In this article, I am going to talk about a social networking site that is loaded with rich prospects. Not yet as popular as MySpace or Facebook, Gather.com is a social networking site that is any Internet marketer’s dream. In its own words Gather is a ‘place where informed, engaged people share perspectives on everything” Consider the following about Gather.com

• At least 75% of the members have a college education
• A majority of the members fall within the 30-60 age group
• More than 80% of the site members enjoy a $50000 annual household income
• These members enjoy spending

These well placed citizens on Gather.com would constitute quality traffic. Can you ignore it? Of course you can’t. So your first step is to visit gather.com and register for a free account.

After signing up, you can head to ‘My Gather’ and create your member profile. You can then post an article or comment. You can also browse around, read other people’s articles, and share images. You can join groups that appeal to you and also invite other friends or associates to join.

Since your intention is to generate traffic, you must make your profile attractive by posting quality articles that are interesting to read. You must ensure that your headlines are catchy with relevant tags.

When you post your articles, you can also include links, images and lay them out to look pleasing so that you get a lot of highly targeted visitors who click the link to your website and can convert into customers.

Gather.com is a social networking site, and as such, you can promote yourself. You can network with members who are in your target market. Get your friends also to join gather.com and rate your posts - highly.

You can ask people to recommend your posts and share it with others by bookmarking it on del.icio.us or ‘digging it.’ If you have any free stuff to offer, mention this at the end of your article with a link. This can get you heavy traffic.

Commenting on other popular members’ articles particularly if they are in your niche can get you lots of highly traffic.

Gather.com is also a great place for pay per click advertising and paid ads. So cash in on this little known social networking site to attract these prosperous members to your website.

Like Gather.com, there are other social networking sites that can also be effective in getting you highly traffic. Social media marketing is here to stay. By using the web 2.0 websites and blogs wisely, there are a lot of benefits to be gained, apart from the obvious ones.

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A major advantage of social bookmarking sites is their complement to search engine optimization which is something no website can do without. Who doesn’t like being Google’s favorite? These social bookmarking websites are easy to use. They work wonders for generating massive traffic to your websites when you add a bookmark tool on your web pages. Your visitors do the rest of the work - the ones that come by read your content, love it, bookmark it with the bookmark tool, and start the link building process. Does that sound sweet?

You’ll find social bookmarking most popular at the social marketing sites mentioned earlier - YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Squidoo etc. one of the best ways to begin benefiting is to sign up with social networking sites that are suitable to your business and create a profile. To get the best out of your association, there are certain vital things you need to do that will help your website, which we’ll cover in a later part in this training series . If you are too impatient to wait, just go ahead and grab your copy of the complete Social Bookmarking Guide at right away.

Social bookmarking is a vital marketing strategy that has a major impact on the following for you, as an online marketer:

Links - You know inbound links are the biggest things that influence your website’s rankings. Using social bookmarking can give you millions of new inbound links to your website. And you what is really wonderful about these links? They are neither pushed nor forced nor bought - they happen independently and naturally.

Managing your reputation - Google just loves these social bookmarking sites. Depending on what you give your visitors to talk about on Digg, MySpace, YouTube and the like, you can literally shoot up in search engine listings very quickly.

Page Ranking - We all know just how long it can take for a new website to get ranked by the search engines. But with social bookmarking and media sites, you don’t have to wait. You can get the word out there by uploading videos on YouTube, creating profiles on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter -and build some links to these.

Search engine optimization or SEO - social bookmarking complements seo quite nicely. Here’s how it works - you bookmark your site or blog, creating an inbound link. Others visit and bookmark your content - so more links. Search engines love quality links. If your content is optimized well with the help of keywords - you are well on your way to seo success.

The collective outcome of the above benefits of social bookmarking is traffic that will convert to sales and profits. Mission accomplished! But how do you actually go around achieving what we’ve discussed above with the help of social bookmarking? You can get the complete guide right away and get started. Social Bookmarking Guide is an investment well worth it!

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Do you Blog? If you don’t, you are making a costly marketing mistake and literally blocking people from reaching you.

Blogging started as a single-sentence commentary in the 1990s. It was a way for visitors and readers to voice their opinions. Then it slowly evolved into pages of personal take on almost anything under the sun.

Soon, blogs became the ‘in’ thing. A web persona - any web persona- had to have a blog where they talked, argued and ’sold’ gently. Moreover - and this where its power was really unleashed - the blog became the source of ever-increasing traffic between related sites. So, any web marketer with a niche made it a point to host his own blog, all the while visiting blogs of related products and leaving comments, which again earned him or her multiple streams of focused traffic.

Here are 5 reasons why you simply should participate in communities:

1. It is simple: Think of it as a virtual notepad, where you jot down your thoughts, ideas and comments. A PC and Internet connection are all that you need to become a big player in communities that relate to your niche.
2. It is authentic: Blogs, your own and others’, allow you to voice your philosophies. They are also a platform where users can voice their true opinions, fears and needs. In short, this is the place where you get to meet real people with real-life experience, unscathed by paid adverts.
3. It is free: You can set up your blogs for free, if you want, though this is not the recommended route for those looking for huge profits. To build proper traffic using Web 2.0, you will need a blogging system that is far more extensive and ‘accommodative’. Using a blogging service like Wordpress allows you to plug into the latest in building traffic to your website. But we’re not talking about Wordpress.com here. That is just another hosted website. You can get the correct version of Wordpress from Web 2.0 Submitter.
4. It builds your credibility: As you offer more and more intelligent opinions, people begin to realize that they can depend on you for the truth. You become an expert and the rest, as they say, is history!
5. Blogging helps you sell: There is a simple formula for making money over the internet: expertise=attention=making money. Before you become THE expert in your field, chances are that your mom and older sister were the only ones to read your posts. But post recognition, you can build traffic through emails, subscriptions, joining a blog network and using an RSS.

Thus, you can see how easy it is to drive traffic to your service and boost your business by participating in communities. You can also see why not participating in communities is the #1 mistake you could make if you are trying to sell a product.

Before you get too excited and start downloading Wordpress with single-minded determination, let me tell you that there are other, equally powerful Web 2.0 marketing resources that can skyrocket your sales figures. We’ll be looking at them tomorrow.

Of course, if you’d rather grab all the information in one go, all you need to do is follow this link: Web 2.0 Submitter.

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Web 2.0 is the latest buzzword in Internet marketing. Not surprising at all, considering what a goldmine it is in terms of all the benefits an Internet marketer can draw from it. Basically, web 2.0 is a platform that allows people to connect, interact with the website and with each other and share information online. Therefore, web 2.0 encompasses all those online communities like blogs and social networking websites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, video sharing websites like YouTube, social book marking sites like Del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon etc. You get the general idea. Now the question is, how do you get the web 2.0 to give you a steady rush of highly traffic? That is the focus of part 1 of this training series.

Every Internet marketer loves free-traffic. This has become a huge possibility, thanks to web 2.0 sites where users have a high level of interaction, passing around information to each other.

As a result of this, there are hundreds of niche topics and markets people tend to be a part of. And just because of this, the web 2.0 social networking sites have become a goldmine for Internet marketers.

You have a huge market to which you can market your products and services, and not spend a dime towards this effort. Your first task is to find the most popular web 2.0 community-based websites where you are allowed to insert your URL. This will help people who want to share your information, making your URL more visible as it gets passed around and this, in turn, brings back highly traffic to your website.

You will be amazed at the number of marketers who are still not using the power of the web 2.0 to get a lot more traffic than even the search engines can turn up.

So create your free account right away with the following top ranked sites, and start building your community, with links that point to your main website.

• YouTube
• Squidoo
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• MySpace

There are several more, and we’ll talk about them through this training series. Creating a profile on these sites is quite easy and all you need to do is spend around fifteen to twenty minutes on these sites every day.

Savvy marketers also increase their page rank with the search engines by creating multiple user profiles for related topics. Once this is done, they link these profiles to each other.

On most of these sites you will find a Forum or a discussion board that allows its members to discuss any topic. These are highly influential locations where members share stuff. Social networking sites allow you to belong to different groups or networks within the site.

Web 2.0 sites are great places to share viral videos, which are a very effective marketing medium online. Millions of viewers see and share videos that appeal to them, thus spreading the marketing message and driving traffic to your website.

Social networking sites let you feature links to your website and blog. For any Internet marketer, one-way links and traffic along with high search engine page rankings are crucial to their success. Web 2.0 helps achieve all these, free of cost.

To find out more ways to leverage web 2.0, watch for my next article on “How To Turn Customers Into Raving Fans Before They Even See Your Site”.

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Apart from the conventional tried and tested methods as an online marketer you must also keep track of new methods and concepts when it comes to traffic generation. And if it costs you nothing - even better. This brings us to Squidoo, the Web 2.0 program that’s being raved about by everyone who knows about it.

What sets Squidoo apart from similar sites is that it has quality content. Most of the pages on Squidoo, not surprisingly rank high with the search engines. The site itself is ranked seven on Google and in the Alexa rankings Squidoo is rated among the top thousand websites on the Internet.

On the Squidoo website you can set up your own ‘lens’ or web page on any topic that you are passionate about. You can leverage your lens by making a keyword rich Squidoo URL. Most forward-planning marketers create more than one lens for different topics using their primary keywords.

The keywords can also be used in the page title and scattered strategically through the content on the page. The concept of long tailed keywords, which are keywords that run to more than just 3-4 words, works effectively here, bringing in the focussed traffic that you want to grow your list and your profits.

Squidoo owes its success to the fact that its members are a dynamic community that is continuously coming up with excellent content and links. You can easily establish yourself as an expert in your area.

By optimizing your Squidoo lenses to the search engines through keywords, you will be accessing the entire Web 2.0 media tagging system. Your rankings will improve to a great extent if your links to your other sites and content are relevant.

Creating original content is the first step. It must be appealing to the visitors and the community. Since there’s community ranking, with quality content, you can be rated highly by the users. By browsing around the site, you get a good idea about how others are tapping into Squidoo and use the same methods to be successful yourself.

Squidoo tips on tags

When you make your lens pay close attention to ‘tags’. You will be asked to choose your primary keyword or tag along with three more. Don’t stop here. Add at least 25 - 30 more tags. Why do you need to do this? Tags attract the search engines. These tags, with no intervention from you, are coded into the html of your website - so imagine the result. Google just swallows it. So when users use Google to search for your tags, chances are good that your page will come up, or at the very least, the overall tag page on Squidoo. By adding the right tags to your Squidoo lens, you can maximize the chances of your being found.

The next thing about tags is this. When visitors search on Squidoo using the tags, the results are brought up based on the tags on all the pages and then by page rank. So if your site is about affiliate marketing, one of your tags must be ‘affiliate marketing’ for you to actually receive traffic on your site. Elementary.

Keep adding tags to your Squidoo lens via the edit tags option.

Now you can see how you can use Squidoo to generate traffic and back links to your website. If you are in affiliate marketing, you can display affiliate links.

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Are you using appropriate Web 2.0 Marketing strategies to get the traffic you deserve?

Talk about marketing products and the four P’s come into mind: Product, Pricing, Promotion and Placement. The first step is to identify the service or product that consumers need. Then, you have to affix the right price. After that, it is promote, promote and promote. Traditionally, marketers focused their attention on advertising and publicity through special events that spread brand awareness. But, in recent times, marketers have started using another powerful strategy to earn ‘clicks’ - Web 2.0.

Why?

Traditional marketing is controlled. It is a process where marketers develop, craft and deliver messages through their PR department. But with Web 2.0, this top-to-bottom pyramid level of communication has been inverted to peer-to-peer communication. The advantage is obvious: information passed on by peers is highly trusted. It also spreads faster.

Web 2.0 technologies are changing the way messages spread across the web. A number of online tools and platforms are now defining how people share opinions, perspectives, thoughts and experiences. Social media tools like blogs, podcasts, videocasting, social bookmarking, wikis and photo sharing are just some of the methods that are becoming more and more popular.

So, the first thing you need to market via Web 2.0 is to have direct access to Web 2.0 marketing resources. Let us look at the various tools marketers use.

Blogging: Marketing on the web cannot be done without a Blog. That is why Web 2.0 places the greatest importance on blogging software. Among all the blogging services available out there, Wordpress is perhaps one of the strongest. It is strong in that it incorporates a number of free and paid plug-ins that make it possible for you to unleash the power of Web 2.0. While free plug-ins are useful, some of the paid plug-ins like the Wordpress Sitemap Plug-in and the Adsense Deluxe help you harness focused traffic to your website.

Linkbaiting: Obviously, the ‘in’ thing in the last couple of years is to create a social marketing buzz. Linkbaiting is another tactic used by web masters to attract cross-links. A number of websites allow you to create it. Examples are Technorati, Reddit and PRWeb.

RSS feeds: RSS feed creation and promotions are potent methods of spreading the word about your website or services. The more number of sites you submit your feeds to, the better ranked your websites would be. By using some of the best automation tools available, you can improve traffic to your website by 70% or more.

Social bookmarking and media bookmarking are powerful tools to woo traffic. One great free service is OnlyWire. They are free and good enough for beginners. But as you start getting serious traffic, you need to consider other bookmarking sites.

Video, video marketing and video syndication are some of the big tools of 2007. Most web marketers ignore video because it can be a little daunting, which is precisely why you SHOULD go for it right away, before the web gets cluttered with it. Video is getting big and the only way to beat your competition is by getting ahead of the curve. You can easily learn how to create video for the web, how to edit your video and how to make free legal soundtracks for your video from various Web 2.0 resources freely available on the net.

Of course, most of the information given here may sound vaguely familiar. But trying to do all of these by hand and one-by-one is going to cost you something very valuable - time; time you should spend on strategizing and providing new services. You could always hire someone to do these tasks for you but the ideal solution would be to have access to cutting-edge automation software that does all the hard work for you and keeps your marketing strategies running on autopilot.

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Linkbaiting is not a new concept. In fact, people have been using it for years to generate one-way links to their websites. Only the term is new, if at all. So, if you’re thinking of driving massive amounts of traffic towards you, better get your linkbaiting arsenal well oiled. Here’s what you can do:

Create great content: By great content, I don’t mean content you get from Private Label Articles. Take a look at some of the top websites for competitive terms on Google, and notice their content on all the pages, not just the index page. Some of the pages simply make your jaw drop. When you are writing to Linkbait, your content is not just some words to fill up a page. The average reader must get something valuable out of your content. Doesn’t matter if they don’t buy or opt-in to your list. Create expert quality content that is interesting, easy and informative.

Rake up a Controversy: Nothing sells better than controversy. Say it with vigor and stir up some heat. Put up controversial video, audio or interviews. You’ll be surprised by the amount of people who come to visit you by way of hate mail, fan mail, curiosity and just to have some fun. And don’t go by what some people say about controversies damaging your credibility. Look at Howard Stern, he’s making a living out of it!

Do a case study: If you can’t kick up some heat, do the next best thing: do a case study of a controversial product or a new product. Conduct some research in your niche and find out what you can effectively ’study’ to rake up enough embers.

Hold a competition: Nothing catches eyeballs faster than a good-sized competition with something juicy at the winner’s post. That is why many websites have end-of-the-year competitions or hold competitions just after a launch. If your competition is popular, you’ll easily be featured on search engines because people are talking about you and linking to you. The competition you hold does not really have to be about your niche or product. Even a fun competition that touches a raw nerve will do the trick, like a prediction poll on the winner of the next American Idol.

These are some of the ways you can bait people to click on your links. However, let’s be realistic here. Each one of your linkbaiting attempts need not hit pay dirt. The trick is to keep trying.

A number of websites help you spread the word about your kickass linkbait piece, so people will find you easily. Seek out sites that are created for your niche and start posting.

Of course, the best thing about Web 2.0 tools is that you really don’t have to do all the hard work. Figure out what you need to do and automation will take care of the rest.

Easier said than done. Zeroing in on the right resources requires a lot of research. You may have to make mistakes and start all over again, which is painful and time consuming, to say the least.

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Regardless of which social bookmarking website you choose to use, the tips that follow will help generate traffic to your website. So lets move to the 5 steps:

Action Tips To Leverage Your Social Bookmarking Campaign

Now, you know what a job it is to appear on the home page of social bookmarking websites like Digg, Del.icio.us, etc. You also know that being there could mean massive traffic and links to your website, in addition to high search engine rankings. Well, its not the Holy Grail anymore, if you know how. You are about to! Read on:

Your Posts Must Have Good Titles

Ask any SEO expert - and they’ll tell you that it’s in the title. It, in this case, is the keyword or keywords. Did you put the keywords for which you want to be found in your title? Say yes, because that’s how the people who see your content or article on these sites will link to you - that is, through the titles. This gets your keywords in the anchor text. This increases your search rankings. It’s a neat cycle.

Keep It Short

If you’ve noticed, visitors on social bookmarking sites don’t have a whole lot of patience to read lengthy text. What you need to do then, is to create content that is interesting, short and easy to read. The first two lines must grab your reader’s eyeball and keep it till the end of your content. Then they might link to it, if they like it.

Use RSS Feeds

Social bookmarking site members are there for information. Not for ads or to do their shopping. That doesn’t mean you’ve lost them. Why not put an RSS feed button on your webpage so that they subscribe to your site, and also submit your site to the social bookmarking sites? You can also position ads in your RSS feeds. That’s more money, more pageviews and more subscribers.

It All Comes Back To The King, Content

Have lots of content or linkbait - the more the better. It enhances your chances of focussed traffic. On social bookmarking sites, users comment. Do away with obstacles like asking users to sign in before they comment. Rather, lure them to comment.

A Word About Coming Up With Content For Social Bookmarking Site Users Here:

As obvious as it sounds, users browse to read as much as they can. They don’t want to linger. So make it easy for them by formatting your content to ensure that they read it and hopefully link to it. No point writing a great article if it isn’t easy to read.

• Make use of paragraph headers that highlights important points
• Get the best out of top ten/five lists - people love it
• Use images instead of words where possible.

You must identify the social bookmarking and networking sites that work best for you. The biggest may not necessarily mean the best for you. So identify those niche sites that can bring you a whole lot of traffic and customers rather than lose time on the passive ones. Check the sites you would like to be associated with to see if the content gels with you. Look for sites where the activity level is high. After you identify the right sites, establish yourself by submitting content and build the community’s trust in you. This will naturally lead them to your website.

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If you haven’t tried Twitter yet, you’ll soon see why you should sign up there. Twitter is a very rapidly growing social bookmarking site and everyone’s excited about it. Quick to sign up with and easy to manage. Twitter is an online community where members ‘twitter’ through ‘twits’ or short status messages. This could range from ‘I am off to the disco” or “I love the new iPod’ and stuff like that. Each twit can be 140 characters long. People on Twitter basically keep a track of or ‘follow’ what their friends and contacts are up to.

So How Can You Find Your Traffic On Twitter?

Twitter lets you add links in your twits. See how this link will bring traffic to your site? Your twits could be optimized headline after headline written creatively to communicate with your page visitors. Its as easy as that. Here are more things you can do and enjoy that huge traffic rush to your website:

Since Twitter is a social media website, you have to browse around and make the effort to connect with others. You can check to see who are already members from your own email lists and automatically add them as friends. You can also invite those who are not yet on Twitter. The more friends you have, the more people will see your twits on their home page.

You can enhance your chances of being seen by the millions of users on Twitter by adding a picture to your profile. You get to choose the pic and you can make sure it is something your contacts will want to see and act upon.

Being active is a big activity on any social bookmarking website and Twitter is no different. So long as you keep posting interesting info that appeals, you will be found and befriended. Nonparticipation is a no-no. Why not talk about Twitter on your blog and add a link to your Twitter profile?

Make use of available resources. You probably still think that it’s a tough job to multiply your ‘friends’ on Twitter. Why not use the Twitter Widget for WordPress on your blog? Not on WordPress? Sign up now! Or use the Twitter badges on your website and let your visitors see it and head there.

The idea is to connect with as many people as you possibly can and add them as friends. Check out the Top 100 list on Twitter and work from there. Keep track of what is happening on Twitter.

Social bookmarking is here to stay and its only a matter of knowing how you can get the most out of it. Most of all it is fun and it’s easy. Apart from building your lists, links and traffic, you also develop long-lasting relationships.

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MySpace is an extremely popular social networking and bookmarking site and when leveraged in the right manner, can be a fantastic promotional channel - at minimum expense.

If you haven’t done so already, sign up and create a MySpace account at http://www.myspace.com/ and make your profile. Here you can list your interests, post photos, embed videos and start building your contact list by browsing around for like-minded people who have similar interests. Its an easy way to build your network. As a MySpace user, you can post on bulletin boards which will then appear on the profile pages of your contacts. The key to posting here is to optimize your messages for your keywords!

Picture this - you’ve built a contact list of ten thousand members, which is actually quite a simple task going by the kind of traffic MySpace sees on any given day. If you post a link to your main business website, that’s ten thousand exposures. And if you are careful about building your list here, you can imagine the viral marketing effect!

You can use HTML code on your MySpace profile page and also highly customize your profile. You’ll find plenty of MySpace profiles turning up in the search results each time you look for something.

When you create your profile on MySpace, choose your profile name carefully so that it can be found by your niche market. Make sure you use your keywords in your profile. Post on the bulletin board regularly and always make sure your main website link is always there. Then watch the traffic flow.

Since MySpace is a highly visible and visited website, you can also use it to achieve a high page ranking and plenty of backlinks - which is the aim of all search engine optimization activities. So if you even have ten thousand targeted contacts promoting you, just imagine the number of backlinks you can get through them.

• Find groups related to your line of activity and make friends. This includes friends of competitors also! It’s very easy to add friends on MySpace and get mentioned among the ‘coolest members’ on its home page. You can also start your own group and invite people to join and contribute content as well as interact.
• Take part in forums on MySpace. You would be surprised to know that not many people even know that MySpace has several forums for a variety of topics. What you can do is find forums that suit your line of business, join them and get into the discussion. Post new threads with expert information and your link so that people can visit your website link for more information about your products, as they develop trust in you.
• Write your own blog on MySpace

Promote your MySpace profile actively. When your MySpace profile is ranked at the top for your own brand, not only do you add to your reputation - you’ll also find that most people would rather drop by your MySpace profile than your business website.

Social bookmarking websites are an asset to any online business- they do in a very short span of time what it takes weeks and months to do when you try the conventional methods of traffic building. Why not leverage them for free traffic?

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