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Thou Shalt Not Spam
A lot of non-marketers think of marketers as nothing but spammers. It's easy to understand why. We all get mountains of spam emails o a daily basis – regardless of whether or not we gave out the email address.
But unless you want to be prosecuted and condemned for sending spam emails out, you'll want to take precautions to be careful about who you email and why. Spam is defined as unsolicited email messages that are sent out to the masses.
True Internet marketers don't mess with spam because it hurts their credibility, risks their accounts, and doesn't convert as well as targeted, welcomed email does. You can have your ISP ban you for sending spam, and you can lose your autoresponder account, too.
It's far better to use an opt-in form where people willingly enter their first name and email address. In fact, it's best to utilize the double opt in option most autoresponders provide.
A single opt in is when you just let the person enter their information once. But what's to stop one person from going around entering another person's contact information for unethical reasons?
You want a double opt in to protect yourself. Here's how it works:
The user lands on your website and sees an opt in box, asking for their first name and email address. They enter it (usually in exchange for a free download or the promise of information at a later date).
Then the autoresponder tool automatically sends out a verification email. The end user gets the email alerting them that they've signed up to be on your list, but it asks them to verify their subscription by clicking on a link in the email.
This means if someone goes to your site and signs someone else up, that person will get a notification and have the option to decline if they weren't the ones who really opted into the list.
Make sure you abide by permission marketing standards. These people trust you enough to hand over important details, so don't sell their contact information or abuse it in any way. If you respect the people on your list, it will grow and you'll have a readymade list of prospects that can help you earn more money on both a short and long-term timeframe.
Filed under Email Marketing by 
Social bookmarking is extremely popular with marketers in every niche. Social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, and Technorati allow users to add links to sites they like and other visitors can grab those links and add it to their own lists, making your URLs go viral.
Social bookmarking sites can be great for getting traffic to your own domains. You can bookmark your sites yourself and then hope others will share the links and in some cases vote your entries up, like Digg users will do.
If enough people vote for a particular story, it might make it to the front page of that bookmarking site. A front-page listing can mean thousands of visitors a day. But because of the very nature of social bookmarking sites, if you want to get a lot of traffic from the bookmarking sites themselves, then you have to make sure that the links you submit are newsworthy – not just your sales pitch page.
Use the news to work your site into the bookmarking bevy of links. For instance – let's say you're in the gardening niche and you have a site on growing tulips. A simple how-to site may not get shared a lot.
But let's say you read an article about a the discovery by a group of scientists that says people who grow tulips in their yards are 60% less likely to develop lung cancer, then you'd have a pretty decent shot at having a lot of users in both the gardening and health demographic share your links with others.
If your sites tend to be less newsworthy and more general, then you shouldn't worry about how many people vote for a story or share your links. Just concentrate on using the social bookmarking sites to gain backlinks to your sites.
Concentrate on bookmarking the index page of each of your sites first. Be careful not to bookmark too many of your own sites at first, since that can appear spammy – remember to bookmark other interesting sites you see that you don't necessarily own yourself.
The key to social bookmarking is to become part of the community who shares interesting information. Create a good profile that tells a little about you. Add a picture, and if the site offers it, start building a "friends" list.
Be careful about how many links you add per day. You shouldn't go crazy and add 100 links the day you sign up to a social bookmarking site. Keep it to ten or less per day and you should be fine.
After you've been a user for several weeks, you might be able to get away with up to 50 per day. Just make sure to keep bookmarking stories on other websites. Vote for a few of the stories that made it onto the first page. Bookmark a story at FoxNews.com every once in a while, or a funny YouTube video. This helps make your profile look a lot more legitimate in the eyes of the community.
Filed under Social Marketing by
Social bookmarking is the latest trend in website marketing and promotion. Many internet marketers have become swept up in the social bookmarking craze in the hopes of producing more traffic for their websites. At present, there is a great deal of misconception regarding social bookmarking and many are not sure what exactly social bookmarking is and how it can help their business. For those new to the fast paced world of internet marketing, understanding what social bookmarking is and how it can improve their online marketing is essential.
Social bookmarking emerged a few years ago as a way for internet surfers to find, save, organize, and share their bookmarks of different web pages. Social bookmarking is an alternative to simple browser bookmarking because with social bookmarking you can share your bookmarks with other people who can in turn share their bookmarks with you.
Because you are constantly updating and sharing your bookmarks with other people you are in effect being social with others, hence the name social bookmarking. Bookmarks saved to a social bookmarking site can shared within a network of others or can even be kept private (which is more like anti-social bookmarking).
Compared to other automated resource classification software, social bookmarking actually has many advantages. The big difference between resource classification systems and social bookmarking sites is that social bookmarking sites are arranged by humans based upon how they understand and interact with the sites content. In contrast, resource allocation systems are arranged by computerized algorithms.
Therefore, the tags that are achieved with social bookmarking are much more semantic and systematic. Additionally, because humans are responsible for the bookmarking of sites, sites with more bookmarks are perceived as having more value than their highly ranked search engine counterparts.
As an internet marketer, social bookmarking allows your websites to get noticed without the need for costly search engine optimization. The more people who bookmark your website, the more perceived value your website will have and this ultimately translates into visitors to your website.
Perhaps the easiest way to start getting traffic from social bookmarking is by submitting your website to stumbleupon.com. Stumbleuppon allows users who have downloaded their software into their browser to randomly explore websites based on their interests. By submitting your site to stumbleupon you can actually start to receive traffic within just a few days.
The world of internet marketing is fiercely competitive and to truly succeed you need to have a competitive advantage over the other guy. Social bookmarking as a form of website promotion is free and can easily deliver avalanches of traffic to your websites. In other words, social bookmarking is quite possibly the competitive advantage you have been looking for.
Filed under Social Marketing by
