Blogs offer countless opportunities for launching your business into the social media networks, and they can be designed as an extension of an existing website, or simply stand alone. Blogging is moving far beyond the casual journal style of the initial growth stages, allowing businesses and large companies to develop a fresh identity.

Blogging culture allows you to take part in a conversational style of marketing, reaching hundreds and thousands of visitors on a daily basis, and even creating a following. Providing high quality content is an important component of your blog; without good articles and content, your readers will simply move elsewhere.

A blog can be used as a platform for your social bookmarking efforts since each and every link to an article can be shared independently. This is why you need to implement a social bookmarking badge or link on your site, since the times that you are not independently marketing yourself, another visitor may go ahead and do it for you!

Blogs are an easy way to break apart your website into different subjects and categories. Even a well-organized website can be limited when it does not offer comments or space for feedback. While many websites are being designed in this way, the benefits of launching a blog along with your site are a valuable opportunity to generate higher readership.

Blogs also give you an option to implement an RSS subscription service. Since many people simply do not have the time to visit multiple sites in a given day, an RSS feed can deliver new content to their e-mail box or other RSS reader. This gives you a chance to share the link with each and every subscriber, and every time you publish, you increase the chances of someone simply submitting your content to a social bookmarking site or network.

SETTING UP YOUR BLOG TO BE SOCIAL MEDIA FRIENDLY

Your blog may be setup through a variety of services including Blogger, WordPress, or TypePad. Whichever format you choose, it's a good idea to look for widgets and code that can add social bookmarking buttons to the site immediately. Remember that this makes it very easy and efficient for your readers to start submitting something they read to multiple social bookmarking networks and search engines; all you have to do during these stages is provide quality content on a regular basis, and work on generating a large amount of traffic. Traffic will build on itself, and the more-established your blog becomes, the higher the chances that it will be discovered.

As your content starts to join the networks such as StumbleUpon and Digg, you'll notice immediate surges in traffic. Traffic is driven largely by the number of interested visitors who rate and vote on your site, and how valuable the content is to a variety of readers. Not only do you need to focus on creating evergreen and valuable content on a regular basis, but it's important to make it easy for search engine rankings with the appropriate amount of keywords.

INCREASING YOUR BLOG'S POPULARITY WITH SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

The only way to effectively increase your blog's popularity with social bookmarking is to spread out your endeavors across multiple social media sites. This may include Technorati, Google Links, Del.ici.ous, and Yahoo! Links where your individual articles and submissions are mentioned either within another blog, or standing alone in a particular category.

Tools such as SocialMeter can help you keep track of how well your blog or webstie is doing in the social bookmarking networks at any given time. SocialMeter scans the largest social websites and ranks them against each other based on how many times your link or website is indexed in each one. You just type in your URL and the results will run a search on each site to give you a final tally.

Badges and 'chiclets', the tools that you can add to your blog or website are very effective ways to develop your social bookmarking activity. Your blog's popularity will instantly increase because you are:

1. Providing users increased interaction. You'll be surprised how many static sites that make this shift can start building traffic with very little direct marketing. Once the news spreads that you are offering this added value to your website, you can look forward to increased traffic on a regular basis.

2. Making it easy to reach Digg and other social bookmarking networks hat allow users to vote. Voting and rating articles is becoming a very popular activity on the web, and if you write something particularly compelling you can start to create a traffic boost overnight.

3. Increasing your exposure naturally in the social networking hemisphere. Social networking and bookmarking gives you a chance to increase your exposure tenfold; visitors who find an article worth sharing will help you reach a much more targeted and refined audience than simply publishing a website and hoping to get readers. You will be delivering your news and information with a much stronger reach.

In addition to promoting yourself on social bookmarking sites, there are some effective ways to market the blog itself. Again, this will encourage your visitors to share the 'news' from your blog on their own. Some effective strategies for blog promotion may include:

1. Join an RSS submission network. These will help you submit to an even larger listing of sites, all from the RSS feeds that you create. Syndication allows you to reach a much larger audience, and building a steady list of subscribers can increase traffic flow instantly.

2. Post announcements about your blog and website on forums, bulletins, and community boards. When you have identified your specific channels, start promoting yourself with news announcements, new articles, or simply an introduction to community members. Include your link and you'll easily start to drive traffic.

3. Join discussion groups and forums about your industry or topic, and leave a link to your blog or website in your profile every time you post.

Be consistent with these efforts and they will pay off big time.

Copyright (c) 2008 Sean S Sampson