A Guide To Social Marketing

What is social marketing?

To put it simply social marketing is when you promote a website, blog or affiliate link using social networks and internet communities. Social marketing is a great way to drive large amounts of traffic to your site for either no cost at all, or for a very small cost to buy professional software that will greatly reduce the time that it takes you to use some of the methods listed below. It is probably the best way that a small internet business with a limited budget can generate large amounts of traffic. But as with all things there are drawbacks, and in the interests of objectivity these are that these method can lead to big fluctuations in traffic rather than a steady stream, and you sometimes get large numbers of people visiting your site briefly and then leaving without spending much time and without buying anything. But even taking these things into consideration I think that this is definitely the most effective type of marketing for most websites.

Social Bookmarking

In case you haven't heard of it social bookmarking is when instead of bookmarking your favourite sites on your home computer, you add them to a social bookmarking website, where they are displayed online for anyone to see. You can then view other people's bookmarks, make friends with other people who like the same kinds of website, add your vote to other bookmarked sites, and then follow your friends submissions and build up a social network. The site also displays toplists of the most popular bookmarks from various categories and tags as well as overall.

Many of these sites get huge amounts of traffic and have many pages with very high google pagerank. By adding your site, and then internal pages of your site, you can get a good amount of free traffic even if your link doesn't become popular, and if you make it to being displayed on the homepage then you will get more traffic than you would be able to get anywhere else at all.

Here are some of the best social bookmarking websites:

If you want to submit lots of ilnks to all of the above and more, which I would suggest you do if you really want to get lots of visitors, then it can end up being quite tedious and time-consuming, to it is well worth getting a cheap piece of software that will do it for you automatically. The best known, and in all likelihood the best quality and value social bookmarking software is Bookmarking Demon. Just click the link for more info.

Social Networking Websites

Social Networking websites like www.facebook.com or www.myspace.com also, as you almost certainly know, get huge amounts of traffic. You can take advantage of this by joining up with all of them and creeating a profile for your business, or for yourself under a businness name. You can then go out and try to make as many friends as you can that you think may be interested in what your website has to offer and use your profile to let them know what is happening at your site. Just remember while your doing this that it will be much more effective if you you make a bit of an effort to actually make friends and have something interesting to say to them, rather than just posting relentless sales blurbs which no-one wants to read.

Forums

The old school mehod of social marketing. When you join a forum you can create a short piece of text, including links, that will appear automatically at the bottom of every post you make. So just go out and join as many relevant forums as you can find, post comments on all the discussions you can on those sites, and you will get loads of free links that are great for both direct traffic and for building up your prominence in search engie results.

User Generated Content Websites

Creating content and adding it to other websites with established communites, high google pageranks and lots of traffic is another very effective method of social marketing. Whether you want to create a single page on a site like this, write an ebooks, make a video, or anything else there is a site out there for you. Of course Hubpages is the best one I have to say that don't I!), but here is a selection of some others that you might like to take a look at, in which I've tried to include various different types: