Social Bookmarking Sites
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking defines Social bookmarking as a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the internet with the help of meta data.
For answers on what, how, why …, you can download this 2 page report from Educause.
Listed below are Top 45 bookmarking sites.
Read more
Ultimate Tips For Building Identity On Twitter
- Have a voluntary following.
- Demonstrate to your followers that you are the most informational person in your niche.
- Build credibility among followers that you can help them achieve their goals.
- Have the ability to motivate others.
- Continue learning and growing in your skills.
- Communicate often and encourage two way communication.
- Understand your strengths and weaknesses and work on the weaker corners.
- Hold a “Ask a question” day and inform your followers one day prior to the day you decide.
- Appreciate your followers when they share a tip.
- Know that each individual counts.
- Provide powerful & relevant bio.
- Give a link to your website where people can get more relevant information.
Marketing Techniques That Are Working For Me
This blog is new. I’m using the following techniques to market my blog. Check the analysis at the bottom.
Prior to setting up my blog, I spent some time to select wordpress theme, made some SEO tweaks, modified few default setting in wordpress.
Now I’m turning to next 5 ways
1) Social media marketing: More than marketing my sites, I’m trying to learn from places like twitter. If you take a look at the tweeters I’m following, you’ll find that most of them are experts in their fields. That is where I can get the best of information from. As Lynn Terry quoted on twitter the other day “you are the average of the 5 persons you are with”. I also added mybloglog widget on this blog. I’m yet to see traffic with this.
2) Article marketing: This is a great way for beginners. I am writing informative & relevant articles and submitting them to 6 article directories. Yes, I do have an article submitter which looks great. But I don’t think it is necessary to post the same article to hundreds of directories. Select top 5 or 10 and rule them on your topic. Don’t miss ezine articles. Its google’s favorite.
3) Forum posts: I hand picked 4 forums for different reasons. One ranks very high in search engines, second one has loads of members, third one is where I belong, fourth one has a “follow” tag. I got as many ‘track backs’ as my posts. I’m yet to score good number there. I’m planning to work on this in the next few days.
4) Commenting on other blogs: I post comments on 3 niche blogs. No-follow on comments in wordpress blogs is default. If you are expecting link backs, it will be a big time-waster. What you might gain is identity building. If you post thought provoking, relevant, informational posts and share a link (at times) depending on the relevancy of the topic, you might expect some click backs. I downloaded “Comment Kahuna” last night. Looks like a handy tool. Yet to try. Will post a review on its functionality tomorrow.
5) Social Bookmarking: I’m still working on this area and was surprised to see that ‘Technorati’ referred one visitor today. This suggests that social bookmarking services work even for beginners. I’m planning to use either socialposter or socialmaster to semi-automize the process.
Results so far:
Social media worked well & brought in 40% traffic
Forum & Comment posting put together brought 40%
Social Bookmarking sites: 10%
Misc: ( email marketing): 10%
With this analysis on hand, I now have a clearer picture of the marketing techniques I will be using in this week.
I won’t read blogs – conclusion
Today is the final day of the experiment I’ve been doing for four days.
This month’s Experiment: Stop reading blogs. If you want to read about the experiment from the starting, here are the links.
Day 1; Day 2; Day 3
Conclusion:
My productivity increased by 70%:
- Tangible proofs:
- I wrote 18 posts in this blog,
- Designed and launched 2 more web templates on templatefair.com
- Submitted 3 articles on 4 article directories
- Posted comments on pro blogs
- Joined some communities and improved my social network group
- Found a mentor
- and my blog stats show that I had the highest number of visitors in these last 4 days than in the last 4 months I started this blog.
- Chalked out a step by step plan to improve and market my websites
It has been an enlightening period:
- Intangible Corollaries
- I’m not confused or bewildered with all the contradictory info available on the net.
- Feel more confident
- I’m able to peruse the prospects more logically because I know things are going to work
Won’t I read blogs in the future:
Ofcourse I will read. But a selected few. I unsubscribed to 32 RSS feed of the 50+ I had. The remaining feeds include 4 pro blogs on IM, 5 on web design stuff, 4 IM news and rest are misc like CNN, BBC, Times etc. I’ll utilize the most unproductive time of my day for reading other blogs in the bookmarks.
Time to Implement
Read only as much as you can implement and utilize. If you are looking for basics, choose a blog which caters for the needs of beginners. Don’t try to learn rocket science with the intention you might one day after 100 years would get to handle a rocket.
List of 100 ping services
A ping is a tool which sends a friendly reminder to check blogs for new posts. WordPress pings only Ping-o-matic which then in turn pings over 20 other services. You can manually including more ping services not included in Ping-o-matic. This will help gather latest news on blogs around the world and to promote them. It helps drive little traffic back to your blog. It may not aggregate to a lot, but every 1% counts.
To add my list of 100 ping services, login to your blog’s admin panel.
Step 1: Click Options > Writing
Step 2: In the box provided under ‘Update Services’, copy & paste the list below. Read more
Effective use of twitter
(Warning: I was never on any social media before and an absolute bum to talk about it. This is just an opinion and not an expert advise).
I signed up for twitter to give it a try and found it very fascinating. I’m on twitter for valuable info which I get from 90% of the 46 people I follow. Well this number might increase or decrease with the time depending on the quanlity and quantity of info I receive.
If you are striving hard, just like me, to ramp up your new blog or website, you cannot afford to stay hooked on this eternal chat room all day. This will not only hamper your productivity but will have a bad influence on your identity.
I noticed few people using twitter strategically and effectively to achieve their objectives. I’m particularly fascinated by 3.
Building Identity
BarryBowman is strategically building his identity by posting valuable seo tips on twitter (most of the time). He follows 973 people and has a following of 880. His strategy (I believe): finds and follows people by keyword search and waits for a few days before removing them if they don’t follow him. Of course, he complains about finding it difficult to cope with so many people 
.
Sharing Info
Infosourcer is Manager, Internet Research at Deloitte. She shares interesting things relevant to net world (most of the time).
Keeping readers informed
Darren Rowse is a pro blogger with huge following. He posts about his latest posts with a little description about the post. This keeps me informed and gives me a choice if i’m interested in reading a particular post. He also tweets about interesting posts by other bloggers that he is reading.
It all depends on what you want to achieve with all the time you invest on social media. If you have specific objectives, chalk out a plan before you do anymore harm to yourself.
Try to answer (as candidly as possible) why, how, when, what, where, which …to use twitter or any other social media?
Why do you want to use twitter?
What are your prime objectives?
How are you going to achieve those objectives?
When or how often are you going to tweet?
What are you going to tweet about?
Which twitter tool would help stay connected without wasting your time?
Happy Tweeting 
I am not reading blogs:day 3
Today is day 3 of my experiment.
My experiment: The impact on productivity by minimizing or completely avoiding blog reading.
Advantages:
1) I am way ahead with my blog posts.
2) I am able to think more creatively
3) I am more focused.
4) I’m not bewildered by the insane amount of info on the net.
5) I could chalk out a plan and figure out candid answers for some how?’s.
Tomorrow will be the last day of my experiment and I’m glad I did this. I will post my inferences & conclusions by monday afternoon.
Inspirations: Most powerful business woman, 2007
Ms Indra Nooyi, CEO, Pepsi Co., is Forbes most powerful business woman, 2007.
A lesson Ms. Nooyi learnt: This anecdote dates back to 1973 when Ms. Indra was to attend her first job interview out of Yale University, the school she graduated from. She wanted to wear a formal western outfit for the occasion. With some difficulty she could put together $50 to buy it. Being an Indian, she wasn’t very comfortable with a formal outfit and ended up buying a pair of trousers that reached down to her ankles. Pondering on the reasons for the rejection at the interview, she turned to her professor for help. Professor asked her what she would’ve worn, if she were in India. Her quick reply was ‘sari’ (traditional Indian costume). Professor advised, “Wear your own shoes. Don’t try to step into other’s shoes because they expect you to. Be genuine and people will trust & respect you”. She wore a sari to the next interview and followed this philosophy for the rest of her career.
Bottom Line: “Be genuine. It is possible to get ahead in life without portraying a false image of yourself to meet other’s expectations. People appreciate if you are genuine”.
Ms. Nooyi’s Philosophy: Balancing work and family life is an everyday task for working women. But this power woman stands as an example on staying connected with her family despite her position in the corporate world. Ms. Nooyi prefers to stay as the primary caregiver for her daughters, 23 & 14. When asked “what keeps her up at night?” Her reply wasn’t anything related to work as you might expect. She said “My kids, I worry about my Kids”. When asked what she wants to teach her kids, her reply was “Be humble. This position might be gone tomorrow, but if you are humble, you will be able to tackle good and bad in the same way”.
Bottom Line: No matter what your position, stay connected to your family & be humble.
WordPress Update 2.5.1
WordPress released latest version 2.5 and within a week released an update 2.5.1
1. Post slug:- I didn’t find it any different except that I didn’t find my favorite “post Slug” option. Post slug works as the url of each post. A search engine friendly tool, I always preferred to use.
I asked Teli Adlam, The wordpress Queen, of www.optinicheblog.com on twitter.
My tweet
@teli. Hi teli. i couldn’t find post slug in 2.5. How does this affect the post url? Thx in advance.
Teli’s reply tweet
teli @ShriNagesh – you need permalinks to be activated and the post slug will appear under the post/page title box.
If you haven’t activated permalinks yet, herez an easy step-by-step tutorial and screenshot to help you.
Hope this solves the issue.
Authenticating Mybloglog Community
I am experimenting with Mybloglog for the next one month. This will be a part of my social media networking experiments. I signed up for MyBlogLog. You can do this with your existing yahoo ID or create one.
MyBlogLog enables you to track that last little bit of information about your website. You probably already know where your users are coming from and you probably already know what pages they’re looking at while they’re there. However, if you have a blog or any other site where you frequently post new content on the main page, you don’t have a good way of tracking what people find interesting. One way is to track when people click on the links you provide. Up until now, outbound link tracking has been a pain in the butt, requiring CGIs and managed links. MyBlogLog makes this process easy.
But why do you need to know what people find interesting on your site? You can use it to tune your content to be even more compelling for your readers. You can use it to determine which stories you should follow up on. Hell, it’s just cool to *know* what people find interesting, even if you don’t do anything with it.
Once you have changed your profile, you got to authenticate your site by adding a little code in a post by adding a meta tag in the header. Add the widget to blog or site.
I’ll have to wait and see how this works for me and my blog.