All Entries Tagged With: "social bookmarking"

Using Articles And Bookmarks To Supercharge Your Viral Marketing

Two days ago I posted on the Blog Content Provider blog how you can use articles in conjunction with blogging to deliver a whopping sucker punch to the search engines and increase your search marketing mojo. Well, did you know you can have a similar effect with article marketing and social bookmarking? No kidding.

Article marketing has always been considered one of the forms of viral marketing. Now, with the advent of social bookmarking, you can take that viral marketing to the extreme. Social bookmarking is viral marketing on steroids.

Try this little marketing experiment for 30 days:

Write 10 articles. Distribute those 10 articles to 10 article directories, one per day for 10 days. After that, bookmark each article at at one of the many bookmarking websites online. You effectively have 100 articles (10 X 10). If you bookmark 5 a day for the next 20 days then you’ll have them all bookmarked at the end of the 30 day experiment.

I suggest that you pick 10 bookmarking websites and focus on those 10. Create a spreadsheet to track your bookmarking. On the top of the spreadsheet, list all 10 article directories where your articles were submitted. Along the left side of the spreadsheet, list your 10 articles. You can use a service like www.socialmarker.com. Go down your list of articles and pick the sites you want to bookmark that article at. It won’t take long using the SocialMarker site. When you’re done, move on to the next article. Do five one day then the next day do five more until all of your articles at each of the directories have been bookmarked.

As you are doing this, check your traffic stats daily and see how much traffic you are getting from each of the websites. If the article directories have stats that allow you to check traffic, even better. That way, you can see how the bookmarking is affecting the articles. But you should expect some of those articles to be picked up and published by others within your industry or niche. Before they publish your article, they’ll likely visit your website. Not everyone who reads your article will visit your website so be prepared for a trickle down effect. But it does work. Viral marketing added to viral marketing equals super viral marketing.

Is Social Bookmarking Replacing Article Marketing As The Marketing Tool Of Choice?

It may seem that social bookmarking is the new article marketing. You get some of the same benefits much faster than through social media websites than through article directories:

• Link Building
• Traffic Generation
• Viral Marketing
• Expert Author Status
• Recognition and Distribution

Article Marketing Vs. Social Bookmarking
Article Marketing has been a big deal online since the very beginning days of Internet marketing. It has grown into a very popular industry of its own and seems poised to continue – maybe even get bigger and better. But will social bookmarking replace it any time soon?

I think not. While social bookmarking is getting to be as popular as article marketing, they really are two separate methods of marketing that can compliment each other. Social bookmarking is to blogs as article marketing is to static websites, though you can use articles to promote blogs and you can social bookmark your static sites. Ideally, you should use both article marketing and social bookmarking to market your blogs and your websites.

Non-writers may prefer social bookmarking because they don’t have to go through the grueling process of writing in order to do the marketing. But if you hire a ghostwriter to do your writing for you then you can do all the marketing yourself – social bookmarking as well as article directory submissions. Of course, you could opt to outsource the entire process, and that’s fine too. At the end of the day, it’s about getting the word out about your product or service and how you do that depends a lot on your goals, your product or service, and your preferences.

Why Not Do Both?
I think every business can benefit from an article marketing plan as well as a social bookmarking plan. Article marketing may be a slower process, but the benefits seem to stick around longer. Social bookmarking is the short term solution that can deliver traffic to your website or blog very fast, but the target is not necessarily targeted traffic. It is not as targeted as the traffic you get through articles and pay per click ads, for sure. That doesn’t mean you don’t want to do it, however.

Article marketing is not dead. Nor is social bookmarking on the path to replacing it. Rather, savvy marketers are doing both, and I think you should too.

Promote Your Articles Through BlogCatalog

BlogCatalog recently added a Social Dashboard to its functionality. It isn’t direct marketing, but you can promote your articles through BlogCatalog just by submitting them to your favorite article directory then Digging them. In fact, you can run every activity you perform through Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious through BlogCatalog so if you bookmark your articles at any one of those three social bookmarking sites then your friends on BlogCatalog will see that activity. It’s just another way of promoting your articles and keeping them viral.

I recommend doing this in phases to make the most impact. Write an article and post it to your blog one week. It will filter through BlogCatalog. Wait about two weeks then send it out to article directories. It will filter through BlogCatalog. The next week, stumble your blog post and it will filter through BlogCatalog again. One week later, Digg the article in an article directory and again it will filter through BlogCatalog. In another week or two save the blog post again (or the article in an article directory) at del.icio.us. Again it will filter through BlogCatalog.

This kind of phased in article marketing will keep your article circulating through the BlogCatalog community for several weeks. The rule of thumb is people must see something 7 times before they act on it. Let’s count: Your blog, StumbleUpon, Digg, del.icio.us; that’s 4 times. If you use Twitter, that’s another time that you can hit even though Twitter isn’t a full blog post. You can just leave a comment like “Saved article at such-and-such directory” with a link to the article. That Twit will filter through BlogCatalog. If you Twit each bookmarking activity as well as your original blog post then that’s a total of 9 times that one item filters through BlogCatalog. Any friends that don’t catch it on the first go round will catch it on the next one. Every time an item filters through BlogCatalog you increase your chances of getting another page view and driving traffic to your website.

How’s that for viral marketing?

Article Content Provider

Social Bookmarking: The Most Overlooked Aspect Of Article Marketing

Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of article marketing is social bookmarking. Most article marketers don’t even think about bookmarking their articles. But why wouldn’t you?

Social bookmarking gives your articles more reach. You can get your articles in front of more people in a shorter period of time and reach people you may not reach otherwise. Remember the purpose for article marketing in the first place. You are writing articles and distributing them to the various article directories so that webmasters and e-zine publishers can use your content to help grow their businesses and help you promote yours. How will those webmasters and e-zine publishers find your articles if you don’t point them in the right direction?

As the Internet grows, your content is more likely to fall to the scrap heaps of the SERPs. You need every edge you can get for getting your content into the hands of the right people. Social bookmarking is another tool to help you do that. Some of the benefits of social bookmarking include:

• Inbound link building
• Driving traffic where you want it to go
• Increased exposure for your brand
• Greater influence upon your market
• Networking with others with similar interests

When you write an article and distribute it through your network of article directories, you are marketing your business. After you have given your article enough distribution, head over to half a dozen well-trafficked social bookmarking sites and bookmark your article at each of those sites. Many article directories now have bookmarking icons on the articles. Just click on that icon and bookmark your own article. Encourage others to do the same.