Social Bookmarking for Site Promotion

Posted on November 3, 2012 by admin

Many website owners are discovering social bookmarking as an effective way to drive traffic to their websites. Social bookmarking websites are basically all about communities and participation. Social bookmarking sites let users interact with each other as well as create their own content. These sites are very different from static sites and blogs.

There are two ways in which social bookmarking sites operate. There are social bookmarking sites that let you bookmark your favorite links in one central place. This is especially handy and convenient for users who get online on different computers. They can always access their favorite sites from one central location.

There are social bookmarking sites that let you create a list of favorite sites public or viewable by other users who are within the social bookmarking site. This is a great way you can generate traffic to your own websites and articles since you can bookmark their URLs and make your bookmarks viewable by others.

And then there are social bookmarking sites wherein you can submit articles that can be voted on by members of the community. The articles that receive the highest votes are the ones that get featured on high-traffic pages. If one of your articles are voted to the top, you can expect to receive a lot of traffic to your site as a result.

When creating some of your articles, keep the social bookmarking sites in mind. Create a few articles on controversial issues or hot topics and then submit them to social bookmarking sites. If one of your articles catch the attention of a lot of readers, it can be voted and your site may may get hundreds, if not thousands, of new visitors.

Here’s a tip: encourage visitors to add your site to their list of favorite sites by including bookmarklets at the end of every web page you create. Bookmarklets are small icons from each social bookmarking site and display to your web pages. Whenever a visitor clicks on a bookmarklet on your site, your page then automatically gets added to their favorite sites list.

There are plenty of social bookmarking sites you can submit, but the more popular ones include Blinklist, Del.icio.us, Digg, and Stumbleupon. Don’t limit yourself to these social bookmarking sites. Find others that are particularly geared towards your niche or target market.

Here’s another tip: Get yourself rolling in the social bookmarking scene by creating multiple profiles in each social bookmarking site. For instance, if you have 12 accounts in one social bookmarking site, that’s 12 votes already for every page you submit. However, be careful about this method. It’s actually a “black hat” method, and you can get your accounts deleted and your sites permanently banned from the service if you get caught.

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Using rewards to motivate your employees

Posted on March 19, 2012 by admin

Motivated employees are crucial to a successful business. Because everyone is motivated by something different, recognizing your employees for a job well done can be complicated. Many people are motivated by money but when the money is spent on bills or groceries, it seems like less of a reward. Some of your employees may be motivated by tangible prizes and others by intangible rewards. If your employees feel that you value their work, they will do a great job and your business will benefit immensely. Your task as the business owner is to find out what you can do to motivate your employees and make them as productive as possible.

A rewards management system that gives points for various benchmarks and allows employees to choose from a catalog to redeem their points can offer something valuable to all of your employees. The various prizes have different point values based on the price of the reward. Employees accumulate points by meeting predefined benchmarks or completing assigned tasks. They can watch their points grow in an online account and cash them in for the incentive of their choice. Such a program can offer a wide range of rewards or just a few. The goal is to offer incentives that your employees will desire. Popular incentives include travel, event tickets and merchandise.

Feeling a sense of recognition gives employees greater job satisfaction and there are definite benefits to having happy employees. People who are satisfied with their work environment take less time off. They like to come to work and gladly do their job. Happiness tends to be contagious so when you have employees who find their job fulfilling, they will influence others with their positive attitude. A culture that encourages productivity by rewarding it is one where employees will compete with themselves and each other to work smarter.

Incentive programs must be well thought out and fair. Points must be attainable by every employee. There have to be clear rules that your employees understand and you have to deliver what you promise. Evaluate your rewards system regularly to ensure that you are getting the intended results.

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Viral Marketing for Small Business Owners

Posted on November 28, 2011 by admin

As more and more people try to earn a living on the Web, the competition for the attention of those surfing the Web becomes more intense. There are constantly new methods of garnering traffic being developed. Almost all of these methods work, but many are inefficient and produce results that are less than the efforts put into the web traffic projects. The most successful methods of small business marketing are those based on the concept of viral marketing. This article is about the benefits of using one of the most proven viral marketing tools, tell a friend scripts – also known more commonly as social sharing buttons.

Viral marketing is the use of peoples’ tendencies across all cultures to share things they find particularly interesting. The only costs of viral marketing are usually in terms of time spent, as people willingly do the advertising and promotion for you. The goal of the Internet viral marketer is to come up with novel entertainment ideas that can be delivered electronically, along with advertisements or positive brand recognition messages. Viral marketing on the Internet has tremendous power in that an idea can be delivered to one person and, if it is truly unique and interesting, suddenly there are millions of people are passing it around and talking about what they saw. It is not uncommon for a Web page with a good viral marketing idea from a single individual to be one of the most visited pages on the Internet within weeks of its launch. However, it is uncommon to come up with unique viral marketing ideas. This is the challenge.

The good news is that you can use techniques learned from viral marketing to improve all of your pages, even if they are not truly unique and particularly interesting pages. As long as they appeal to a niche or specific group of people, you can benefit from viral marketing. This is where tell a friend scripts come into play. A tell a friend script is simply some code ranging from a little snippet of code you paste into your pages to a full-fledged contact management script that keeps statistics and e-mail lists. You have probably seen tell a friend script buttons or email to a friend buttons on news sites. These can include Google +1, Facebook “Like” and Twitter “Tweet This” buttons, as well as options for a wide range of social bookmarking and social news sites.

If you’re a WordPress fan, there are several plugins which make adding sharing options a snap. One of the best is the 100% free Sexy Bookmarks, which “Adds an attractive social bookmarking menu to your posts, pages, index, or any combination of the three”. The frequently updated and well-rated plugin lets you choose from about 50 different sites to include sharing shortcuts too and also includes options for email, GMail and more. Here’s how it will appear at the bottom of a blog post:

All there is to using tell a friend scripts is you place the script on any pages with somewhat unique content that you think a person may want to share with others. They click on the button and input the email address of a friend with which they want to share the content. Often they are allowed to write a little personalized message to go with the email. Suddenly you have generated new site traffic and sales leads. Most sales people in the offline world would do about anything to have access to such high-quality sales lead referrals. Since the email comes from someone they know, you don’t get harassed for spamming and you have a much lower chance of your email going to the “bulk” or “spam” folder on the receiver’s computer.

Remember that the more interesting and unique the content is, the more people will use your tell a friend scripts. A general rule of thumb is that if you post a news story or RSS feed, post a media clip, have an online game available, post unique content, or have any other for of media available, you should take advantage of tell a friend scripts. It is also possible with well-branded media you’ve created to allow the media to be attached to the emails and sent around the Internet. This kind of viral marketing will spread even faster than Web site content, but you lose control of the content and some people may alter it.

If you are interested in putting tell a friend scripts into your pages, I have really good news for you. There are dozens of free tell a friend scripts available for free commercial use on your site. You can simply go searching for tell a friend scripts. Then follow the directions and install the tell a friend scripts into your pages. Feel free to try out several tell a friend scripts to get the one that works the best for you and your site.

Another benefit of using tell a friend scripts is that you’ll be able to get a better grip on what content your site visitors really like and what content they find ordinary. Many people overlook that tell a friend scripts may be the most useful customer feedback tools. The more you use these scripts, the better you’ll get at producing unique and entertaining content for your users. In other words, the more you use tell a friend scripts, the better you will get at viral marketing.

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