The popularity of social networking websites is fast spreading like wildfire across the Internet. These websites allow their members to live in a carefree virtual world where they can interact with other members without any obligations. Apart from finding friends, these sites are now used as Internet marketing tools - yes, social networking websites can help increase website traffic by sending a massive amount of traffic to a website thereby improving its search engine rankings.
These websites are powered by the latest sophisticated technologies like AJAX, that allow members - apart from interacting with other members - to customize page backgrounds, work with unique templates, post music/videos, share pictures, store documents and generally have a ball of a virtual time.
There are two kinds of social networking websites - social networking sites and social bookmarking sites. Social networking websites allow you to network with and make friends with their members - most of the most famous social sites that feature a tremendous database of users are MySpace, Orkut, Bebo, Facebook, Hi5 and Friendster. Serious Internet marketers become members of these websites and then spread their links around, thereby generating volume traffic on their own website.
On the other hand, social bookmarking websites allow their members to save their favorite links on their pages, which, of course, are shared with other members. Famous social bookmarking sites include delicious, Mixx and Digg.
There are some social networking sites that bring together common interest groups, but even their focus is on making new friends. These "friendship" sites feature a tremendous number of members and are always busy, with members hanging all the time. Some social sites such as Facebook and MySpace allow their users to even hoist advertisements and market their products, so long they don't spam. So, if you have a good enough website, and you want to generate solid traffic on it, then you can always sign up with a social site and say nice things about your website there to divert the traffic.
Let's now talk about social bookmarking sites - these allow you to easily save, organize and maintain your favorite bookmarks along with sharing them with your friends and other members of the site. On these sites, you can save and store any URL or webpage that you find interesting and mark it for public viewing. You can even tag your bookmarks if you like. Some of these social bookmarking sites link to your URL and this increases the backlinks to your websites, thereby increasing its search engine results ranking. It is well known that websites such as Stumbleupon, Digg and Delicious are famous for directing massive traffic to websites. If your website ever gets on the front page of these social bookmarking websites, then you must be ready to handle a mindboggling inflow of traffic.
Search engine algorithms simply love social sites because they get clued on to links that feature rich content. So, if you have your website's link on these social sites, it will be picked up and indexed by the search engines pretty quickly.
If you use Wordpress as a content management system, then remember to incorporate plugins like Socialmarker, Socializer and Addthis. These plugins enable your site's visitors to bookmark your website with just one click, and as we have discussed, getting bookmarked by many users goes on to improve the search engine rankings. There are other plugins such as Onlywire that can automatically spread your post to about 20 different bookmarking sites as soon as it is published!
Sites like Youtube and Flickr allow their members to post videos and pictures, and they are frequented by millions of users daily. These websites too can be used effectively for Internet marketing. It's simple - just think creatively and make a video using a hand-held cam or shoot some pictures with your digital cam, and you're rolling! Metacafe, a video-sharing site, even shares their revenue with their members!
Well, social networking sites are here to stay for a long time. Might as well use them to increase traffic before they begin losing out to another Internet innovation.
Many internet marketers who have used these ways to promote their websites have come forward and claimed that they have not received any real targeted traffic from these social networking sites, or made any sales. They have concluded that the social networking websites like MySpace are a waste of time and don't really produce any good results. Being a member of some of these popular social networking sites, I believe that the internet marketers do not really fully understand the power behind this marketing tool.
Where many marketers have gone wrong is joining these websites just for the purpose of selling their product or promoting their business opportunity. If you decide to go this route your marketing approach should be way less aggressive. Your main goals should be to build one-way backlinks from a high page rank authority website, and brand yourself so that prospects can find you.
You have to start off by building your presence online. If you are new to internet marketing, you have to build a presence in your target market and a very big one at that if you want to have any chance at being found online. Many people are stuck with the belief that they can build one website after another and it will be found with little or no marketing plan. This just is not the case and failure is one hundred percent with this attitude. Because the website traffic on social networking websites is so high, you have a much higher chance of building a web presence then your competitor who is not utilizing these methods.
The next important reason to get involved on these social networking websites is building quality one-way backlinks to your website. The search engines love these authority sites and are always spidering them. If you want to get your new web pages spidered quickly then build a profile on one of these social networking communities and the search engines will come and your prospects can find you. I am always posting free classifieds on sites like Craigslist. Even though the conversion rate is so poor from the free classified sites, a one way link from Craigslist can bring lots of organic search traffic. You have to remember not to try and blatantly sell something to someone. Try and build a profile that talks about yourself and your business, and include links to all of your websites or blogs. You can also try and SEO your profile by repeating keywords in your profile, the search engines will pick this stuff up and send you traffic if you pick the right niche keywords.
Finally, you need to brand yourself in your niche. By becoming an expert on a certain subject, people will start to trust you and associate you with a product or topic. When you write articles and post them to the social networking sites, you let other people become informed of your products and opportunities. By contributing to the social networking sites you are building lots of value for yourself and trust in other people. Basically, the key is to not blatantly sell to someone and use a more softer approach. Build your credibility and your traffic and sales will increase over time.
I hope that you have become more well informed on social networking as a tool to market your business. With a little patience and persistence you too can utilize this new marketing tool to build your website traffic and sales.
Both Kevin Sinclair & Daniel Cassidy are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Daniel Cassidy has sinced written about articles on various topics from Site Promotion, Multi Level Marketing and Multi Level Marketing. Daniel Cassidy is a online networker who spends time on sites like , a "MySpace" like website for business. Daniel is also the webmaster of. Daniel Cassidy's top article generates over 27100 views. to your Favourites.