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Get Huge Traffic from Social Bookmarking Sites

2008-05-22T23:46:00.000-07:00

Sites like propeller.com, digg.com, stumbleupon.com and other social bookmarking sites can give you a huge traffic. How about having 30,000 or more visitors everyday when your website is on the front page. Here are some useful tips on how to get huge traffic from these social bookmarking sites:

* Catchy Headlines – There are many articles got ignored on social bookmarking site because of their headlines. Your title should always be catchy because people first see the title of your article. If the headline or title is not that catchy, expect a small traffic from that article.

*Short but Meaningful Description – Write a short but meaningful description about your article. The description should be intriguing to catch more attention but don't use false facts just to get the interest. If you want to have long description paragraph to describe your story, always remember that people usually don't read above 100 characters. Plus, other social bookmarking site have character limit in description, so you need to think a short but meaningful description about your article.

*Outstanding First Paragraph – It is important that you have great first paragraph with your article on social bookmarking sites. If you already have successful headlines and description to have the User's interest, don't forget to create great first paragraph for them to visit your site or else they'll not going to visit it because of your awful first paragraph.

*Content is Everything – If your article is a junk, social bookmarking is useless. Your site can also get banned on social bookmarking sites if you continue to post junk articles.

*Right Time to Submit – Most of social bookmarking sites only have 24 hours for your article to stay there in front page. So it is not advisable that you post when Users are still sleeping. Weekdays is also a right time to post in terms of traffic because you can have more competitors on weekends.

*Right Category – Some sites might not have the right category for you. If you find that there no right category for you, you can submit to Miscellaneous, General etc. where all uncategorized matter goes.

*Build a Good Profile – If you have an old profile user in social bookmarking sites that posted hundreds of interesting stuff, there is a chance that you'll receive a notice on what you submit. Many social bookmarking prohibited to add links to the interesting articles because it like self-promotion. The worst part of it, you could get banned to their site.

*Cooperate with other Users – There are many articles that made it to the front page of the social bookmarking site because they have networks of friends. If you have at least 15 votes from your group of friends chances are other user might also vote for you. On Digg.com, if have 50 votes your story is on the top of their page.

*Submit in English – Majority of the users are English speaking. So, social bookmarking sites only accept English language. Using different language is not recommended. If you really need to submit your story in different language, make sure that you include English translation.

*Don't submit Old Stories – If you really need to submit old news, make sure that you have updated story related to that.

*Check your Facts and Spelling – You could have negative votes if other user found that you haven't got the right facts about your story. There are some social bookmarking sites that that don't permit to edit your post after you posted it. If you misspell your keyword, title or even your URL, it will stay forever when you posted it. So before posting your story, check your facts and spelling first.

* Have Related Articles – One of the technique to keep your visitor longer on your site is to have related or similar article so that they'll read more articles on your site.

*No no to Automated submitters – Submitting stories on different social bookmarking sites takes a lot of time and you could think that automated submitters is the answer. It is not advisable to use this because it has malware that steal passwords and you could get banned on social bookmarking sites if you use this.

*Responds to Comments – Always respond to the comments on your article. It is possible that you could make more friends and have a top-profile if your story has many comments.

*Prepare your server for a Huge Traffic - If your articles gets the interest of many user to visit your site, thats a great news because of huge traffic you have but if you have a so-so server you need to changer your server that can handle huge amount of traffic.

*Snowball Effect – The good thing about snowball effect is that if people find your article interesting they could start talking about your story. They could start blogging your topic and you could have lots of backlinks from them.

Social Networking Safety and Security

2008-05-20T00:02:00.000-07:00

Kids and teenagers tend to browse social networking sites a lot – it is where they get news, meet new friends and share pictures or videos among other things that they can do in these sites. However, social networking sites prove to make kids and teens vulnerable as they post personal information for the whole internet world to see, making them easy preys for online predators.

Here are some tips that will help in protecting kids and teens when they browse and use social networking sites:

1.Understand the site – you won't know what you're dealing with until you've checked it out for yourself. Read the privacy policy, terms of usage and conduct, find out which kinds of people use the site.

2.Review pages – it would be best if you knew what your child or teen is putting on his/her profile page. Try to look at it objectively – meaning, you don't intrude into their private lives as long as they aren't doing anything wrong. Although if you see something on their pages that are against your rules, talk to them about it and tell them to remove it.

3.Set internet rules – just as you have house rules, you must be clear about setting some internet rules that the kids must abide with, otherwise, they lose their browsing privileges.

4.Don't let kids and teens meet anyone they met online – with all the news we hear about online predators and their young victims, I think this point is clear enough and self-explanatory. We don't want our kids to be the next one to be reported.

5.Private information should remain private – remind your kids and teens not to use their real names, or at the very least, not their full names. They should also know that home addresses, landline numbers, web messenger ids and cellphone numbers must not be publicly seen on their profiles. If possible, they shouldn't be putting those at all.

6.Look for alternatives – there are a lot of social networking sites today, and some offer a good security measure to avoid anything that we don't want to happen. Especially to our children. Advice your kids and teens to set the privacy of their profiles, limiting the views only to people they personally know.

7.Be cautious about media – photographs and personal videos must not give away personal details like addresses, schools and car plates. Be sure to check the pictures and videos that your children are uploading.

8.Emotions should be kept in check – kids, teens especially, tend to post highly-emotional entries on their blogs that some social networking sites provide. Advise them not to do this often as they tend to become more vulnerable to online predators. Warn them about the danger they might be in if they keep posting their personal feelings this way.

9.Use web filters – this can help in keeping your kids and teens away from the bad sites, images, videos and other online materials that they should not be exposed to.

10.Removing profile pages – if all else fails, you can contact the webmasters of the social networking sites your children belong to and ask them to delete your child's profile permanently.

These are just some basic steps on how to protect your kids and teens from the dangers social networking sites may pose. There are other things that a parent can do if they feel that their child really is in danger, but it is always a good idea to apply the necessary precautions to avoid dealing with something bigger and nastier in the future.

Social Bookmarking Networks: How do you create the popular stories?

2008-05-20T00:01:00.000-07:00

It's probably the dream of every social bookmarking network's user to have their submitted stories and articles make it to the front page of the site. Why? Because making it to the front page (and not just in the “just submitted” category) means that a lot of people voted positive on this article. It only follows that they like the article because they voted positive for it. By liking it, it means they have read it. By reading the article, it means they have visited your site. This is very rewarding in terms of traffic and, more importantly, in potential income.

If you have a site and/or a blog, you should know how the basics of making money off them goes. It's either one or all of these money-making strategies:

People buy your service or product
People click on your affiliate links and other advertisements and purchase from them
The page views and page loads that you get is converted into money by some ad servers

This is, of course, impossible without traffic and attention from potential visitors which is why social bookmarking can help especially if you're just starting out with your business or site. In order to achieve good traffic from these bookmarking sites, you must first learn how to attract people into voting for your articles and making them popular for more people to see.

Listed here are a few tips and tricks (depending on how you call them) on how to create that popular article to promote your site:

1. Offer something unique
I know, I know. Being unique these days is either overrated or too hard to do. My vote is on the latter. With so many “unique” stories popping out everywhere on the internet, people's attention are divided into the many different unique articles being submitted into social bookmarking sites. Try to scour the web for something that you think would make it big; if it's not there, you can bet that it's your time to shine, and if it is, think of some ways on how to beat that existing article that you found.

2. Offer something useful and informative
It always helps to offer up an article that other people will find useful. Be it a technique on how to fix a software bug, a review on a newly released gadget or the latest news on nuclear warfare, people tend to flock to something that will give them more information about their daily lives and the world around them.

3. Titles and descriptions make a big difference
There are some members of social bookmarking sites who rarely read the stories being submitted. These people are more into the “social” part rather than the “bookmarking” side of these networking sites. One common characteristic that these kinds of users have though is that they vote on stories based on the titles and descriptions. Even if the story is really dull and boring, they wouldn't care (and neither would they know) because they didn't read past the title and description. So make sure that you have this really great title that people will quickly notice among a sea of other titles and write a description that will complement the title.

4. Voting for other stories may be a good thing
Some users will be kind enough to reciprocate story votes in bookmarking sites. You shouldn't just submit your stories – you should also vote for others. It would give you more exposure to the social network that you belong to.

5. Make friends
Don't be shy to invite other people to become a part of your friends' list. The tendency is that they might opt to get an update of the stories that you submit, or at the very least, visit your page every now and then to see if you have something that they might be interested in. You get to have more votes this way. Being a network that this is, their friends will see the stories that they voted on and there is a chance that they would vote for your story too. This is the endless cycle of bookmarking sites.

Building a Network: How to make your social network popular

2008-05-19T23:59:00.000-07:00

One of the main concerns of a social network owner is how to make the site popular and successful through user activity. A social networking site will die if there are no members who will make use of the functionalities of the site and who will encourage visitors to join in on the activities.

So how does one turn a seemingly generic social networking site into a bustling community full of active participants? Here are some ways on just how to achieve that:

1. Offer something that other social networks don't have
Or at the very least, make an existing function better. We see a lot of social networking sites that have practically the same content; the only difference lies in the number of users and usually, their interface. Try to compare the different successful sites that you can find and determine whether they're lacking something that you, as a user, would like to see in those kinds of sites. If you can't find anything, try to see if there's anything that you can improve to make the users' browsing and activity better.

2. Judge your site the way a normal user would
Forget the lines of codes, the costs, the time it takes to develop and all those other technical stuff. Put yourself in the shoes of a normal, average user and criticize your layout, functions, interface and other add-ons to see if they would work well even for those who aren't computer-savvy. I'm guessing that this will be one of the hardest tasks that you have to do since you know your site like the back of your hand so if you get stuck on this one, ask a friend or a family member to do the judging for you.

3. User bases help in spreading the word
Offer privileges to the first ten or 50 users who sign up to your site and in return, you can ask them to help you in promoting your site. This promotion can be in the form of inviting their friends and family through email or by posting you networking site's link on their personal sites or simply by word of mouth. This is actually how the successful social networking sites started out – if it worked for them, it can work for you.

4. Listen and take time to consider the users' feedbacks
If they know that you personally take time to address their concerns, your users will be more loyal to you. It isn't everyday that a webmaster actually responds to his site's users' feedbacks. Explain to them if what they want is possible or not. Consider the feedbacks as constructive criticism on how to make your social networking site more enjoyable for them and for future members.

This is just the start, mind you. It takes a lot more to continually pursue the road to popularity and success with a social networking site. It's the start but it can definitely help. The social networking site's owner and users must cooperate with each other to ensure that the site can and will make it big despite the many rivals today.

A Brief Look into the World of Social Networking

2008-05-19T23:56:00.000-07:00

Undeniably, social networking has been one of the biggest internet fads to date, having millions of people subscribe and visit the countless social networking sites everyday. With the popularity of social networking these days, someone who isn't taking part of all these can't help but wonder if there are any real benefits to it all – whether if you're personally using it or your company is using it. A lot of social networking members will claim that there are heaps of benefits to these kinds of sites so let's take a look at some of them:

1. Building a “social network”

When you're a member of social bookmarking sites, you get to meet friends the world over. You aren't restricted to your own local community when it comes to meeting new people, unless of course, the social network that you belong to is restricted to your locality alone. These people can become mere acquaintances, friends or even business partners. Relationships in social networks tend to be flexible. Your social network can also be “specialized” depending on what you need a social network for.

2. Social networking sites have different categories

As stated in the first point, you can choose which social network you want to subscribe to depending on how you want to use it. There are different kinds of social networking sites:

Conventional and generic networks
News networks
Bookmarking networks
Business networks
Media-sharing networks
- Video-sharing
- Image-sharing
- Music-sharing
Startpage networks
Fitness and sport networks
Widgets and plug-ins networks
Mobile networks

With the knowledge of the different kinds of social networking sites, you can easily choose those that are to your interests and build a network that will suit your needs as an individual, career-person or a business entity. For a more in-depth look at the many forms of the social networking world, you can check this list:

3. A bigger shot at being popularity

Everyone wants to be popular as far as I know. They want to be known for something they're good at especially. When you actively participate in discussions, make lots of friends and offer useful and interesting advices, stories or tips, you become popular. That's how social networking goes. This is useful especially if you're promoting your brand because your brand is an extension of yourself. If you're popular, your brand becomes popular too.

4. Links and traffic

Social networking can greatly help when it comes to link building and incoming traffic whether it's a business you're promoting or your own personal site. If you create really good stories and other forms of articles for your site and submit them to some social bookmarkng networks and they become marked as “hot” stories, you can expect heavy visitor traffic to your site in a matter of seconds. The traffic that you will get from social networking sites are all natural and each one of them is a potential customer just waiting to be persuaded into buying your product.

These are just four of the many other benefits one can get with the help of social networking sites. This brief insight delves a bit into the business side of social networking - not only on the personal level - which can help in promoting your business and selling your services and products. It may be safe to say that social networking sites have a really big impact in today's internet community, not only for a single user, but for a large-scale business entity as well.

PhpFox

2008-04-02T04:22:00.000-07:00

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