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The Ethical Use of Social Bookmarking
I guess everyone remembers my opinion against social bookmarking, which seems to go against the prevailing orthodox of internet marketing. I just want to clarify that there is an ethical and highly benefical use for it, but the keyword here is ethical. I've used social bookmarking methods to get a site 10,000 unique hits the first month and too this day it still gets about a 100 unique hits a day and I haven't done anything with it in months.
Let me tell you bit of a story. Before I knew Stumbleupon was a tool used by internet marketers, I used it. I used it just like how it was intended to be used. I'd click the stumble button and wait to see an exciting site. I had this account for almost two years. I had a few people following me, I added absolutely no sites to the system. I was a power user though... One thumbs up from me would give a site a 1000 unique hits for the next 12 hours. It was a pretty sweet deal. Than I got caught up in the whole social bookmarking craze and started to stumble my own pages. At first I was getting traffic out the ass. It was so easy. One thumbs up and my page got 1k of people looking at my stupid ads and blogs. As you can tell this stopped very fast. It got to the point where I'd be lucky to get 10 hits. The reason it didn't work is that I didn't use it ethically. How to use it ethically... It isn't that hard really. It requires a certain degree of empathy and common sense. If you submit something and a lot of people thumb it down, Stumbleupon will just make you a weak user. It doesn't matter how many people you have following you. No Sales Pages/Blatant Advertising: No one is going to buy, so stop it. These people are going to give you so many thumbs down that no one will get it. It's stupid and a waste of time. No shit: Look, you have to show some empathy. Will people really give a crap about your content? A serious observation. Crap is going no where, so don't waste your time. Submit to the BEST CATEGORY: When you submit something, you want it to be in the best category, so the people most likely to approve of the page will see it. If you have a Conservative blog, and submit it in "Politics" or "Liberal Politics", you're going to get thumbed down and Stumbleupon will make you a weaker user. Be A User: Don't just use the service when you have some site to submit. Be a regular user. You'll see a lot of cool stuff and get a better idea of what is acceptable. Ethically for your benefit... This is what all of you want. I'm sure you know how to use the service ethically, but you want to benefit from the service. The goal here is to take advantage of what we can and reject that "natural instinct" webmasters have to advertise to the traffic. Your goal is not to convert the traffic. It's as simple as that. You're not going to find buyers, so why look? The goal here is to get people to hang around, backlink/viral, and the occassional person that might be interested in an ad. Regular content is fine for categories of more information oriented people. If you submit something to the Electrical Engineering category, you're not going to get a ton of traffic no matter how good the content is, but you will get thumbed up. We want viral, so you're going to have to shock, excite, make'em laugh, make'em say "wow", etc. You're probably wondering how you can turn your "niche" blog into something like that. The best way to do it is to look at what other people have done and see how popular they are. You'll find some method of doing this. I've seen it done on serious business websites, so it isn't that hard. October 19 2008
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Affiliate Marketing Xpert was created for people that want to live the Four Hour Workweek lifestyle.
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