Social Bookmarking as a Network Marketing Promotional Tool

Social bookmarking provides the ideal way of promoting your network marketing business: in fact a means of promoting just about any online business once you understand the concept. Before discussing that, though, let's look at what is needed to effectively promote your network marketing enterprise.

The success of the type of business broadly described as network marketing depends by definition upon recruiting as many members into the program as possible. To achieve that you have to use as many means as possible of putting your message in front of as many eyes as you can. You can use every regular means at your disposal:


• A regular website
• Blogs
• A Squidoo lens
• Forums
• Pay per click (PPC) advertising
• Traffic swarms
• Rotators
• Article marketing

Plus a few more. However, that is no longer enough, and this is where social bookmarking comes into its own if used properly. Note these last three words: 'If used properly'. Most people are aware of social sites, some being social networking and others bookmarking sites, and each is different. OK, some are clones of each other, but most people use them as if they were all clones, or all intended to be used in the same way.

That is not the case, and each site has its own strengths and weaknesses which you can exploit to your advantage. Digg is a great way to promote your content whether that is an article, blog, video or anything else. StumbleUpon is ideal for bookmarking on the fly when you come across an interesting page when surfing. Others have their own uses and benefits.


Competitors or Employees?

Most online entrepreneurs regard everybody else as competitors; people from whom your activities should be hidden, and so they might regard social bookmarking as being too revealing of their business.

Well here's news for you - that's not the way it works with network marketing. In general, although social bookmarking can be used to put you that important step ahead of your competitors, in network marketing it is not beating competition that is important, but getting your message across to as many people as possible. Others doing the same as you might not be competitors, but unknown to you be members of your downline, and hence your virtual employees.

How it Works

Let's look at what social bookmarking can do for you in general, and in what way these benefits multiply through search engine exposure. The term social media marketing is often used for this way of using such sites.

Basically, social media sites are used to store links to web pages that you want to revisit, and also that you want to bring to the attention of others. 'Web pages' here refers to any entity on the World Wide Web, not only website pages, and including blogs, lenses, landing pages and so on.

These links can be organized and searched, generally by the use of 'tags' or keywords related to the link. The bookmarks can be shared with others interested in the same subjects as you are. Users interested in a specific topic, or niche, will search using these tags, and when they come across your link, click on it, and if they like what they see they too can bookmark your page giving you another link.

In that way your bookmark can also be bookmarked by others in much the same way as other websites can carry a link back to a page on your website and so improve your Google Page Rank. The more people sharing your link, the more relevant to the tag, or keyword, a search engine will regard the page it leads to.

This is a very significant way of bringing your web pages to the attention of search engines. It is infinitely preferable to have your web page discovered by search engines in this way than by you submitting it. For starters, it can take months for your page to be listed through submission, but hours by means of social bookmarking links. The term 'page' here means a normal web page, a blog, Squidoo lens or any other web presence.

Quite frankly, anybody involved in network marketing that is not using social bookmarking is missing out on a massive amount of traffic, and if there is one thing that such programs thrive on, it is traffic.

Ways in Which Social Bookmarking Can Help to Promote Your Network Marketing Business

• You have a link back to your site from another website. Such back links are valuable in raising the relevance of your page in the eyes of search engines, and can lead to a higher listing and so more exposure for your business.

• Other users of Digg, Blinklist, Technorati, Facebook, etc. will click on your link and find your web page. That is good, targeted, traffic.

• Other users will bookmark your links so multiplying the effects of the above benefits.

• Social sites of any type consist of web pages that can also be listed on Google and the other search engines such as Yahoo, Ask and MSN: that increases the ranking value of your links, and also brings them to the attention of search engine users.

These are very important benefits to your network marketing business that is nothing without good targeted traffic to your sales or registration page. Social bookmarking offers you a source of free traffic that will not only complement that from you regular advertising campaigns, but also tie them together into a unified business that can only be to your significant advantage.

As previously mentioned, not all social bookmarking sites work the same way and there is an effective way to use each of them in network marketing.

If it is too obvious to the search engines (or people monitoring this) that you are using social bookmarking solely to promote your own Internet marketing links, you can be penalized on the search engines and lose the benefits of social bookmarking as a means to increase visibility to your content.

If done too obviously, it is considered spam and can have adverse effects on the search ranking of your content.

In order to avoid social bookmarking pitfalls in your Internet Marketing you need to create a natural bookmarking behavior; have interests other than just your business 'money making' sites, show a broader range of interests by bookmarking sites of other topics. Also, bookmark sites that are not yours. And, bookmark only your best stuff when you are posting your marketing content. The search engines, as well as the people at the bookmarking sites, will reward you for it with 'traffic' -- lots of it!

Learn how to effectively use social bookmarks and how to generate more prospects today! 

Copyright 2009 ©. Roxana Castillo.