Building eCommerce

By Stephanie Foster

Lately I’ve become fascinated with social bookmarking. It’s a vital part of any Web2.0 website marketing strategy, and being discovered through social bookmarks can mean floods of traffic.

The catch is that the traffic isn’t always buying or clicking traffic, but it can be traffic that build backlinks to your site. It can be quite valuable.

The beauty of being well ranked in social bookmarks is that it means people have found that page of your site interesting in one way or another. Maybe it’s useful information. Maybe you made them laugh. Maybe they think it’s so bad the world needs to laugh at you. But in any case, you’re getting attention to your site.

But there’s a big catch. Many sites frown on your promoting your own websites. You can’t be too obvious about doing such things if you really want to succeed.

You also need to be a part of the community. If you make a lot of friends or join groups on the social bookmarking sites you consider to be important, you have a better chance of your sites getting more attention. Just bookmarking your own site doesn’t do much good unless other people do it too.

To get attention you have to pay attention. Bookmark other sites. Participate. Just as in marketing on forums and blogs, the more you participate the more you are likely to get from your efforts.

When you bookmark a webpage, you generally need to tag it or otherwise categorize it. The tags will help it be found. In fact, as you post to your blog it is a good idea to include Technorati tags so that your posts are easily found there.

But Technorati doesn’t often send all that much traffic. Digg, on the other hand, can send server-crashing levels of traffic. StumbleUpon can do well too.

When you promote your site too much, you run the risk of being labeled as spam by other users. You have to be very careful about how you promote, or risk losing your account. This makes doing plenty of honest bookmarking of other great sites very important. Combine this with only bookmarking your own sites when you have something you think is really unusual and valuable.

Another way to increase your odds of being socially bookmarked is to provide links for it on every page of your site. People bookmark pages, not just sites. For WordPress users there are plugins to make this very easy. You can also add a link from OnlyWire that will handle this for you on any page. The basic code they give you requires that you enter the URL and tags you want used, but it’s a way to get things moving. Users have to sign in with the service, which can be something of a disadvantage.

Not every submission you make to social bookmarking sites is going to do anything with you. Many will just fall through the cracks. But when it works out the results are amazing.

About The Author

Stephanie Foster blogs at http://www.aspectsofhomebusiness.com/blog/ about running a home business. She offers more tips on social bookmarking at her blog.

By Joseph Gilharry

If you have your own online business, one of the most important things you can do is to collect good leads. You will want to be sure that you get targeted leads that will be profitable for your business.

While there are a variety of ways that you can capture leads, one of the most effective ways to capture leads is to use forms on your website to get the information of prospective customers.

Link these forms to an auto responder and you have a great way to build up your list of leads and a great way to start bringing in more potential customers.

There are a variety of different ways that you can use forms on your website in order to capture more sales leads. First of all you may want to offer subscriptions to a free newsletter.

Many people are interested in receiving information for free, and this is a great way to get their email address so you can start sending them information.

The internet is overflowing with people who are looking for information, and if you can provide helpful information that people are looking for, you can help increase the amount of leads that you have.

Another type of form you may want to have on your website is a form to enter some type of contest. You may want to hold a contest on your website and offer a small prize for the winner.

Forms can be provided for registration for the contest, which will allow you to get their name and email address, which you can use for further sales leads.

Many people love to win a great prize, so this is an excellent way to get people to fill out your forms.

Having forms that allow potential customers to ask for more information is another way that you can capture leads with the forms on your website.

Whether they have questions about your products or just want general information from you, you can provide a form that asks for their name and email address so you can provide them with more information.

When you use these various forms on your website, it is important that you have them linked to auto responders.

These auto responders can then automatically add the email addresses to your mailing lists, which makes it amazingly easy to send out emails to everyone on your mailing list.

Using forms is a great way to capture your own leads instead of having to pay someone else to provide you with the leads that you need.

If you want to start increasing your sales online, then you need to start capturing more leads, and what better way to do so than to use your own forms to build up your list of leads.

About The Author

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