site to nearly hundred of social networks and high quality Web 2.0 directories (including Google Base).
