Online marketing is tough. There are so many businesses competing for attention that it is difficult to stand out from the crowd. The upside is that the World Wide Web provides ample opportunity to build your business for free…if you are willing to put in the time and effort.

Job #1: Search Engine Position

The primary goal for marketing online is to drive traffic to your website. More traffic equals more sales. The best way to achieve that objective is to show up at the top of the search engines. That is, when potential customers search for a product or service that you carry (your key words), your business should be on the first page, the higher up, the better. Even if your business serves only a local area, your customers need to find you easily on the web. The way this works is people enter, for example, “pest control Las Vegas” and the search engine returns websites that are optimized for those key words. The trick is to get your website to the top of that list.

There is not quick and easy way to get there. You cannot buy your way to the top of (or even into) search engines. The search engine companies like Google, Bing, and Yahoo use complicated, secret algorithms to determine which sites rank the hightest. The rules are ever-changing, mostly in an attempt to combat scammers. However, there are legitimate tools, referred to as SEO (search engine optimization), that can be worked to build your site’s status. For the most part, these tools cost no money, but do require time, effort and patience to achieve.

Most people understand SEO to be about placing the right keywords on your website pages and setting the appropriate tags for the search engine crawlers to find. While these factors are important, there is a lot more you can do by utilizing other existing websites to get the word out about yours. One of the factors that all search engines rely on are the number of links back to your site from other, well-ranked websites.

Social Networking and Bookmarking Sites

As soon as your website is posted, even if it is a “coming soon” page with a limited description, begin spreading the word. Start with the popular social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Users of these sites can create or join professional groups and post business pictures and videos. Join in with forum discussions relevant to your business. Be sure to include a link back to your website, when possible, but do not spam the boards. That is, be sure you respond appropriately to the question or discussion. If you just post your link to every forum, you will be kicked off the networking site and develop a bad reputation for your business.

Other users can join your business’s profile and be kept up-to-date on your postings. Twitter and Tumblr also allow users to keep tabs on what is happening with you and your business. These networking sites take a while to build up, but over time can be an effective tool for virtual word-of-mouth marketing.

Other websites, called social bookmarking sites, allow you to select and bookmark noteworthy web pages or news articles for others to view. These bookmarks also allow comments from other users — a great opportunity to market your own business. Of course, be sure to stick to relevant topics and offer pertinent comments. The same rules apply here as with other social sites. Some of the more popular bookmarking sites include Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Mixx, Fark, and StumbleUpon.

Content is King

Building content on and off your site is critical. Whatever your business idea, there is a lot that your target market doesn’t know about what you do. In a bizarre twist of modern consumerism, your customers expect free information or free samples before they buy. Your site should contain enough valuable, relevant, free information to get your potential market interested in your product. For most products, tell them why they need it and how they will benefit from purchasing your product. Write articles about particular features or uses. Write product reviews of the products you sell. Start a blog that discusses relevant news articles or opinions of interest to your target. Then, post announcements of these articles to your social networking sites.

Also consider writing informational articles (not blatant advertisements) to submit to article directories, other free content websites, and even magazines and newsletters that are read by your target market. The articles should be useful to your market — the intention is to become known as an expert in your field. While for the most part you should not (and, for some cases, can not) include links or references to your business in the body of the article, you can usually include two or three links to different pages of your website in your byline. Be sure these links include the key words you are trying to optimize. For example, an article by the owner of a pet supply company might be about the health benefits of dog sports. The byline might read as follows, with the bold words linked to pages on the website:

Mutt Trainer, owner of DogSportsStuff.com is a Certified Pet Dog Trainer. During his 28 years in the dog world he has competed in conformation, obedience, and agility with his pet Chesapeake Bay Retrievers. His first love is dog sports, especially dock diving and flyball.

If your articles are well-written, interesting, and informative, they may be picked up by other online e-zines to be distributed through their newsletters and websites. A single article, then, can result in at least two and as many as hundreds of links back to your website. Depending on how crowded your key words are on the web, these links can make a big difference in moving your site up the search engine results.

The Payoff is Worth the Time and Effort

Boosting your ranking on the search engines takes significant time and effort, but the payoff is significant as well. Once your business hits the first page of the major search engines for the right key words, your business will reach a far broader market base than through any other single form of advertising. How long it takes to get there depends on how crowded your key words are and how much effort you put into SEO. Key words like “starting a business” are especially difficult to crack. It can take a year or more of concerted effort to consistently show up on the first page. Less common key words take less time but still require the links back and content to get you to the top. Be warned — those SEO consultants that guarantee your business will be in the top 5 of the search engines do not guarantee the key words you want. That is, if you are in the pizza oven business, they cannot get you to the top of “pizza oven” searches any faster than you can. However, they probably can get you to the top of “Mike’s Pizza Oven, Inc.” relatively quickly…because you are the only business out there with those key words.

About the Author-K. MacKillop, a serial entrepreneur, is founder of LaunchX and authors a small business startup blog. The LaunchX System is designed to help entrepreneurs start a business. Visit LaunchX.com to learn more about creating a comprehensive marketing plan for your business startup.

Internet marketing is an incredibly vast subject. Figuring out ways to utilize the internet to send traffic to your website or affiliate link can feel like a very daunting task for the new internet marketer. If you are just starting out do not try to overcomplicate things. Do not bite off more than you can chew. Take it slowly and master one technique at a time. Too often people will jump from one marketing method to another without really taking the time to learn what they are doing.

Some of the most basic things that you must master are:

1. Blogging (for affiliate marketing)

2. Article Marketing (Writing an article for the web is not the same as writing for print!)

3. Pay Per Click (Adwords, Yahoo, Miva, etc)

4. Video Marketing (YouTube, Revver, etc.)

If you are really serious about building an internet marketing business you also should learn about Squidoo and how to build great lenses, social bookmarking, and how to leverage free blog sites to generate free traffic to your personal website. Pick one affiliate marketing method on the list above and take the time to learn everything about it before you move on to another. Patience is the one characteristic that most new marketers lack. Everyone wants to make a quick buck on the internet, on I understand this, I wanted to make a fast buck when I started out as well. Impatience however will just cause you to lose out on tremendous profits in the end.

Every tactic mentioned above is aimed at the same thing: Generating a steady stream of traffic for your web sites. If you do not have traffic you cannot have an internet marketing income!

The first thing you need to do if you truly desire internet marketing or affiliate marketing success is to learn. Read everything you can about this business. There is a lot of good information available, much of it for free. Just browse around the various article directories and marketing websites on the internet and you will find all the information you need to get started.

There are a lot of internet marketing and affiliate marketing “gurus” out there who all want to sell you something. Many of them have excellent information that you really should purchase to help you jump start your business, however it’s important to carefully evaluate their claims and avoid getting caught up in the hype. There is no shortcut to success. Remember that. It takes time and effort to succeed at affiliate marketing. Many people give up because they bought into the hype of some program and forgot that success comes hand in hand with hard work.

Everything we do in life takes time and effort in order to succeed. There are certainly methods out there that will allow you to make an internet marketing income fast, but even they will require you to put in a certain degree of effort in order to be successful.

Remember there are many paths you can take to build a profitable affiliate marketing income. Just be willing to put in the effort required to make the path you choose work.

I am an advocate advocate of plug-n-play affiliate marketing programs. Simplicity is the key to success. Learn more about my plug-n-play business philosophy by visiting my blog: Click Here

I get a kick out of people when I ask them what strategy they use to market their product and they tell me something like, “Oh, I do a little of this and that…some classified ads, article marketing, a little PPC. It’s good enough.” Now don’t mistake me. If you’re budgeting $300 a day on pay per click and making three times that much in income, then you probably don’t need to be reading this article anyway. But if you’re still fighting to promote your site, then keep on reading.

There are more methods to generate traffic than Carter has liver pills. The issue is, most people either don’t know about these techniques or they’re just too lazy to put them into action. Certainly, I can go and list all the common methods to generate traffic, such as classified ads, PPC, article marketing, SEO, social bookmarking and blogging and pinging, but there is a world out there that is beyond this that most people don’t think about or even know about.

Let’s begin with something as simple as a press release. Now, press releases are slightly different from your standard promotional technique. A press release actually should not be promotional. It should narrate on what your product, site or service is and how it is of value to people. What makes it unique? What makes it something that will be of importance to people? Also, it should be objective and not read like an ad. A good press release can generate tons of traffic to your new site.

What about social networking? Twitter is all the rage today. Well, why not begin following on Twitter composed of people who share similar interests. Not everybody on Twitter is an online marketer and maybe there are a lot of folks there who are interested in YOUR niche and YOUR product. Imagine putting up a blog with valuable info about that niche and sending tweets to your followers that include your blog URL. For that subject, you can add useful info in the tweets themselves.

Then of course you have forums. Like it or not, there are forums in just about every niche. Why not go to one and share what you know with the other members? Don’t try to market your site. Don’t post ads. Instead, look for questions that you can answer and actually answer them. Do these long enough and other forum members will begin to honor you.

And the above only scratches the surface of what you can do in addition to the standard stuff like article marketing, PPC, SEO, social bookmarking and blogging and pinging to promote your sites. There is offline marketing too. When was the last time you took out a small ad in a local newspaper?

Point is you can never do enough to advertise your business.

Do you want to get a vivid picture of how to land in the top 20 of every affiliate promotion you tackle, then visit my resource box to download “Stone Evans” FREE 325 page ebook on the science of making money online.

To YOUR Success,

John Benjamin

John Benjamin is the webmaster of How to Start an Internet Business. Sick and tired of spinning your wheels trying to make a buck online? Download Stone Evans FREE 325 page ebook at Online Business Ideas and get a 6 figure education for pennies.

I’ve never tried this process of link building. I usually do forum posts, blog comments, article marketing, blogging, doorway pages, member profiles, and web directories.
I guess I just don’t know what it is! I don’t really understand how the system works. Does digg.com put up a link to your site or something? I’m confused at how this system helps me build backlinks.

Although there are many ways to market your business online, I only use free techniques because they have the chance to go viral.

Viral marketing is a form of word of mouth marketing that becomes viral. What this means is that your campaign spreads like a virus. Viral marketing will allow you to reach market segments you might not otherwise reach.

Another advantage of using viral marketing is that as your message spreads, your marketing automates itself. By automating your marketing, you continue to drive traffic to your sites and make money without doing any work.

Below are seven ways to help you unleash a viral marketing campaign in your business:

1. Write articles.

This is, of course, my favorite internet marketing technique. The reason is that it allows me to:

-build valuable one way backlinks to my websites,

-increase my rankings in the search engines,

-brand myself as an expert,

-show my potential customers how I can solve their problems.

Showing my potential customers how I can solve their problems is the most important element of writing articles. The reason is that you are adding value to your products by giving information, and sharing with others what you know without asking anything in return. It also gives you an opportunity to show whether or not you may solve the customers’ problems.

Most internet surfers are tired of sales pitches; they want information. Give good information.

2. Send out a press release.

Press releases are another way to build one way backlinks to your website. It’s also a way to tell others about your business and show them what you can do for them. Online press releases allow you to connect directly with potential customers.

To write an effective press release, you want to concentrate on news about your business. Show others how you will solve their problems.

Like articles, press releases are often syndicated across many sites, and this allows your press release to go viral.

3. Build a Squidoo lens.

Squidoo is the brain child of best selling author and entrepreneur Seth Godin. A Squidoo lens is like a one page minisite on a specific topic or product. Lenses allow you to give as much information as you want about your products or services. It also allows you to rank well in the search engines because Squidoo ranks well in the search engines.

Squidoo lenses offer readers a chance to vote on lenses, as well as bookmark them. The social element of this site makes lenses highly viral. Create a good lens, and you may go viral quickly.

4. Participate in social marketing.

Social marketing is an easy way to connect with both potential customers and others in your industry. This is an opportunity to get out there and “strut your stuff.” In other words, you have a chance to demonstrate your expertise.

Social marketing encompasses a wide variety of techniques, including social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, blogging, social bookmarking and videos. All of these are highly viral because they are interactive.

5. Write free reports to give away.

Although this technique has been around a long time, it’s also still effective. Mark Joyner used it with his free ebook, “Search Engine Tactics.” (This ebook has been downloaded over one million times.)

The way to make an ebook go viral is to first put it in a format everyone may use. PDF (Portable document format) is the way to do this because Adobe works on any computer. The other thing you want to consider is making the report brandable.

What this means is that you allow others to add their details, or the affiliate links to your report. Those who want to give away your report use a “brander” to add their affiliate IDs, as well as a link to their websites if you allow it.

This gives others incentives to promote your report. More importantly, it gives them an opportunity to make sales. Branding increases the chances of your reports going viral.

6. Build a network of joint venture partners.

Although this technique takes the most work to do, it’s also one of the most lucrative ways to market your business online. When you build a list of joint venture partners, you have the chance to reach more potential customers in your market. Not only will you reach more potential customers in your market, you also have the opportunity to gain new affiliates for those who want to sell your products or services.

The secret here is to provide as much support to your potential partners as possible. Make it easy to join your affiliate program and include plenty of viral marketing materials like articles, reviews, and brandable reports.

7. Use Tell a Friend Scripts.

A “Tell a Friend” script allows visitors to recommend your site to others. There is, however, a right and a wrong way to use this type of script.

The most important thing to remember here is to give your visitors an incentive for using your script. Ask them to recommend your site. In exchange, give them a bonus for recommending you. Make the bonus exclusive, something they can’t get anywhere else.

One of the biggest advantages to using viral marketing in your business is that it is free, and once you create a successful campaign, it multiplies itself exponentially. Look for ways to market your business using viral marketing. A successful campaign will put your marketing on autopilot.

Internet Marketing is a tough job. Intellectual Marketing is that Art by whch we use our intellect to generate traffic.

Creating a website or blog is not enough. Your sites and blogs should achieve visibility on the search engines. Then only will people come to your site. Remember a blog or a site without traffic is zero. It is traffic which makes a site great. Yahoo, Google or MSN get tremendous traffic ( above 1 miilion hits a day ) and that is why they are ranked high.

There are many methods of attracting traffic. You have to submit your blogs, feeds, urls, articles etc to the respective directories. Then only will they achieve visibility on the search engines.

Talking and writing about generating traffic is easy. It is difficult to get a lot of traffic. One has to do Intellectual Marketing religiously. I put in 10 hours of Web Marketing every day. Otherwise my blogs and sites will be devoid of traffic !

After you have created your blogs, you have to submit them to the blog directories

Submit Your Blogs

This is blog submission web page I use to submit my 28 blogs

http://www.eastrovedica.com/html/blogsubmissioncenters.asp

Submit Your Feeds

The xml feeds of your sites and blogs should be submitted to the feed directories.

Submit Your URLs

Every web page or every blog page you create is a Uniform Resource Locator or url. You should submit your urls to the Search Engines.

I submit my urls normally via www.addme.com

Submit your Articles

The articles you create should be submitted to the article directories. I use this web page to submit my articles

http://www.eastrovedica.com/html/articlesubmissioncenters.htm

Ping your blogs

You can submit your feeds using Pingoat ( www.pingoat.com ) or Pingomatic www.pingomatic.com

Create Squidoo Pages

Squidoo is heavily trafficked and I created 27 lenses on Squidoo. Each Squidoo page is a url and they should be submitted to the Search Engines. Once submitted they will be visible on the Search Engines. Once they are visible, you will get traffic to your Squidoo Page.

From your Squidoo page you should give links to your blogs and sites. That way you will get fairly good traffic.

Use Social Bookmarking

To get traffic, you can submit your pages to Social Bookmarking services like Digg, Technorati etc. These social bookmarking sites get around 1 million bookmarks a day. The web or blog page which you bookmark becomes visible and people read and click and lo ! you have got traffic.

I use the Social Bookmarking Button of AddThis ( www.addthis.com ). It submits to over 16 Social Bookmarking Sites.

Good Luck with Intellectual Marketing !

An infopreneur is defined as one who sells info products. You can sell your info products via the Web, via blogs, sites and lenses !

Article Marketing continues to be the best method for getting exposure and traffic to your sites, blogs and lenses !

Create blogs on Blogger or WordPress. Create as many blogs as possible. Also create lenses on Squidoo. I created 23 blogs on Blogger and 24 lenses on Squidoo.

From your Squidoo lens, give links to your blogs and sites. From my main Squidoo Lens, http://squidoo.com/ZodiacAstrology, I have given links to my main blog, http://zodiacastrology.blogspot.com and to my main site, www.eastrovedica.com

One blog post is more or less 200 words. Convert 3 or 4 blog posts into one article. You already got content. All you have to do is to edit it and lo ! you have an article !

After creating an article out of blog posts, you can

Post the article to your Squidoo Page

Post the article to your site

Email the article to subscription lists

Send it to article directories

Send it to article submission lists

Immense are the benefits of Article Marketing! The e-article has been defined by Ron Knolton as the ultimate promotional tool and it is this tool which will get you traffic.

If you convert blogs posts into articles, you can have as many as 1000 articles per month. Your articles will give you tremendous exposure, generate leads and get you the much needed traffic for your blogs, lenses and sites !

The Benefits of Article Marketing

1) Lead Generation

2) Increased traffic

3) Increased Rankings ( Alexa traffic rankings, Google Page Rankings, Yahoo Inbound links etc )

4) Postioning you as an expert

Your articles will appear on the article directories and these articles will get you traffic. My YBL (Yahoo Inbound links) for my main site, www.eastrovedica.com was 1800 last year and in one year of Article Marketing, it has gone upto 18000 YBL, a tenfold increase !

If you have Adsense ads, Adbrite ads etc on your sites, blogs and lenses, you can benefit from adrevenue. Just get traffic to these blogs, sites and lenses and your adrevenue will go up !

I have created promotional lists, a list of article submission centers, social bookmarking sites and blog submission centers & you can make use of my promotional lists.

Submit your blogs to these blog submission centers

http://www.eastrovedica.com/html/blogsubmissioncenters.asp

Submit your web and blog pages to these social bookmarking sites

http://www.eastrovedica.com/html/socialbookmarkingsites.asp

Submit your articles to these article submission centers

http://www.eastrovedica.com/html/articlesubmissioncenters.htm

Good Luck with Intellectual Marketing !

Article by G Kumar, intellectual marketer & writer of www.articlewisdom.com He has 9 years online experience as an Intellectual Marketer and he has got 393 K hits for his site www.eastrovedica.com due to Intellectual Marketing. Free blogging tips at blog2wisdom.blogspot.com & his marketing blog is up at http://marketingwisdom.blogspot.com

There are so many things amazing about the WordPress blogging platform.  Its user-friendly interface, its interlinking features, its SEO potentials, its interconnectivity with other WordPress blogs, its ability to publish content so easily and so efficiently well, and so much more!

But the best thing about the WordPress blogging platform has got to be its highly customizable nature.

In fact, there is a big community on the web dedicated to create WordPress themes, WordPress modifications and WordPress plugins.

WordPress plugins are, without a doubt, the most enjoyable features of WordPress blogs.  WordPress plugins add to the functions that WordPress can accomplish. 

There are WordPress plugins that are as trivial as providing weather reports, providing a ticker for the latest news in the field of sports or the stock market or the world, reporting post counts, providing a rating system for each blog post, and the likes.  There are also WordPress plugins that are as essential as putting a stop to spam comments – which are prevalent these days – and automating the publishing of posts.

Among the most important of these WordPress plugins are those that automatically display AdSense blocks on a particular area of the page.  Without these WordPress plugins, bloggers will be pressed to manually tinker with the source code of the blog to incorporate their AdSense ads.  There are also WordPress plugins for other Pay Per Click (PPC) programs like AdBrite.

Before magazine-style WordPress themes became popular, WordPress plugins that automatically embed YouTube videos were very popular.  They’re still widely used these days – especially those that cater to other video streaming websites like DailyMotion and MegaVideo – but the sheer convenience of having it as one of the features of an appropriate WordPress theme has lessened the plugin’s popularity.

Yet another integral WordPress plugin is one that adds icons that, when clicked, will submit a particular blog entry to the corresponding social news network.   WordPress plugins like this are responsible for driving fantastic traffic to the blog overnight.  Just imagine if a reader likes what you posted and he’ll have the option to immediately submit your blog entry to a social news website like Digg.com, and once submitted, Digg users will also enjoy your blog entry and they will vote for it.  You’d have hundreds and thousands of visitors to your blog in a matter of hours!  Other social news networks and social bookmarking websites are also included, like StumbleUpon, Technorati, Del.icio.us,  Slashdot and Reddit.

WordPress plugins add a limitless potential to the blogging platform.  Every day, a new plugin is created and published in the WordPress community.  The WordPress platform is an ever-evolving program because of the commitment of its devoted flock.

And online marketing will only become better because of it!

Affiliate marketing has turned out to be one of the most popular ways to make money on the Internet. The reasons for its popularity has been defined and praised on countless sites, and in numerous eBooks.

For the purpose of this short article I want to refer to my own, simplified definition of affiliate marketing: filling a SPACE with TEXT with the end purpose of convincing the reader to click on a LINK.

In my opinion there are four main types of spaces that can be filled with text, and that all-important link (direct affiliate links or links to pre-sell pages):

1. Content-rich websites centered around a particular topic (or niche). Text for the purpose of marketing include articles, reviews, and overviews of products and services.

2. Single pages – a Squidoo lens is an example of a “single page”, as are mini-blogs or (landing page blogs), individual user-generated social bookmarking pages, social networking pages, and even sales pages.

3. Proper blogs. What is a proper blog? It is the main publishing and content management platform for a serious blogger, dedicated to making the best out of his/her blog. This type of blog is rooted in the original purpose of blogging platforms, and is far removed from mini-blogs that become static after the first 3-5 entries. (Mini-blogs can be useful for both the marketer and the person seeking information, and although it can’t be compared to a proper blog in terms of traffic and quality of content, it is light years removed from the “splog” – the ugly cousin of the blog family.)

4. Advertising spaces. This kind of marketing space includes the little ads served up by Google and other PPC search engines, as well as classified ads or other content published on classified ad sites (like product reviews with the sole purpose of convincing the reader to click on the affiliate link).

There is one more space that can be considered a major element in any marketing effort: the pages of an Adobe PDF. The Portable Document Format has become the standard for electronic books, and because active links can be included in a PDF, it provides an excellent opportunity to weave some affiliate links in between (hopefully) useful information on a subject.

Some people are ambitious enough to master all of these spaces. Others choose one or two and maximize their profit potential. In the end it’s up to you to decide which space is a good fit for your talents, available time and marketing ambitions. Whatever your pick, mastering it would provide maximum return on your efforts.

Social bookmarking has been around for as long as the Internet has existed. If you found a website or resource that you really liked and wanted others to know about it, you told your friends. The quickest way to tell them was to send them an email or post a message on a forum containing the link to that website so they could look at it and add it to their browser favorites list.

This marked it so it could be found again in the future. That was the old way to spread the word about the things that were new or exciting on the Internet. Now, there are some easier and much more effective social bookmarking tools you can use to get the word out about new things.

Social networking involves “tagging” a website of particular interest so that it can be easily accessed. The tag shows up in two places; one being the user’s profile or website, the second being the original homepage of the tagging bookmark. The tag can appear on a list of favorite websites posted on a blog or website, or it can be a special website designed specifically for these tags, called a bookmarking network. Examples of popular bookmarking networks are twitter, facebook, squidoo, flikr, and wetpaint.

Visitors to those sites can then rate the URL value according to how often a search occurs or that link is clicked on. Popular bookmarks remain at the top while less favorable links and spam are lost to new searches. Social bookmarking can be monitored for trends in the market and is used to introduce new and better products and ideas.

Many consumers, whether they realize it or not, use social bookmarking everyday to decide what products are worth investing in, where to shop, where to eat and other consumer decisions. This is because when they do a search online, the most popular searchable things that have had multiple tags come up first in the list. Tags can be a good way for consumers to gauge whether or not a product or company is legit by who manages the feeds and how often the website is tagged.

Here is a list of some great social bookmarking tools you can use today to boost your website visits and get the word out about new items of interest:

Twitter. Do you twitter? This seems like the most asked question recently by social networking people. This free social networking site works by people who become members and post short updates as they wish on anything in general. It’s advertised as a “service for family, friends and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick , frequent answers to the questions; What are you doing” (Twitter.com) The update feeds can then be posted on the person’s blogs, websites or anyplace else where they want people to know about what they’re doing and talking about. People often post their articles or other tidbits about their businesses with links included to get others to visit their website.

Facebook. This is an international social networking site whereby members sign up free and can post messages and updates whenever they wish. If they include links to their websites or other online items, members can go there to read more about them. Feeds are then available for adding to blogs or websites for real time updates. Facebook is growing in popularity among people who were typically participating in other social networking sites like MySpace, but its attracting more career- and business-oriented people.

Squidoo. This neat little social bookmarking site has nothing to do with sealife. In fact, not only is it a great way for people to interact and post updates, but it allows users to create simple websites called “lenses” for others to read about their special interests or topics. So if you are promoting a certain niche interest, an idea or something related to your business, you can create a page to promote this idea and include links back to your sites. Squidoo offers its members additional tools like forums to come up with ideas to promote their pages and highlights popular lenses all over the Internet.

Flikr. If you’re into sharing more than words and like to include images as part of your networking efforts, then you may like Flikr. This social bookmarking site allows users to post images for others to review. Users can also talk about their experiences by joining either private or public groups. So families can use Flikr to share personal photos, or public groups can share images and talk about things of interest. Each photo is assigned a tag which can be placed on user’s websites and blogs. Flikr rates images according to how many times they’ve been viewed and this list is posted on the community section for all to see.

Wetpaint. This is a Wiki format social bookmarking site that allows members to create a website about anything they are interested in or want to promote. It’s a similar concept to Squidoo, except that it is expanded to include the ability to integrate popular feeds into both your Wetpaint site and your blogs or other websites seamlessly. Wetpaint is supported by not only all the major search engines, but also by all primary news feeds and searches conducted by Internet users. This opens up the possibility that someone who may just be doing a general search will land on your Wetpaint site.

There are so many great tools out there that you can use to get the word out about your ideas and share your blogs and websites more effectively. In just a few minutes, you can be signed up and hooked into the best of what the Internet has to offer. Be sure to check out the above social bookmarking sites to get the most out of these services and increase your website’s searchability.