Keries Blog

As a new internet marketer, you will hear much about social bookmarking. This is a term used broadly for the latest trend of social sites, link sharing or micro-blogging sites. Initially intended for a way to share your favourite sites with your friends and anyone with similar interests, these sites have now become a way to market your business, connect with potential customers and stay up-to-date with the happenings within your niche market.

Social book marking sites include sites such as Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc. All of these sites have toolbars that you can add onto your browser as a plugin that will allow you to add any sites of interest as you are surfing the net.

These sites are free to use. You create an account and fill out your profile. Then you install the widget or toolbar as an odd-on to your web browser. Once that is done, you can simply click a button to add a bookmark to your account. This will add the URL, and page title to your list. You have the option of filling out keyword tags and a brief description of what the page is about.

When you begin using social bookmarking as a marketing platform you must proceed with caution. Remember that these sites were not intended for marketing but rather as social sites. If you get carried away with the marketing and self-promotion, you may find your account banned from the system.

Whenever you are using a site as a means to further your business, remember to be a good neighbour. Include other sites of interest within your niche aside from your own and you will find you get much more interest from other members of the social bookmarking community.

The links to your site that you share also count as great back links and a means to drive traffic to your website, so treat them with respect and you will benefit from being included in the social bookmarking communities.

The terms email capture and lead capture refers to getting your website visitors to add their email address to your opt-in form allowing you to add them to your emailing list. Once they are on your mailing list, you then have the ability to contact these leads or potential customers in the hopes of converting them into buying customers in the future.

Typically, you use a lead capture page, also known as a squeeze page or landing page, and present your visitors with an offer of a free report, newsletter or mini-course that will be delivered by email in exchange for them opting into your subscriber list. This is also known as permission based email marketing.

You can use a single opt-in or double opt-in system to capture leads. With a double opt-in system, the visitor fills in the form and then will immediately receive an email that will instruct them to click on a confirmation link to confirm that they really want to receive emails from you. This is a security measure to prevent users from having their email added to lists without their permission. By clicking on the link, they are verifying the email and establishing the fact that they are the owner of that email address.

A marketer may choose this method over the single opt-in option to prevent being accused of sending spam emails. This also prevents visitors from entering a bogus email address to get your free offer and reduces the number of bounced emails in your list.

For businesses, it is important to gather leads and build an email list as it often takes several contacts before an internet user will trust you enough to follow through and make a purchase. It is also much easier to sell to existing buyers and leads than it is to attract new customers for future sales offers.

Relationship marketing and email marketing is only possible if you have captured leads to your mailing list.

In the computer world, a “ping” can mean several things, but where it is used most frequently these days in the internet marketing world is when it associated with blogging. A ping is an XML-RPC mechanism that allows a blog to notify a server that it has updated content.

Most blog applications have a ping service built into the code or you can add additional ping services to the automation of the blog. Whenever you revise a blog post or add new content to your blog, the ping system sends out a message to the blog server that your blog has been updated.

This blog server then creates a list of blogs that have new content and makes it available to blog search engines so they can then go and crawl the updated sites and index the new content.

You can also submit pings manually to sites such as ping-o-matic or pingoat. These sites supply information to multiple ping servers and would cover the most popular sites. If you wanted, you can search out more of the independent servers who do not share their pings. For most, ping-o-matic is the server of choice to use as it shares with the largest number of blog servers and can be set up to ping automatically within your blogging application.

There are also “pingbacks”. If you have your blog set to receive pingbacks, your blog will receive a message any time another blog links to content within your blog. This can be beneficial to you if you want to keep track of who is publishing your content and providing links back to your site.

A backlink, also known as one way link or inbound link is the term used when any website, other than your own domain, places a clickable hyperlink leading to your website from their own. This is often referred to as off-page SEO. (search engine optimization).

The most desirable backlink is one that uses keyword anchor text instead of your website URL for the link. Anchor text simply means that the web address is linked with HTML code to your keyword phrase. An example of anchor text can be seen when a site has a “click here” or “Read More…” clickable link. For the best results though, you should use your keywords as this will tell the search engines that the link leads to a website about that topic.

Whenever possible, you should create your own code to be placed on other websites for backlinks. You know which keywords you are trying to rank your site for so you will be the best one to ensure the person linking back to you will get it right if you do the work for them. Make it easy for people to link to you by providing your backlink code within your website that they can just copy and paste in their website.

If you are doing the backlinks yourself, you can get high quality links through placing your anchor text links in forum signatures, blog comments, social marketing profile pages such as Twitter and Facebook. Make sure you take advantage of any chance available to put your link in anchor text format. This will greatly improve your search engine placement for your desired keyword phrase.

This is just one way you can improve your search engine placement and promote your website through off page SEO. I have much more information available on my website.