Social Bookmarking

Digg, Technorati, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Fark, Furl, even Netscape. Web 2.0’s largest trend has created over 1,000 of this new breed of “Tagged News sites.” On them we mere

humans share our online bookmarks with each other, and on the latest incarnations, we vote them up and down against each others to point out which ones are the most interesting or useful.

These tools are great, and their power is staggering at times… But all they do is essentially just use humans to duplicate Google’s work to the same end!

Why would we go through such trouble? Because computer algorithms still just don’t “know” their resources the way humans do. Having another person select a website and “tag” it as relevant to your keyword is much more intuitive for us to find resources with. It has its problems too, mainly when combining keywords, but overall it’s becoming an extremely popular way for people to find other websites.

SiteMaps

Both Google and Yahoo! let you write a “map” of your website and submit it to them, so their spiders will know in advance exactly what to go index and how often. This has nothing to do with your website’s “Sitemap” page, those are for a human being’s eyes, although technically those make it a little easier on the spiders as well.

Google’s spider map is commonly a file named “sitemap.xml” that must be placed on the main web directory of your server host. Google demands that it be written in the XML language, which looks a lot like HTML except for a few other commands. Don’t worry, you won’t have to write a single line of code for this. There’s an excellent free tool coming up in a minute to write these for you.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is big business. The number of companies out there providing SEO services is quite staggering, and it’s growing every day. Does that mean it’s too difficult to do all by yourself?

Not at all. It’s very involved, and it will take a little time and ongoing effort, but it’s not rocket science, and you can even do everything you need to organically Rank #1 in all major search engines by yourself, all for free.

When I opened my SEO Services business in 2004 I only had experience working with my own websites before that point, and I learned VERY quickly one last, very important thing about SEO… 

It’s personal.

If you pay a big company to optimize your website for you, as opposed to you learning how and doing the optimization yourself, then you’ll never be able to rank as highly. Another company cannot have the very discreet knowledge of your businesses’ keywords and market that you had to learn the hard way.

Safelists

An often dismissed way of advertising online is by using a Safelist. It’s named that because you have to agree not to report the flood of emails you get as spam… So the emails you’re agreeing to use is therefore “Safe” from spam accusations, no matter how many come in each day. I normally get a few hundred emails daily just from the three accounts I mention below… Way more than I or anyone else is planning to read through.

Safelist’s major problem, which everyone agrees is substantial, is that no one really reads these emails. Conversion rates (people actually clicking a link in one of the emails) are down in the toilet around 0.0001%.

RSS – (Syndicated Content)

There are actually many great uses for RSS, which stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” Website Publishers & especially Blog owners should use RSS feeds in their pages to give fresh, on-topic

content to their readers each day without having to lift a finger. Alternatively, they can offer their own RSS feed to other webmasters so that those other sites can publish their site content elsewhere (with a link back to their site, naturally.)

Your visitors will like having the fresh industry news there at a glance. I know that I certainly appreciate my Yahoo! news start page portal, which is nothing but 50 RSS Feeds all crammed together.

Press Releases – (A subset of Link Building)

Much like Article Marketing, writing and submitting press releases can be an incredibly effective way

to get attention to your website or cause. 

However, not just any informative article will do for a press release; these are meant to go to the News agencies of the world… So your submission has to be at least a little newsworthy & time-sensitive.

Many businesses apply this tactic by hyping up their product launches, writing a press release about the release of their upcoming product that is factual but implies that the launch is quite a newsworthy event where they are located.

PodCasting

There are free places online for people to actually download MP3s on any subject. Naturally, you can also upload them for free.

Many people are audio-centric and prefer to learn by listening on their iPods, usually so they can

multitask or not be bored during a commute. Giving them free content is an excellent way for your name and relation to their favorite subject matter to be presented.

Much like how an article works, effective PodCasting depends on your content being interesting enough for them to want to download it, but at the same time, you must include your sales message and of course end it with a “Call to Action” that motivates the listener into following up in some way such as visiting your website.

It’s true that this rarely results in many links back to your site, and if your content is interesting enough, the best you can hope for is for fans to pass them around to each other by word of mouth… Certainly no benefit for link-building.

Pay Per Click Freebies

Other than the big-name traffic like Google, MSN, and Yahoo!s text-ad programs, there are endless

competitors for pay-per-click venues… More than you could imagine.

So many in fact, that yep, you guessed it, there are freebies here too for us to take advantage of. How much? Well, how about $1,040 in PPC money, without even showing a credit card? (With minimum bids as low as $0.005!)

These types of “Old School” PPC engines are the dinosaurs of the net. Most of these companies you’re about to see are older than Google, and even older than any kind of Search Engine Ranking!

Opt-In

As in Opting into a subscriber’s list.

OPT & OPL

Other People’s Traffic & Other People’s Lists.

NewsLetters

It is a regularly distributed publication that is generally about one main topic of interest to its
subscribers.

Newspapers and leaflets are types of newsletters.

For example, newsletters are distributed at schools to inform parents about things that happen in that school.

MY Space

MySpace Marketing on the web’s #1 Social networking site is a lot like how you remember High

School; the rules are different, it’s all about competing in a Popularity contest! In fact, you may notice that it seems the majority of MySpace members are pretty young… So why does everyone obsess about using MySpace to market with these days? Simply because they’ve already got the traffic there.

MySpace.com is at this moment the world’s 6th most popular website according to Alexa.com. YouTube.com and it had been closely competing for the #5 spot for half a year until Microsoft’s ‘Live’ search got between them. (YouTube, which I review later in this eBook, is even better for marketing purposes than MySpace.) Still, getting a website all about you on the #6 website worldwide is an opportunity you shouldn’t pass up.

MSN AdCenter - (Also usually not free)

I once again hesitate to mention a big-name PPC Engine because this is supposed to be a free resource report. However I’ll make an exception because I think you’ll want to pay

the $5 they need for you to open up a new account with when I spill the beans on AdCenter…

First of all, MSN launched AdCenter in 2006 and they’ve still got a long way to go in order to catch up with AdWords… Or even Yahoo’s Search Marketing program. MSN’s per-click prices are pretty low right now because of this, and it’s common to get #1 or #2 for a keyword at or under $0.30 per click.

List Building Services

List building is the process of adding new subscribers to your mailing list. This subscriber gives you their email address in exchange for receiving certain information, a special offer, or a free gift. You can do this online via your website, or you can do it offline using manual or automated data collection tactics. There are various tactics you can use to increase how fast you build your list, and how large your mailing list ends up being.

Online programs referred to as “list builders” are a modified form of Safelists where you must build a downline and at the same time only get emails from your own upline. They are usually free to join but have 2 or three upgrade packages where the more you’re paying for your monthly membership, the more emails you can send out.

Link Swapping - (A Subset of Link Building)

Link swapping used to be a simple concept that just meant two webmasters could scratch each other’s back by placing a link on their websites, pointing to each other’s site, for mutual benefit in the

search engine’s eyes.

This definition became inadequate when Google decided that this kind of swapping, although not actually bad enough to deserve punishment, was only done in fact to influence their rankings, and so they made some algorithm changes that complicated things for us.

The premise is simple, mainly because Google and the other big Search Engines see all incoming links to a website as a “vote” for that site’s popularity. (The PageRank method.) Webmasters quickly adapted and put up a link directory on each of their websites to automate the link-swapping of that site with other webmasters. This method has largely lost its’ effectiveness, however.

Link Building

The most time consuming form of work to do in order to get your site ranked well by the Search Engines. Comes in many forms, but all takes time to do right.

See “Articles,” “Blogs,” “Blog Comments,” “Doorway sites,” “Classified Ads,” “Craigslist,” “Directory Submissions,” “Forums,” “Testimonials,” “Social Bookmarking,” “Press Releases,” and “Link Swapping.”