The Power of Social Bookmarking for your online store

Marketing social bookmarking comes in two main options – one, your prospects and customers bookmarking your online store’s pages, and two, you proactively bookmarking your own pages.  Don’t be afraid to toot your own horn…that is what marketing is all about.

Here is how to do it:

1. GETTING YOUR CUSTOMERS TO PROMOTE YOU:

Asking your site visitors and customers help spread your content onto social bookmarking sites is a powerful tactic to gaining more visibility for your online store.  Plus, you can see which products or services you sell are most interesting to customers and buzz-worthy.

There are many ways to implement this technically on your site.  The more technical ways are outside this scope of this article, but I want to share an easy way to give your site visitors the ability to bookmark your pages on the most popular Web 2.0 properties or email the page to a friend.

It is called sharing buttons (a.k.a social bookmarking widgets).  There are two popular companies offering FREE, easy-to-use (just copy-and-paste the code onto your site) sharing widgets to share your content on other websites or with friends.  One company is ShareThis and the other is AddThis.  Here is a current view of each when someone clicks on the widget on your site.

QUICK TIP:

These two companies allow your visitors to share content from anywhere to anyone or another site without leaving the current page.  You will want to encourage the usage of a feature like this within your online store.  Try placing it on your product pages, editorial pages, homepage and other pages with interesting content or features.

2.  TOOT YOUR OWN HORN – PROMOTING YOURSELF:

Luckily, actively promoting yourself on social bookmarking and social networking sites is an accepted marketing practice.  In fact, these sites encourage people sharing valuable content and links on their service.

There are many sites for social bookmarking.  Here is a short list of the most popular bookmarking sites:

• Delicious
• Digg
• Technorati
• StumbleUpon
• 43places
• Propeller
• Reddit
• Sphinn
• Diigo
• Clipmarks
• There are MANY more…

SUPER TIP:

Related to the concept of actively promoting yourself to other sites is the concept of “pinging” a site.  This simply means that you tell other sites about updates to your site, so instead of waiting to let other sites and search engines find out about your newest updates, you can just let them know.

Use Ping-o-Matic to tell other sites about your changes.  It is a FREE service that according to their site, “…is a service to update different search engines that your blog has updated.”

NOTE: you don’t have to have a blog to use this service, simply an updated webpage and an RSS (optional, but preferred).

Many online retailers have RSS through their E-commerce platform.  If you use a hosted E-commerce platform and you are not sure if you have this or not, contact them to ask or look in their user forums online to find out.  Hate to get too technical here, but it is likely you can easily produce an RSS feed either directly through your online store (perhaps through an XML feed) or through other online services that produce RSS as an output from their system (e.g. Feedburner).

If you have a WordPress blog or use other popular blog technology, you already have an RSS feed – likely by category, tag and more.  Plus, you ping other services AUTOMATICALLY whenever your post a new page or post behind-the-scenes. This is good, but you can add more sites to your “ping list” to have your blog software work harder for you.  You can either tweak how your blog pings other services or you can add Ping-o-Matic to your arsenal.

It is easy to tell more sites about your updates and have more potential for additional traffic to your online store or blog.  You will want to make sure the right sites know about your site’s updates.

Here’s to your online (social bookmarking) success,
David

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