'Social Bookmarking' As An Aggressive and Acceptable Blog
Marketing Tactic
Social bookmarking websites are becoming more and more popular.
They allow you to save bookmarks online and Tag/Categorize them
with keywords instead of saving them as bookmarks in the
favorite's list of your browser. This is particularly useful
when your browser based bookmarks have become unwieldy. It's
also help since you can access your bookmarks from any computer
where you have an internet connection.
I have compiled a list of Social Bookmarking websites from a
number of sources. You can find it in the resource box at the
end of this article.
Once you have bookmarked them, you can view them, sort them by
category/keyword as well as see links from others that have been
categorized like yours.
You also establish RSS feeds for each category (tag) that you
'subscribe' to. This alerts you to new links in your areas of
interest. Your bookmark collection/RSS Feed becomes viewable to
others who can also copy your bookmarks to their own collection.
So now you can aggressively promote your RSS feed to the RSS
Directories and Search engines, syndicate them and make them
available to a much wider audience.
Social bookmarking sites also help you to meet other people who
are interested in the same topics you are and who may also have
knowledge of web resources that you don't.
On Social Bookmarking sites, you first create an account. Then
you bookmark interesting and useful things in the area of your
interest or expertise. By doing so you create a useful Feed.
Once you've done that you intermittently, (or aggressively), add
useful and interesting items, (that could use additional
exposure), from your own content. Make an honest effort to
contribute USEFUL information and links. This is all about
sharing and exposure. Done properly, you can be as aggressive as
you want to be about sharing information. You can share your
blog(s), links to your informational/resource sites etc. Think
about the fact that when you share links to other's resources,
you're also effectively promoting their content as well.
This is a way you can aggressively and ethically promote your
content and the content of others. I personally have hundreds of
gigabytes of my own information and information of others,
connected to my notebook. In the final analysis, it's doing me
no good what-so-ever just sitting there. But by organizing it,
online, I can help myself, (getting organized, getting my
content exposed, etc.) and help others at the same time.
If you spice up your feed with too much sales and marketing
related or self promotional stuff, people can and will easily
drop their subscription to your feed. And instead of gaining
good will and doing a service to the internet community you
could get labeled as a spammer and suffer the consequences.
So while being aggressive is possible and acceptable, being
careful to consider the best interest of the community is
certainly warranted.
Balancing being ethical and providing a useful service to others
with promoting your own content enables you to be as aggressive
as you like. But remember, in the final analysis, others will
make the decision on whether it's ethical and useful or spam.