Author: Kevin Sinclair

What would happen if one of your friends tells about your newest blog to her five friends and they, in turn, tell their friends and it goes on like this? Pretty soon you will have all the traffic you need for a comfortable income from your new-found writing careers. Is it possible to to achieve this kind of success using the virality of the social web, or does it sound like a pyramid scheme?

The emergence of social web provides opportunities for viral marketing that never existed before. Face to face talk or talk over the phone has its limitations in reaching your audience. The Web 1.0 offered forums for a limited viral marketing opportunity. The social web has opened up avenues manyfolds expanded online reach. This article describes seven techniques for using the social web to achieve virality.

1. Before jumping to social websites to launch your viral adventure, make your site social web friendly. Provide a link on your site for users to invite their friends. When someone joins your site through an invitation, reward points to the inviter. Announce a contest on your site and reward the top inviter with e-books or a t-shirt with your site logo.

2. Spend sometime at Digg. This is a community based news popularity web site. If your blog article hits the front page of Digg, you will get thousands of visitors and some of them will eventually become your regulars. Study the types of articles that end up on the front page of Digg. Write your blog articles targeted to Digg users.

3. MySpace is the ultimate social website because of its sheer size in terms of visitors. If you have lots of friends who have their MySpace pages, create a niche network community in MySpace with common interests. Post teasers of your interesting blog articles in your MySpace page with links to your full article. Ask your friends to write comments on your blog postings.

4. Take a look at Delicious. Google Delicious to get the url because it is not a dot-com domain. It is a social bookmarking site to store your bookmarks online. You should build a network of friends at this site and study their bookmarkings to assess the type of articles they prefer to bookmark. Tailor your blog articles to mimic the article style your network appreciates.

5. Visit a site called Squidoo. At Squidoo you create “lenses” (a Web page) about any topic. You can create as many lenses as you want and you can embed external links in your lenses. Squidoo lenses also have a good search engine credibility. So, your sites will get some good external in-bound links for free.

6. LinkedIn is an online community of experienced professionals. Create your account at LinkedIn and network with professionals in your fields. Offer some free services for other professionals in your network and solicit their recommendations. All recommendations appear in your profile. LinkedIn provides great opportunity for someone to find your business or services.

7. YourElevatorPitch provides a free online spot to announce your business and services. User rates your ad pitches. This site also allows you to link back to your site.

Other sites worth exploring for viral opportunities are Flickr and YouTube. Both the sides accept multimedia (photos for Flickr and videos for YouTube) contents. These sites are good for establishing your brand by regular posting of theme oriented humorous contents.

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Author: Brian Solis

I’ve been on a recent whirlwind speaking tour recently, sharing and learning all things related to the socialization of marketing and service as well as how to measure these new strategies and tactics.

From San Diego to New York to SF back to New York and then Vegas and SF again, I was reminded that no matter how grand an expert one purports to be, the truth is that we’re all still trying to figure this out as it continually changes - together.

I’m not talking about what to do or how, but what must be done in order to ensure that this global renaissance paves the way for permanent residence in every media property and business through value, education, and reform.

The world of Socialized Media is maturing and along with it, our knowledge, expertise, reach, and personal and represented brands are only flourishing. It will continue as long as we realize that these new social tools and networks require an entirely new commitment and embodiment of what we personify and how we can be a genuine resource to the people who define the communities that are important to us.

In Technorati’s 2008 State of the Blogosphere report, the company observed that blogging is becoming mainstream, leading the way for an Active Blogosphere - defined as the ecosystem of interconnected communities of bloggers and readers at the convergence of journalism and conversation.

I’d also add that as the Active Blogosphere further permeates our daily information consumption and distribution processes, that the Social Web equally becomes pervasive. But, it’s so much more than an Active SocialMediaSphere.

As networks become densely populated and new communities arise and thrive, we’re experiencing a fundamental shift in content creation, distribution, and consumption, thus creating an Active and Participatory Media society that is inspiring and seeding a more literate and enlightened generation.

Blogs and social networks are now part of our daily lives.   * comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008)   - Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US   - Facebook: 41.0 million | MySpace 75.1 million   - Total internet audience 188.9 million

* eMarketer (May 2008)   - 94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users)   - 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%)       * Universal McCann (March 2008)   - 184 million WW have started a blog | 26.4 US   - 346 million WW read blogs | 60.3 US   - 77% of active Internet users read blogs.

YouTube = 10 percent of all internet traffic (source: Ellacoya Networks)    YouTube & Wikipedia among top brands (source: brandchannel.com)    Five of the top 10 websites are social (source: Alexa)   Over 100 million blogs exist (source: Technorati)   120,000 new blogs launched every day (source: Technorati)   1.5 million posts per day (17 per second) (source: Technorati)

Everyone is a Social Media Expert      You’re a purveyor of new media, but then again, so is everyone else it seems. So what are you going to do to rise above the fray while also delivering true, incontestable value to those you’re helping?     Are you an evangelist or a consultant?     Are you an extension of your company brand or are you an employee?

Are you a leader, follower, or are you meandering through your profession? Are you confined to the role of a social marketer or do you represent something with longer-term value? At the end of the day, everything that’s transpiring around us is actually improving the existing foundation for our business, from service to marketing to product development to sales to executive management, and everything in between.

Social marketing revitalizes and empowers every facet of our workflow and its supporting ecosystem. Seeing the bigger picture and tying our knowledge to the valuable feedback from our communities will help us guide businesses towards visibility, profitability, relevance and ultimately customer loyalty.

In every single case, it doesn’t just take an expert; it requires a champion to make an impact.   You are that champion.

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Author: Alan Mater

Social bookmarking is quickly becoming one of the many popular aspects of what we know as web 2.0.  It is becoming a very effective way for web surfers to find the latest information and news on any subject they want.  Social bookmarking sites use viral marketing and popular opinion and have the ability to discover what is important before any search engine bot can spider the site and rank it among the thousands of sites out there on the internet.

It is becoming a crucial part of any business’ online presence and is a source of traffic for your site that should not be ignored. Social bookmarking is a powerful tool in promoting a website and may just be the best way to boost the traffic to your site.  Webmasters now have the ability to display a variety of bookmarking buttons on their web pages and the surfer can then easily bookmark the site or specific page.

One little click on the relevant button that is being displayed, the surfer will be taken to their favorite bookmarking account.  Multiple social bookmarking sites are combined on one page into one button to make it easier for the surfer and no work is required by the webmaster. Optimizing your web pages for Google and all the other major search engines is not enough anymore.

The only way to be successful at online marketing is to include the online community as part of your marketing efforts and to not ignore the effectiveness of web 2.0.  Social bookmarking can help you get your sites out there on 47 of the best social bookmarking sites in under 15 minutes.  The more people that bookmark your site, the more organic traffic you will get, as well as backlinks which will give it authority in Google.

Now keep in mind that social bookmarking alone will not give you a top search engine ranking, but it will definitely not hurt your marketing efforts. If you are going to try to reach the social bookmarking audience, then make sure you include Digg on your pages because the audience is so large.  Digg is a high power authority and a listing will rank highly on Google and other search engines for certain terms.

Searchles is loved by Google, Yahoo and the other major search engines.  StartAid bookmark pages rank highly in Google and other search engines as well.  Listing your sites in Furl will lead to traffic from organic rankings and its popular page drives traffic.  Best of all, StumbleUpon can send major traffic with its user base of around 3 million and currently brings in more traffic than any other social bookmarking site.

A great place to find a button to add all of these services to your site is www.addthis.com and is free.       Free exposure is always going to be the best alternative for the webmaster, and social bookmarking services like these as well as other web 2.0 sites are great ways to get a lot of free exposure and traffic.  This isn’t only good for building backlinks, but people search on bookmark sites to find information as well.

Do not ignore the major bookmarking sites, or you are ignoring some of your potential subscribers or customers.If one of your main concerns is getting repeat traffic, then you must make it easy for your visitors to add your web pages or site to their social bookmarking services.

Word-of-mouth advertising is often underestimated and overlooked, but this can drive a lot of traffic to your content and create buzz.  Web 2.0 sites like bookmarking services get millions of hits a day, so it would be wise for you to start utilizing them on your site to increase both real traffic and get long term incoming links.

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