web 2.0 traffic

There is currently one social traffic generation strategy known as social bookmarking which is also very popular among Internet marketers.

To put it simply: Social bookmarking is a way for internet users to store, classify, share and search Internet bookmarks online.

In the past, everyone used to store their bookmarks on their own computers, for example, when you visit a web site that you like, you bookmark it via your browser on your desktop computer at home. Now, if you are away from home, there is no easy way you can retrieve your bookmark from your home desktop.

However, the availability of Internet and social bookmarking sites had changed this.

Now, you can easily go to any social bookmarking sites and put your bookmarks online on the servers of the social bookmarking sites which you are on. You do not have to rely or go to your home desktop to retrieve your stored bookmarks. With social bookmarking sites, you can retrieve your bookmarks anywhere in the world as long as you have access to the Internet. Not only that, you can even share your stored bookmarks with the world if you like.

A typical social bookmarking site not only allows you to put up your bookmarks online, it also let you decide if you want to keep your bookmarks private for own use, for public access, or for restricted access to your contacts only.

Some social bookmarking sites provide even more functionalities than merely storing and displaying your bookmarks online. However, this is not the scope of this blog post.

There are several ways in which you can generate free traffic to your web site via social bookmarking:

a) Create your bookmarks online and share with everyone else.
Particularly, bookmark the sites that you want others to know, then share them online for maximum exposure for your sites so that anyone who viewed your social bookmarking profiles on social bookmarking sites can see them and hopefully, to click on the links to your sites.

b) For some social bookmarking sites, whenever you bookmark a web site, your latest bookmark will appear on the home page of the social bookmarking site.
Or for other social bookmarking sites, your profile will be featured on the home page of the site whenever you just bookmarked a site.
All these bookmarking tasks actually expose your bookmarks to more Internet users online, which in a way will increase your site visibility online, and possibly additional traffic as well because they provide a link back to your web site.

c) If you have a web site or blog, you can also put some social bookmarking scripts or plugins onto them so that you can allow any of your visitors to easily social bookmark a page or blog post on your web site/blog to share with everyone else. This simple method of allowing others to share your contents online will also bring you more free traffic.

Here are some more time-saving tips for you:
-    If you are looking for a great social bookmarking script or plugin, you must try www.addthis.com. I spent a lot of my time looking and trying out many of such scripts and AddThis is the one of the best out there, with the easiest implementation among many others.
-    Another great resource will be www.onlywire.com. If you are using multiple social bookmarking services and you are tired of having multiple shortcuts to add a social bookmark, then OnlyWire will save your time by allowing you to send once to OnlyWire.com and it will auto-submit your social bookmark to many social bookmarking sites that it supports. (Note: Although OnlyWire saves you time, it does not work perfectly as some auto-submissions to some of the supported social bookmarking sites do not work properly)

It has also been said that when you social bookmark a web page, you are actually creating a backlink from those social bookmarking sites to your own web page, and this helps in your SEO marketing efforts for your web pages too.

Squidoo.com is one of the world’s most popular web site for people who want to build a web page about their passions. Based on current Alexa’s ranking, Squidoo.com is the top most visited web sites in the world.

On Squidoo, you can write about the books you like, how to set up a blog, how to be a better lover, or just to share your knowledge or interest online, or even to spread the word about the stuff you love by creating a lens.

Signing up with Squidoo is fast, free, and super easy. You can do it within 5 minutes.

Basically, you can write about anything that you are passionate about on Squidoo even if you are not a technical person or web designer. At the same time you can also choose to raise money for you or even charity at the same time!

You can do all these by creating a lens on Squidoo. A lens is what Squidoo calls it and it is nothing but just another web page that you can create on Squidoo without knowing HTML, just like how you can create a free blog on Google’s blogger.com

Many web site owners experienced great results using Squidoo because Google indexes Squidoo pages very fast. Many of these site owners had problems getting their keywords ranked on first page of Google for many years but within a relatively short period of using Squidoo, they get ranked on first page of Google for the keywords that they wanted!

I experienced this myself too when Squidoo was relatively new on the Internet. I was promoting an affiliate program and in my test campaign in trying out Squidoo, I realized that my Squidoo page had beaten the product owner on their own product keywords and my Squidoo page was on the first page of Google search results!

I repeated the same Google first page search results when I was doing another test campaign for another affiliate program which I was on. From then on, I realized that Squidoo is one great service to use if you are promoting something online.

However, recently, Squidoo made the news when they became the targets of spammers. Google then gave them the Google Slap.

This slap from Google was said to have affected how Squidoo pages will rank on Google search engines as well as drop in traffic to Squidoo site.

However, if you ask me, I will still think that Squidoo will make a good place for us to tap some traffic from as long as the lenses that you are creating on Squidoo is providing real value to your readers and Internet users.

Also, Squidoo will be very helpful for those who want to share their expertise or knowledge online but do not have the technical skills to do up a proper web page and marketing skills to drive traffic to their web pages.

If you are interested to see how a typical Squidoo page will look like, you can visit one of the Squidoo page that I have set up at www.squidoo.com/freesoftwareguy

This Squidoo page will save you hundreds or thousands of dollars every year because it shows you where to download free and legal anti-virus software, free anti-spyware, free personal firewall, free office productivity software, free html editors etc.

One of the web 2.0 strategy to generate free traffic to your web site is via stumbleupon.com.

From my own experiences of using StumbleUpon, and those from my various Internet Marketing groups and associates, the feedback for traffic coming from Stumbleupon.com has been quite good!

So, what is Stumbleupon.com? StumbleUpon is a new web 2.0 web site that helps you to discover new web sites! If you do not know what web site to surf when you are bored, you must go to Stumbleupon!

How does it work?

• You can sign up for a free account with Stumbleupon.com and you will tell StumbleUpon during your sign-up process about what types of web sites or topics you will be interested in.
• Upon successfully sign-up with Stumbleupon.com, you will install a Stumbleupon toolbar on your browser (FireFox or Internet Explorer etc)
• When you are bored and you want to look for web sites to surf, just click on the “Stumble” button on your StumbleUpon toolbar, your browser will then load a web site in the category which you have indicated your interest in during your sign-up process. For example, if you have indicated that you like Self-Improvement web sites, whenever you click on the “Stumble” button, your browser will load a Self-Improvement related web site for you! So, no more thinking about what web sites to visit! Let StumbleUpon finds you a new web site!
• With StumbleUpon.com, you can channel surf the internet with the StumbleUpon toolbar to find great web sites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. StumbleUpon has millions of sites in its database, all submitted and recommended by other Stumblers.

Also, when you see a web site that you like, you can tell StumbleUpon that you like it via the StumbleUpon toolbar that you have already installed by clicking on the “I like it” button. If you dislike a web site that you saw, just tell StumbleUpon that you do not wish to see similar web sites again via the same toolbar! So essentially, StumbleUpon learns what you like and makes better site recommendations for you.

Not only that, you can connect with friends and share your discoveries of great web sites and resources, meet online people that have similar interests, and check out what other people are discovering.

If you are still wondering how traffic comes to you when you use StumbleUpon, let me enlighten you:

1.       When any of the other Stumblers clicks on the “Stumble” button on their toolbar, StumbleUpon may send them to you and you get free traffic!

2.       When you create your StumbleUpon profile, people can view your profile. Any web sites that you have ‘stumbled upon with a thumb-up’ will also appear in your profile and anyone, including your friends or strangers, who view your profile will be able to view those sites that you have indicated that you like. StumbleUpon works on the basis of the power of recommendation. If everyone is recommending a web site on StumbleUpon, do you think you will go and have a look too?

Now, I have some tips for you to bring you more traffic via StumbleUpon:
a)      Visit your own web site and gave it a thumb-up

b)      Tell your friends about StumbleUpon.com and get them to sign up and give your web site a thumb-up as well. The more the better, remember the power of recommendation?

c)      Add your StumbleUpon friends into your StumbleUpon network of friends!

StumbleUpon has become one of the most popular web 2.0 traffic generation strategy for many Internet marketers because it is easy to use and it is free too!