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Why You MUST SHOULD Submit Manually to Social Bookmarking Sites

It can be extremely tempting to use automated forms to submit your website or blog to social bookmarking sites. After all, it saves you a lot of time and hassle. In fact, there are companies that you can pay to make automatic social bookmarking site submissions for you so that you don’t have to spend any time on the effort at all. There are even sites and software that allow you to press a button and instantaneously submit your articles to dozens of social bookmarking sites. It is very tempting to use these services. Posting to social bookmarking sites is a very tedious, time consuming task. It can take hours every day to perform a successful social bookmarking campaign. However, you will have a much better result if you submit your articles by hand. In fact, I think that it is crucial to always engage in manual submissions on the popular social bookmarking sites. I will discuss this further on in the article.

Why Do I think That it is Important to Manually Submit Your Articles to Social Bookmarking Sites?

(1) To ensure that your article was submitted correctly.

Some of the social bookmarking services have been reported to not work properly. The only way to ensure that your article is submitted correctly is to submit it by hand.

(2) To ensure that you don’t alienate users.

It sounds like an exaggeration but the Internet really is run by users these days and if you alienate enough of those users, you run the risk of ruining your business. Automatic social bookmarking submissions are considered bad form in the current online world and can greatly decrease your credibility with the users who can drive traffic to (or away from) your website. Bad word-of-mouth on social bookmarking sites is just like bad word-of-mouth out there in the real world; too much of it can destroy a business.

Even though there is software out there that will let you automatically submit your website to social bookmarking sites, people who use those sites regularly are opposed to the use of that software. The reason for this is that social bookmarking sites really are seen as a community, a place where users can get together to discuss the things that they do and don’t like on the web. Despite the fact that most people on social bookmarking sites are there to promote their own online work, the sites are still widely used for the purpose of community and online sharing. People who violate the community by not taking the time to manually submit their sites are essentially seen as outsiders who the community will ultimately shun.

(3) To ensure that you and your site isn’t banned or buried.

Being shunned from social bookmarking sites can have a devastating effect on your ability to use them for website promotion. Many social bookmarking tools have ways of not only voting for content that’s placed on the site but also of voting it down. Enough votes down and your content can be buried so that the time that you took to put it on the site is completely wasted since the content isn’t seen anyway. And the effects of automated social bookmarking can be even worse; some sites will actually ban your entire domain from the social bookmarking site if you are caught failing to manually submit your content. This means that you won’t be able to use the social bookmarking site at all in the future, even if you do decide to change your ways.

(4) To Continue to Expand Your Social Network

When visiting a social bookmarking site, you will be able to build up your social network. How? Well, by visiting the site, it is inevitable that you will see articles or sites that you will want to visit and therefor digg, stumble, or rate. Every time you rate another site or communicate with another user, you are building up your credibility and your social network. This is very important in a social networking campaign.

(5) Out of Respect of The Social Bookmarking Sites’ Members

The issue is basically one of respect. People who use social bookmarking sites want to know that you care enough about your content to submit it manually and to tell them why they might be interested in it. Get on the good side of these people and you can use social bookmarking sites to greatly increase the traffic to your site. But make a fatal faux pas like failing to manually submit your site to these places and you’ll quickly find that you’ve been ostracized from the online community to the point that you might as well just move out of the virtual town that you were calling home.

HOWEVER, Social Bookmarking Submitters Will Bring You Traffic

Yes, social bookmarking submitters will bring you traffic. You will just get tons more traffic if you submit manually. And your efforts will pay off.

However, if you don’t have the time to submit manually, these are my suggestions:

(1) Manually Submit to the Most Important Sites.

This would include the major social bookmarking sites as well as your article’s niche category. For this article, submitting to sphinn.com would be the most important for me. Sphinn is a social media / SEO social bookmarking site. And I consider the major social bookmarking sites to be Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Slashdot, and Simpy. If your submission is a video, then YouTube is the top video social networking site. Here is a huge list of social bookmarking sites.

(2) Only Submit Your Best Articles to the Social Bookmarking Sites.

There is no reason to submit all of your articles to the social bookmarking sites. If you aren’t crazy about one of your articles, you could be pretty sure that noone else will be either. There are some articles that just aren’t worthy of being bookmarked, so don’t feel that you have to submit every single article to the social bookmarking sites. Instead, reference your articles within other articles that you write.

(3) Use an Auto Social Submitter and then Follow up on Each Site.

I suggest this for only quality articles. Don’t submit your cr@p articles to social bookmarking sites. This isn’t fair to the users who value that community. These users shouldn’t have to wade through junk to get to the good stuff. My suggestion is to use a social bookmarking submitter to submit your article to multiple sites, but then follow up on each site to make sure that your article was submitted properly. Also, as an added benefit, if you visit each site, you might digg a link or make a new friend while you are there. At the minimum, check up on the major sites to make sure that everything was submitted correctly.

(4) Let Your Visitors Do the Leg Work.

If you already have a popular site, let your existing network bookmark your articles for you. I have tried a service called AddThis, and it worked great for me. Here are more social bookmarking widgets and tutorials that might help you:

3Spots

Add to Any

Add to Any Bookmark

Add to Bookmarks

Apostolos Dountsis Social Bookmarks Plugin for WordPress

Badged.net

Beautiful Beta: Dynamic Rollover DHTML Social Bookmark Buttons

The Bookmarketer

Bookmarkz!

Blogger Social Bookmarking Tool

Buttonr.com

Darxr.net: Social Bookmarks Sidebar Widget for WordPress

Dashboard Widgets

Easy Wordpress Widget for Social Bookmarking Sites

Ekstreme: Social Bookmarking Submission Code

Gath Adams: Build Your Own Social Bookmark Widget

GrayWolf’s Social Bookmark Scripts & Widgets

iFeedReaders

Oscandy: The Multiple Social Bookmarking Widget

Manhattan Service: Social Bookmark Tool

OnlyWire

Pheedo

PopMarks

Postli

PunchCard Manual

Romlet

Socialbookmarker

Social Bookmarks 3.1

Swicki Builder

Shout List Icons

Social Bookmark Script: Web 2.0 Optimierung

SocialBookmarkIt

Socialize It

The Socializer

Tips n Tricks Social Bookmarking Buttons

Top Ranks Social Bookmarks Creator

WebCosmo

WpBlogBMLet

WidgetBox: Ultimate Social Bookmark

WP Plugin: Gregarious

YouFame.net: Social Bookmarking Widget Generator

Your Minis Social Bookmarking

YourMinis: Web2Bar

Your Minis: Web2Bar

(5) Speed Up The Process

To speed up the process, I suggest using copy and paste.

Open up an email or text file and copy and paste all of the information that you will need on the post submission forms. This usually includes the article’s title, article’s permalink or url, articles tags (sometimes with a space, sometimes with a comma, sometimes with a colon), article’s description, and sometimes a clipping of the article.

What are Some Social Bookmarking Submitters (Auto Social Bookmarking Submitters That is)

Social Submit

Auto Social Poster

Only Wire

Social Poster

Tagenie

I hope that this article was helpful to you. I suspect that might people might disagree with my views. Please feel free to rant if you like.

Technorati Tags: social submitters, social bookmarking submitters, social networking submitters, manually submit, automatically submit, auto bookmark submit, auto bookmarking submitters, social bookmarking, social networking, social bookmarks, bookmarks, bookmarking, networks, network, networking

Using Facebook for Web Site Traffic

Reddit is one of the social bookmarking sites that relies heavily on your interaction with the user community on the site. Reddit uses a point system in which users can vote on each post; the posts with the most points get pushed to Reddit’s home page for all to see. But Reddit is even more complex than this basic voting system implies; there are also ways to discuss the posts and to vote on the comments that are left on the posts which can affect their visibility as well. In order to be able to use Reddit to effectively direct traffic to your website, you need to get a handle on the voting system and user interaction that drives this particular social bookmarking tool.

In order to start using Reddit, you simply need to go to the site and register for an account. There are no toolbars to install and no confirmation emails to get you started which makes this a very easy site to sign up with. But once you’ve done that, you need to spend a significant amount of time networking on the site in order to gain popularity on the site and get traffic to head over to your site from there. The first thing that you should do is to begin submitting websites to Reddit. You should submit your website as well as relevant quality pages on your website (particular blog posts for example).

Next, you need to start meeting other Reddit users. This is best done by getting involved in discussions that are going on about other people’s posts. Do a search to find posts that are similar to your own and work your way into the discussions there by leaving comments. Be aware that your comments can be voted down so you don’t just want to spam posts with your own links. You want to leave interesting comments that show that you read the posts on which you are commenting. For this reason, it’s better to get involved in just a few discussions at a time and to contribute well to them.

You should know that Reddit is somewhat specialized in the kind of content that is found there. There are “subreddits” which are kind of like major topics that are of interest to Reddit users. The popularity of these varies depending on the day but top categories usually include programming, science and politics. If your content doesn’t relate to these categories or ones that would be of interest to people who enjoy these categories, you might not be able to get the attention of Reddit users. If that’s the case, you should consider using a different social bookmarking site instead of this one.

However, Reddit does get a fair amount of traffic, so if you have regular or occasional posts on your site or blog that are relevant to Reddit, you should think about using the site. It allows you to get into some interesting discussion which can prompt additional posts that will then be seen by Reddit users. The interaction that’s necessary to make it work can be time-consuming but it can also pay off in high traffic directed to your site.

Technorati Tags: reddit, reddit traffic, reddit networking, using reddit, reddit for traffic

Using Facebook for Web Site Traffic

Facebook is known as a social networking tool for young people. Even more so than MySpace (which has gained recognition in the business world because of its MySpace music channels and other marketing opportunities), Facebook is considered the playground for people who are looking to trade conversation and keep up with friends. As such, Facebook often gets overlooked by people in the business world who find it to be a waste of their time to gossip with their acquaintances about the latest going on in the world. But despite its use by youngsters as a place for gossip, Facebook can be a great tool for driving traffic to your own site and possible generating additional revenue for yourself.

American Chronicle published an article which looks at eight reasons that businesses should consider using Facebook. There are some good points made here including that Facebook users are active users who are on the site every day, meaning that they’re looking for new information and that new information might as well be content on your site that they can drive traffic towards. Another good point is that the nature of Facebook lends itself well to traffic-driving – it’s a naturally viral hotbed where people are sharing information about their likes and dislikes which means that if they like your content, they’ll let other Facebook users know.

And a point not made in the article but which bears some attention is the fact that Facebook is indeed used by a large number of young people. This is important because it is young people who make up a large percentage of consumers interested in purchasing products and services through the web. Those who have part-time jobs or access to parents’ money spend it on the hottest new things. And if you can reach these people and convince them that what you have is that hottest new thing, they’re going to rush traffic to your site to check it out. Now, of course no one is suggesting that you head to Facebook to con kids into buying your stuff. But all good marketing plans look at their target market and if yours can include youngsters, why not spread the word through a social networking site through Facebook?

Another important thing to know about Facebook is that it offers the ability to import your RSS feed to the site. You should always import your RSS feed to your social networking sites because this increases the number of people who are going to subscribe to it. And of course people who are subscribing to your feed are learning about your new content as its available on the site, driving traffic there not just once but every time that you add fresh content. The point should be made that you can’t make good use of Facebook for traffic if you aren’t regularly updating your site content and making sure that it’s of good quality. But if you’re creating stuff that people are going to want to read, Facebook is one of the many ways that you can let people know that it’s available to them.

Technorati Tags: facebook traffic, facebook, using facebook for traffic, facebook networking, facebook tips, facebook help, facebook guide

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING WIDGETS / BUTTONS - List of Social Bookmarking Buttons to Make it Easier for Your Users to Add Your Sites / Articles to Social Networking Sites

3Spots - Here are over 100 social bookmarking bookmarks (buttons) to place on your website.

Add to Any - One button for multipost to Social Bookmarking sites and RSS readers button generator.

Add to Any Bookmark - Let your visitors easily bookmark your pages using any bookmark manager. Add to Any is constantly updated to include every bookmark manager, and other alternatives.

Add This - AddThis spreads your content across the Web by making it easier for your visitors to bookmark and share it with other people, again…and again…and again. Our simple yet powerful widget is very easy to install and provides valuable statistics about the bookmarking and sharing activity of your users. AddThis is the perfect tool to help your visitors create a buzz for your site and increase its popularity and ranking.

Add to Bookmarks - AddToBookmarks is a small JavaScript you can add to your blog or website. The more links to your content, the more traffic and buzz you’ll have. Grab my free script to make it easy for your visitors to add you to their bookmarks.

Apostolos Dountsis Social Bookmarks Plugin for WordPress - Social Bookmarks is a WordPress plugin that adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them in a number of different social bookmarking sites.

Badged.net - Badged.net lets you add your favorite social networking badges to your blog or web site. Simply create your badges and put the line of code where you want them to appear.

Beautiful Beta: Dynamic Rollover DHTML Social Bookmark Buttons - This tutorial just gives you some simple instructions on how to implement DHTML rollover social bookmark buttons.

The Bookmarketer - A free social bookmarking tool to place bookmarking site links on your website. Or you can paste the simple TheBookmarketer script on each page. One link prompts your visitors to bookmark your site at whichever bookmarking site(s) they use. Plus, we keep updating this tool in the fast-changing world of Web 2.0. so you don’t even have to think about it.

Bookmarkz! - Use Bookmarkz (beta) to easily add “one-click social bookmarking” links for one to ninety four popular social bookmarking websites and what’s even better is it’s all done with virtually no setup!

Blogger Social Bookmarking Tool - This tool can be very useful for bloggers who wants to let readers to add “social” bookmarks to their posts. You can select as much bookmarking services as You wish and put them all in a line (with or without logotypes) with direct bookmarking links. There are some variations of how the result line looks, You can play with checkboxes and choose what You wish.

Buttonr.com - Free widget helps your visitors to promote your website and add it to social bookmarking services.

Darxr.net: Social Bookmarks Sidebar Widget for WordPress - The widget allows you to select a number of social bookmark sites which are displayed in the sidebar. This allows your readers to bookmark your blog or article, depending on the context, directly to the social bookmarking sites you have enabled. To install the widget, simply download the widget from below, and upload the contents of the archive to your wp-content/plugins/widgets folder and activate the “Bookmark Widget” under your plugin settings.

Dashboard Widgets - With “add this” you can quickly add the website you are currently watching to a few “social bookmarking”-services. Just start your dashboard, choose one color and a service and create your “add this”-widget. If you are now browsing a website only click on this icon and add your bookmark. The only issue I see is that it doesn’t bookmark the exact url.

Easy Wordpress Widget for Social Bookmarking Sites - The Wordpress Bookmark Widget allows you to select a social bookmarking site to be displayed on your sidebar. This allows your readers to bookmark your blog or article directly to the social bookmarking sites you have enabled.

Ekstreme: Social Bookmarking Submission Code - Social bookmarking tools such as Digg and del.icio.us can be seen as the latest tools to drive traffic to a website and to provide important links. These services allow varying degrees of automated submissions, and so this page was created to give you the required code to add to your pages to facilitate submission.

Gath Adams: Build Your Own Social Bookmark Widget - It’s important to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to bookmark your site - both so they can find it again, and also so they can share it with their friends. I have a bunch of sites, and I wanted to create a simple way to add bookmarking to all of them.

GrayWolf’s Social Bookmark Scripts & Widgets - Here a tutorial on how to implement some social bookmarking into your site just like the picture below.

iFeedReaders - One button for multiple postings to social bookmarking sites or feeds.

Oscandy: The Multiple Social Bookmarking Widget - OScandy is working on a new widget that will push the boundaries of multiple social bookmarking by provide a interactive interface that works direclt from the administrators blog/website. It is an application for mass social bookmarking of social bookmarking sites i.e del.icio.us, furl.com blinklist.com etc.

Manhattan Service: Social Bookmark Tool - Social bookmark tool to allow visitors bookmark pages or posts from your website / blog directly to social sites. Adding this social bookmark widget script on your pages, you don’t have to worry anymore about site submission in social sites like Digg, Technorati, Yahoo social bookmarks, Reddit, Furl, Delicious.

OnlyWire - Use One bookmarklet for all these services Backflip, Bibsonomy, Blinklist, Blogmemes, Blue Dot, de.lirio.us, del.icio.us, Diigo, Excites, Furl, linkatopia, Linkroll, Looklater, ma.gnolia, Markaboo, Rawsugar, Shadows, Simpy, Spurl, unalog, Wink, and xilinus.

Pheedo - Pheedo’s FeedPowered™ advertising platform converts your RSS feeds into rich, dynamically updating advertising that engages your audience. Leverage your existing RSS assets to extend your brand, drive traffic, and acquire new feed subscribers.Pheedo’s Engagement Triggers™ make it easy for your audience to interact with your brand and share your content and offers with friends - directly from the ad unit.

PopMarks - PopMarks is a pop up tool, one button, for Blogger, WordPress and TypePad that can do many things: Social Bookmarking, Read or Subscribe to RSS feeds, searching, translating… as you want.

Postli - Postli allows bloggers and website owners to replace list of buttons useful to post to social sites similar to the following: * old style list of buttons * with a single link that allows to post to every major social site.

PunchCard Manual - PunchCard is a javascript widget for simplifying content submission to social bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us, digg, technorati, and 42 more. Every button is a tiny mark on a punchcard, and when the mouse hovers the punchcard a tooltip pops up, and the tooltip shows icon and name of the site corresponding to that mark.

Romlet - Romlet boasts your best site stats and provides both tools and incentives for visitors to boost your popularity. This simple but powerful widget is a brag badge, bookmarking tool and stats counter all rolled into one. Romlet is continually updated to display current on-site information to you and your readers. It also provides relevant and updated bookmarking buttons to make voting for your site as easy as possible.

Socialbookmarker - A free service designed to reduce the time and effort needed to socially bookmark a website. Requirements The only requirement is that you need to be using FireFox when socially marking. All you need to do is simply drag this button SocialMarker.com to your bookmarks toolbar, in order to create a submission bookmarklet. When you are on a website that you want to socially mark, simply select the text and click the SocialMarker button to pre-populate the submission form with the selected information.

Social Bookmarks 3.1 - A really cool social bookmarking widget. There is text that says ‘Bookmark’ and then when you click on it, bookmarking buttons pop up. A new version (3.1) of the Social Bookmarks WordPress plugin is now available for download. This updated version includes Bloglines and Tailrank to the list of supported sites increasing their number to 26.

Social Bookmark Count Plugin -  Now by installing”The Social Bookmark Count” you can monitor StumbleUpon, Digg, Sphinn, Reddit and del.icio.us bookmarks daily.

Swicki Builder - An online social bookmarking button builder. Get the code to add the social bookmarking swicki to your site

Shout List Icons - Customize your social bookmarking and easily add a configurable icon list of networks. Currently enabled for 35+ networks, but you pick which ones to display!

Social Bookmark Script: Web 2.0 Optimierung - Use the Social Bookmark Script to automatically add link icons from the best social bookmark services to your web page in order to enable your visitors to set a public bookmark for your site by mouse-click. Two benefits to this script is that there is no maintenance for you because the script will be updated by social-bookmarking-script. And there will be no Pagerank loss due to social bookmarks, because you only need to use javascript links.

SocialBookmarkIt - SocialBookmarkIt.com provides the tools you need to quickly add all the major social bookmark links to your website.

Socialize It - You can now link to all the social bookmarking services using just one link. No need to dig into each website’s submission process and API ; no need to fill your site with 40+ icons just to be sure your visitors will find their favorite one

The Socializer - The Socializer allows you to easily submit a link to several social bookmarking systems. Instead of having a link to each social bookmarking website, you have a single link to all of them! The Socializer is a free web service from eKstreme.com.

Tips n Tricks Social Bookmarking Buttons - It is very important to provide the readers with a very easy way to bookmark the articles they find useful. This blog article author tells you how to add buttons directly on your blog or website.

Top Ranks Social Bookmarks Creator - This social bookmarks tool provides you with several easy to implement options to encourage visitors to your blog to bookmark your posts on the most popular social bookmark and news sites. You can decide how many or how few bookmaring services to display on your blog. There are also several display options including text links and a drop down menu to conserve screen space.

WebCosmo - With a single Web Cosmo Widget button, visitors can collect the content they come across and save it into their favorite bookmarking service, pass to to friends etc. Its easy to install and easy to use. It works with both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

WpBlogBMLet - This bookmarklet generate the code for posting the blog entry to social bookmark sites, directly from blog. The current script generates bookmark links for del.icio.us, digg, blinklist, furl, yahoo myweb2.0, simpy, shadows, spurl & buddymarks.

WidgetBox: Ultimate Social Bookmark - This widget will let readers easily bookmark your web/blog into about 50+ social bookmark services.

WP Plugin: Gregarious - Social bookmarking allows users to submit, comment on, and “promote” websites. The Gregarious plugin supersedes the Digg This Reloaded Plugin and allows for seamless integration between your Wordpress Blog and social bookmarking sites such as Digg.com, Del.icio.us, Reddit and more. Requiring no editing of templates, and a simple point and click interface, Gregarious is the ultimate social bookmarking plugin for Wordpress.

YouFame.net: Social Bookmarking Widget Generator - This widget will help others easily social bookmark your site. Just follow the steps on YouFrame, and then select your buttons, create the code and put the code on your blog or website

Your Minis Social Bookmarking - This widget allows you to bookmark and/or submit your URLs and news stories to various aggregating services. To properly use this widget, you will need to manually (or programmatically) add posturl=[URL to post] to the FlashVars string. This will tell the widget which URL to submit and/or bookmark.

YourMinis: Web2Bar - You can add this widget to your yourminis public page or blog to make it easier for users to post stories to the major web 2.0 bookmarking and news sites. All you need to do is change the address via the ‘edit widget’ or arrow button!

Your Minis: Web2Bar - You can add this widget to your yourminis public page or blog to make it easier for users to post stories to the major web 2.0 bookmarking and news sites. All you need to do is change the address via the ‘edit widget’ or arrow button!

I hope that you enjoyed this list. If you are into Sphinn (a Digg like site for webmasters, SEO, and social networking) then you should check out this list for some great tools. I will write a blog article about more tools and widgets soon. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Technorati Tags: social bookmarking buttons, social bookmarking, social bookmarking widets, tagging, tags, tag buttons, tag widgets, buttons, widgets, addthis, add social bookmarking, list of social bookmarking buttons

How to Win at the Digg Game - Tips by Top Digg Users - How Top Digg Users Get to The Front Page on a Daily Basis

Digg.com is one of the biggest social bookmarking sites currently in use. Because of its popularity, it can be a great site to use for driving traffic to your own website or blog. But because of its popularity, it can also be a difficult social bookmarking site to break into. After all, there are so many people on there throwing up posts that it can be easy to not get noticed on Digg. Still, if you can access the site and use it to your advantage, Digg is a terrific tool for getting more people to see the content that you want them to see. This article is an aggregation of tips from top Diggers themselves.

Here are a large number of tips for using Digg.com for driving traffic to your site.

Create a Catchy and Memorable Name
When you are creating a Digg account, you will benefit from creating a memorable username. I tend to remember users who stole celebrity names and people who have created humorous names. Just remember not to create a spammy name that tells people you are just there to get traffic to your site, such as diggmenowplease.

Build Up Your Digg Profile
One of the articles that I read stated that building up your profile is by far the most important factor that will carry a Diggers success or failure. According to the article on AdityaSpeaks.com, the 5 most important factors for a successful Digg profile are (the most important point is number 3) :

1. Number of stories submitted
2. Number of stories which became popular
3. Popularity Ratio which is the percentage of your submitted stories which became popular. Kevin Rose is the only person who has 100% popularity ratio. Means all the stories which he submitting went popular. Well for those who don’t know Kevin Rose is the founder - CEO if Digg
4. The number of stories you dugg
5. The number of distinct people who viewed your profile.

Brand Yourself by Using an Avatar
People will recognize you by your avatar. Don’t pass on an opportunity to get more people clicking on your stories. Put a face to your name. Try to find an image that is either very funny, very cute, or find a picture of a gorgeous woman. You are trying to get people talking about you and your avatar so take this seriously. Find or create an avatar that matches your personality and one that is either very humorous, super weird, or just really cool. I found a lot of funny avatars and avatar tools…you can see the list on this page.

Diggers Don’t Like When You Digg Your Own Articles
Digg users don’t like it when you submit our own stuff. It is okay to digg your own stories, but you should try to get someone else to submit your stories for you. The submitter should appear to not have any visual connection to you or your sites. If the Digg community finds a connection, you might be blocked or banned.

Use Feeds, News Alerts, and Social Aggregators to Stay Current on Very Current News Topics
The only way to be the very first to post a news topic, is to stay notified of the news and hot topics online. I you have subscribed to rss feeds, utilize news ticker, use social aggregators, and subscribe to news alerts, then you are probably doing the best that you can. I suggest subscribing to a select few RSS feeds or you will end up being overwhelmed. You can slowly add more RSS feeds in to the mix as time goes on. I suggest also using social aggregators such as PopURLs, DoggDot, NetVibes, or Reddiggulo.us as your start page, or at least visit them often. Another idea is to subscribe to news alerts from top news sites, top news aggregators, and niche sites.

Use Your Stumble Toolbar to Find Cool Sites to Submit to Digg
If you are having problems finding a site or article to submit to Digg, then look no further then your own StumbleUpon tool bar. I find the craziest stuff in StumbleUpon.

Know The Interests of the Digg Crowd
Just like any site or news source, this site has a trend of liking a certain type of article and disliking other types of articles. For example, Diggers don’t tend to like articles about doing better on Digg, but Sphinn users eat it up. On the other hand, Digg users love funny news, news about the iPhone, Digg usability, and Paris Hilton. However, Sphinn users hate stories about Paris Hilton. So what is my point? Don’t submit articles that don’t fit the Digg genre or you will set yourself up to fail.

Choose Your Target Source Sites
Before you are even ready to make your first post, you need to research to find some news sources that are updated frequently, but that you don’t see often on Digg.

Stay Active
Try to get on to Digg at least once a day. Becoming a top user on Digg is a lot of work. You can’t just join, submit a few stories, digg a few posts, and somehow become a top user. Like everything else in life, hard work and determination will get you to where you want to go. Pencil Digg into your busy schedule and try to digg and comment on a few stories.

Digg Stories When They Are New
Keep an eye out for new upcoming stories that you think will go hot and be one of the first people to digg and comment on it. Digging and commenting on new upcoming stories is the way to get noticed. Think about it. After you submit a story, don’t you additively watch that story to see how it is going to fare? Don’t you always notice the first user who comments on your story? Of course you do, because you have been anxiously awaiting a positive comment. Well, other members feel the same way. That is why this tactic works.

Subscribe to Digg’s RSS Feed
Subscribing to Digg’s RSS feed is the best way to stay on top of things in Digg. This also helps you to stay acquainted with the current popular trends.

Submitting a Lot of Stories
In order to get to Digg’s homepage, you need to submit a LOT of stoires. Create a favorites folder and call it something like ‘LinkBait’ … ‘DiggBait’ … ‘Diggables’ or something like this. Place in this folder sites that you will check regularly to see if there is anything worth submitting to Digg. Include the obvious sites, such as ‘Google News‘, ‘Reddit‘, ‘Netscape‘, Mashable, BoingBoing, ArsTechnica, TechCrunch, Technorati Top, and ‘PopURLs‘. But, then also place not so obvious source URLs in this page as well. Submit stories as often as you can and you will start doing well in no time.

Stories From Major News Outlets are Hot
Stories from the major news outlets tend to be the most popular stories.

Diggers Tend to Like Certain Type of Stories

• Diggers Tend to Like Informational Top 10 Lists
  Also, Diggers tend to be interested in informational articles and stories. So if you see an article that is informational, such as top 10 Tutorials on Building a Light Bulb out of a Piece of Steak or Top List of Free Tutorial Sites. If the story has ‘Top 10′ in it, the article will probably do pretty well. Diggers love lists.
• Diggers Tend to Love Useful Web Surfer, Webmaster, or Design Tools
  If you find a great useful tool for web users, you should definitely submit it. What is even better? A top ten list of web tools would be even better.
• Diggers Tend to Love Controversy and Gossip about Celebrities.
  There have been tons of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton posts that were hugely popular on Digg. Both of these ladies are synonymous with ‘Hot’ submissions (at least Paris is). There also have been many hugely controversial political posts as well. Submit something controversial and you are almost definitely going to do well with that post.
• Pictures and Videos Do Really Well on Digg
  Picture and video diggs do really well on Digg lately. Find a really interesting, funny, or strange picture or video and submit it. You are sure to do well if you pick a good headline for the story.
• Statistics in Title and Description Tend to Do Well
  Stats in the title and description tend to do well even if you can’t back up the numbers.
• Bush Bashing and Fox News Bashing Almost Always Works on Digg
  Digg tends to be a very liberal site and most of the users tend to think that Bush is an idiot and that Fox News is spreading blatant lies. Post an article about George Bush, the Bush administration, or Fox News and you are almost guaranteed to go hot with your story.
• Commentaries and Opinionated Articles Tend to Do Badly on Digg (Unless it is extremely controversial)
  If you want to post commentaries on Digg, be prepared to not get anywhere with your story. However, controversial articles do great.
• There are Subcultures and Fan bases on Digg.
  There are a lot of clique / fan topics on Digg. There isn’t a list of Digg subculture topics, you just need to find out what these topics are. Some of these topics are Star Wars, Ron Paul, Linux, Wii, and Apple. If you know of more subcultures on Digg, please let me know and I will list them. Almost any good article or news item listed about one of these fan-base topics will do well.

Digg Uses an Algorithm That Not Only Counts Votes
Many people thing that Digg is run by a small number of people and that new Digg users don’t have a chance to make it to the front page. This isn’t completely true. Yes, it is much harder for a newbie to get on to the front page of Digg, but it has been done. Digg not only counts the number of votes, but it also takes in to account how many friends that Digg user has. Newer users’(those with few friends) votes count more than a user who has a lot of friends. On the other hand, a story that gets a large amount of votes gets shown on the ‘most voted’ page of ‘upcoming‘ stories, which puts it in front of more potential voters more easily.

Try to Time Your Diggs
Try to time your digg submissions at times when you know that is an active time for your friends. The more friends that you have online, the more likely that they will see your upcoming story and digg it.

Try to Submit Stories on Off Peak Hours
Another good tip, especially if you don’t have a lot of Digg friends yet, is to submit your stories in the middle of the night when there is little competition. This way your story has some time to get noticed and dugg. Try to time your Diggs for about 7 - 9 AM Eastern time (GMT -4). Use Dugg Analytics to view statistically what time is best for you to submit your articles.

Don’t Submit Your Own Stories Until You Are Able to Get 20 or More Diggs
Don’t submit your own stories until you are able to get 20 or more Diggs from another site’s story. Also, if you start out using other site’s stories, you build up your karma with other members. Nobody will think that you are using Digg to promote your own stories if you start out submitting other site’s stories. Here is a story called ‘The Dangers of Digg Self-Submission‘.

Don’t Submit Stories to Digg if it is a ReBlog / ReCap of a Larger Story
This tip seems obvious to me, but it must be said. If you continuously submit already submitted stories, you are in danger of getting your domain and account being banned from Digg. For example, If you use reblog (a software that allows you to use other people’s stories as your blog) then using Digg isn’t for you. You should only be submitting original content. However, if you recap a larger story, but also added commentary and something unique to the story, then it is okay for you to submit that story to Digg. Below, you can see what is stated in Digg’s FAQ. Beware, this doesn’t mean that people don’t break the rules. Yesterday, I saw the same story submitted over and over again about Britney being pregnant with her 3rd child.

Is it a duplicate story if I submit a similar story but from a different source?
That isn’t for us to decide. Sometimes there is a better story from another news outlet. We let our users determine that aspect of duplicate submissions. It is, however, a duplicate story if you submit the same story from the same source.

Digg’s FAQ also says: “We strongly discourage the submission of duplicate stories as it only steals credit from the first submitter.”

Make Sure to Use a Catchy Title for Your Digg Stories
Unless people find your article’s title interesting, they won’t click on them. Even if your article is just so-so, if you spin the title in a way that makes it sound exciting, you will get people to click through to read your story. Diggitizer is a cool (and funny if you ask me) tool that helps you create a good title for your digg stories. Maybe this tool will help you if you are stuck for a good story title. Some tips are to use the words ‘Cool, Top, Best, New, How, Free, Launch, and First.’ Read this article for writing quality Digg titles … and … Here is a good article on how to write a title for Digg stories.

Also, if you are submitting someone else’s article, it is usually better to create your own catchy title. Probably the author of the article wasn’t creating a title specifically for Diggers. You probably know better what titles work on Digg, so I suggest you create a new title for the Digg post.

Digg Story Descriptions are Very Important Too.
Titles are very important to grab the Digg users in, but please don’t forget about the description. The reader wants to know more before they click on the link to the story. It is acceptable to just copy and paste the first paragraph of the story, but I usually prefer a more to the point approach. I want to know quickly whether or not I am interested, and most Diggers feel the same way. I would suggest highlighting the key points of the story in only one or two sentences.

Place Your Article in a Non Competitive Category
You might have noticed that some categories move way too fast for your articles (such as Offbeat News) to even have a chance to get Dugg. Try finding a category (that matches your article’s content) that moves a bit slower, such as Technology > Gadgets or Sports > Golf. However, don’t get caught putting your story in a category that doesn’t even match your content or you will find your story buried or even banned.

Content is King … or Maybe Not?
Some of the articles that I read said that content was the most important part of the Digg process. Other articles said that the better the content, the worst the story does. I have found both to be true. It seems like the stupidest stories get to the top sometimes. And I have posted some amazing articles that went unnoticed. It is very frustrating sometimes.

Don’t Submit Every Page of a Multi-Page Story
Digg users hate when you submit multiple pages from a multi-page story. You might even be banned for spamming. If you find a multiple page story that you want to submit, then find the first page of the story and submit that page to Digg.

Don’t Over Use Keywords
Don’t overuse keywords in a spammy way. Some people spam Digg with keyword heavy submissions so that they will get traffic from the Digg search engine. Don’t do this, you will get banned anyways.

Don’t Submit a Story that is written in Greek
Don’t you hate it when people submit stories in Russian or Japanese and all you see are funky characters?Please don’t be one of those people. LOL.

You Have Submitted a Story and Your Story is Listed in Upcoming … Now What?
After you post your story to Digg, your story lands up in the Upcoming section that you posted to. If you posted to Technology > Design, then look for your story in Technology>Design and then click on ‘Upcoming’ in the upper right corner. Watch for your story on the right side bar called ‘Hot in All Topics’ if you are on the front upcoming page or ‘Hot in Design’ if you are on the Technology > Design Upcoming page. When you hit 30 - 40 Diggs, you usually appear on the front page ‘Hot in All Topics’ side bar. When your story disappears off of the ‘Hot in All Topics’ or ‘Hot in Design’ sidebar, it has either gone ‘Popular’ or was buried. DON’T BURY OTHER PEOPLE’S STORIES TO GET YOURS TO THE TOP!!! This silliness will get you banned, not to mention that it is just ethically wrong. However, you can bury articles that you feel are nonsense or that are spammy. When your story is in the hot stage, you should play the upcoming page. Digg good articles, bury bad articles, and comment on as many as you can. This will get more people to digg your article because people notice that you are being active in the community.

Votes Count More the Quicker They Come
Votes count more when they come in quick succession. Try to get your friends and family members to digg your submissions within a 30 - 60 minute window.

Comment on Articles That You Have Submitted
After your submitted article starts to get a few Diggs, make a comment on the Digg to get the conversation rolling. Don’t say something like ‘this is the coolest story’. Instead, say something meaningful, interesting, or funny. Continue to comment as more people do to keep the conversation going. This is not only a good way to keep people interested in the submitted story, but it also builds up your credibility, and possible friendships with other Diggers.

Comment AND Digg Stories
If you have something to say, then say it. If you are a very quiet person, and you don’t ever have anything to say, then this is a problem. You need to force yourself to make comments on stories. The reason that it is important to comment on Digg stories is so that other users start remembering your username and avatar. You want to become branded in everyone’s However, remember that commenting on a story won’t count for anything for the story if you don’t remember to digg it too. Here is a cool tool to track your comments and how many diggs each comment received.

Make Friends, Be Friendly, and Network Away
Making friends has become the most important strategy to becoming a top user on Digg. Even if you aren’t inherently a social person, you will need to become one to win at the Digg game. On other social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, there’s no easy way to contact Digg members, browse their photo gallery or break the ice first. The way that you make friends on Digg is by looking at member’s statistics, comments, and stories and forming your opinion that way. It takes a bit of getting used to.

Seek Out Top Diggers
Seek out Digg top diggers and get their attention. Top diggers have put in a lot of work to become top diggers and they demand your respect. Make sure to get on their good side. Make them your friends, digg their submitted stories, and comment on their Digg submissions. You should also visit their blogs and make positive comments and suggestions on their blog. I also suggest placing top diggers on your blogroll to really get their attention. Another good idea is to review their blog in a positive light or interview them. If this top digger is on sites like MyBlogLog, add them to your network. Find out where these users hang out online, such as forums, blogs, communities. Start hanging out in those places as well. You need to then take part in those communities too and make helpful, friendly, and maybe even funny comments and observations. Try as hard as you can to build a relationship with this Digger by building not only your credibility but by trying to show your similarities to that person (not blatantly just in casual conversations). Never ask these users to Digg you as you don’t want them to know that you are looking for Diggs from them. Let your great content speak for itself.

Frequently Check to See Who Has Befriended You
Frequently check to see who has befriended you. If someone has added you as their friend, check out their profile before adding them as a friend. You can try to add them to see if they Digg your stories, after all, they did just add you as a friend so they might like your content. You can always dump them later if they don’t digg your content.

You Don’t Need All of Those Friends, Do You?
Every once in a while, you need to reduce the number of friends that you have. Yes, it sounds strange, but it is true. Like I said earlier in this article, the more friends you have, the less each vote counts. In other words, if you get 30 votes with only 5 friends, your votes will count more than a person who also gets 30 votes but has 300 friends. You should unfriend people who don’t Digg your content. You should keep top Digg users and people who befriended you, but other than that, I would prune the rest. Use this tool to find out which members are Digging your content. Some of the top users have as little as a few dozen friends, so don’t be afraid to cut down your list of friends a bit. Only 1 out of every 100 Digg users are active participants in the community. You are trying to find the needles in the haystack.

Be Selective When Adding Friends on Digg
Adding friends is essential to become a successful Digger. Your first instinct may be to add as many friends as you can. Don’t go adding huge numbers of friends though, instead be very selective. Look at members who have digged your past or current stories. Take a look at this member’s Digg stats. Have any of their diggs gone popular? Do they have plenty of submissions? Do they have plenty of comments? If they do, I usually make them friends. You should also make friends with some or all of the top Diggers . One reason for this is so that you can follow their lead. See how they do it…they are obviously doing something right. For example, check out their titles, their descriptions, what types of articles they submit, etc. Use Dugg Analytics to view stats about Digg members. The good news is that once you start hitting the home page of Digg, you won’t need to search for friends anymore, they will come and seek you out. Only 1 out of every 100 Digg users is active in the Digg community. Your job is to find those needles in the haystack. You can even add the #1 Digger, Kevin Rose , or the #1 digger Mr. BabyMan. He has a 100% Popular ratio … he is the only one on Digg who can boast that percentage. What does an ideal friend look like? Take it from Brett Borders on Copy Brighter, your ideal friend does the following …

• Checks in and uses the site daily
• Diggs a lot of stories
• Checks for stories that their friends submit and diggs them regularly
• Submits stories that you will enjoy following and voting on
• Doesn’t submit way too many stories
• Doesn’t have 50 zillion friends

Note: When you add a friend on Digg, you will see their submissions, but they won’t see yours. When you add a friend, you are becoming their fan unless they add you as a friend too. If this user adds you as a friend, then you will both be mutual friends and both of you will see each other’s submissions.

Make Friends with Your Fans
For the most part, fans are the Digg members who like your Diggs and your submissions. Make friends with the people who are fans of you. After you both have befriended each other, you will both be able to check out each other’s submissions.

Digging Your Friends’ Stories & Your Friend’s Digging Your Stories
Don’t just blindly Digg all of your friends’ articles. This is very tempting to do since you are a busy person and you have a lot of other things to do. However, you will more than likely get banned if you keep doing this over a period of time. Instead, only click through to the articles that you find interesting or that already have a number of Diggs. Also, take the time to click through to make a meaningful comment (not just - great or liked it).

Don’t shout ‘Digg this’ to all of your friends. Instead build up a report with all of your ‘friends’ or better yet, become actual online friends. Also, if the same people keep digging your stories, you will get caught. Also if your friends digg your stories too quickly, it will appear unnatural and you will get caught.

Superficial Conversation Doesn’t Work
In order to be successful with Digg, you can’t just send superficial messages to other Digg members and Digg friends. An example of a superficial Digg message is “Digg my stories and I will Digg yours”. Instead try to make a deeper impact on this user. An example of a deeper conversation starter would be “I saw your post on business card design ideas and I really enjoyed it. I am adding you as a friend because I see that you have dugg a lot of stories that I find very useful. Are you a designer too?” Although it might feel like it will take forever to make friends this way, if you want to become successful at this, then try to at least make some friends this way.

Follow and Digg Your Friends’ Content
After you have added some friends, you will need to stalk them and Digg their content. How do you do this? It is easy, just do the following:

1. Go to your profile
2. Click on the Friends’ Activity tab up top
3. Now look at the right side bar and click on submissions
4. Browse through and Digg all of your friend’s stories that you like (don’t leave any of your friend’s out … if you find that you consistently don’t like one of your friend’s stories, then find a more compatible friend.

After you continuously Digg your friend’s stories, they will take notice and reciprocate. If one of your friends doesn’t catch on after a while, maybe they should be on your friend’s list.

Learn How to Have a Tough Skin
If you are going to be a top Digger, then you will need to grow a tough shell. Some Diggers are very rude and they will personally attack everything you like about yourself. Don’t take everything to heart. These Diggers are either trying to get attention, are trolls, or are just plain mean. Some things that these people say are true though, so try to learn from your past mistakes.

To Be Nice or To Be Rude
There are several different ways to get attention on Digg, some people prefer to be jerks and some prefer to be nice.

• Be Extremely Rude to Get Attention
  I hate this one, but since I am aggregating everything that I found out about Digg, I am going to repeat it for you. I am against this tip, but if you aren’t, then go ahead and try it. Be rude and people will notice you. Beware, some people may block you and then they won’t see any of your stories. Try to create mortal enemies to get even more attention.
• Or Don’t Be a Troll - Stop Being Rude
  Trolls are jerks, so don’t be one. It is very frustrating when you work for days on an article and then someone says nasty things about your writing style, the design of your page, or other personal attacks. People will think you are a jerkhole and they will block your user account so that they don’t see your posts at all. You catch more flies with honey, so be sweet. Be nice even when others are being mean and heartless. Maybe Digg members will stop and think twice before burying your story to raise the rank of their own story if they know that you have been kind to them. You never know, it might work.

StumbleUpon and Digg Together Make a Great Team
Using Digg along with StumbleUpon is a good idea. Add a digg button to the article that you are going to submit to Digg (if it is on your site that is) and then submit the article to Digg and then to StumbleUpon. Hopefully the two together will work to your benefit.

Save Your Site From Going Down with the Digg Effect
If you are going to try to get a page digged to the front page, you need to worry about The Digg Effect. Simply said, The Digg Effect is when your site crashes from so many Diggers visiting your site at once. The way that your server goes down is that your server gets suddenly hit with a spike of thousands of requests, overloading your server. Read this article for many ideas for Digg proofing your site. Also, if your site cannot handle a popular Digg, then you should consider first mirroring your site. Visit The Coral Content Distribution Network. CoralCDN is a free peer-to-peer content distribution network, comprised of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers. It allows a user to run a web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand, and all for free. There is also a possibility that your site’s cache was picked up by DuggMirror, but only if you were listed in popular upcoming stories long enough, and even then it isn’t always a sure thing.

Use Digg Tools to Enhance Your Digg Experience
Enhance your Digg experience with Digg Tools like Smart Digg Button, Digg Alerter, and the powerful Social Media for Firefox browser tool … and here are more Firefox Digg tools. Use Dugg Analytics to analyze Digg data…it is an amazing tool. Also, you should read this article - 29 Awesome Tools Built on the Digg API.

Don’t Game the System
Even though there is software and web sites that offer services to allow you to game Digg and other social networking sites, doesn’t mean that it is acceptable. Digg is a community, a place where users can get together to discuss the things that they do and don’t like on the web. Despite the fact that many people on Digg to promote their own online work, Digg is still widely used for the purpose of community and online sharing. People who violate Digg’s community rules will essentially be shunned by Digg members and ultimately banned. Read Subvert and Profit. It is an article about the site Subvert and Profit, a site that games Digg. The premise of the article is that if you use gaming systems, your article might continue to get diggs, but Digg will bury your story anyways. So gaming the system isn’t worth it.

Add a Digg Button / Widget to Your Site
If your submitting your own content, then you should add a Digg button to all of your articles. Adding a Digg button / widget to all of your articles, gives each of them a higher chance on Digg, and as an added perk, you are helping to increase the number on Digg. Take a look at this page on Digg to find the perfect widget for your site.

Learn From Your Past Mistakes
If your story was buried or just totally missed by everyone, learn why this happened. Did you submit a lame story? Was your title not enticing enough? Maybe you submitted in the wrong category? Did you submit a story at peak hours when there is way too much interesting stories to compete? Do you need to make more friends? Be honest, is it a lame story? There are some Digg tools to help you find out why you were buried, such as Digg Spy, Digg Alerter and The Bury Brigade Exists. You might be surprised to find out that there were just vindictive webmasters trying to get above you so they worked together to bury your story. This just happened to me yesterday. Also here are some interesting links. Top 50 Buriers in the Bury Brigade .. Digg’s Dark Future and Online Censorship .. Digg’s Failure and When No Moderation Doesn’t Work .. Digg’s Bury System is Being Abused .. An Open Letter to Kevin Rose ..and a post on Diggs blog .. On Buries and Blocking.

Try, Try, and Try Again
Try posting at least once a day. The only way to succeed is to try until you get it right. And after you get it right, keep doing it right (easier said than done). Your persistence will pay off, I promise you. If you don’t give up, you will find yourself being a top digger. Don’t give up. You will have your up days and your down days.

Sources: Here are the blogs and articles that I found some of this useful information from (also used forums and communities)

11 Tips to Enhance Your Digg User Experience (And Hopefully Bring You Front Page Fame)

White Hat Digging - 3 Tips and Tricks for Understanding and Submitting to Digg

How to Get to Digg’s Front Page

Digg Tips - The Official Guide on How to Get Dugg

Digg, Diggers, and Dugg

Welcome to Digg School - 4 Tips to Digg Success

The Top 25 Digg Tips

5 Simple Tips to Get on The Front Page of Digg

How to Assplode Your Blog with Digg

Digg Secrets Exposed - Tips to Increase Your Story Visibility on Digg

Why I Hit the Digg Home Page on a Daily Basis

Demand Your Presence on Digg with 6 Simple Steps

How to Make the Digg Homepage

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Elgg is an open source social platform based around choice, flexibility and openness: a system that firmly places individuals at the centre of their activities. Your users have the freedom to incorporate all their favorite tools within one environment and showcase their content with as many or as few people as they choose, all within a social networking site that you control.

Elxis - (free)
This Content management system is Open Source software that is compatible with Linux and Microsoft Windows Operating Systems. It is a User Friendly CMS, embeded powerful WYSIWYG Editor with content organized in to sections, categories, content items and autonomous pages. Some other features include multimedia management, Include video in your content, Creates as many menus as you like, support for drop down menus, Graphic menus, Content publish scheduling, Web site preview, Send articles through email, Print articles, Create PDF files from articles, Access manager, Content display based on access level, Custom and prebuild user groups, Group administration, Custom fields, Form builder, and more.

Etomite - (free)
Etomite is completely different in many ways - it allows the end user to control virtually every aspect of their website, whether it be from layout to how the Meta Tags are generated, making it the number one SEO CMS.
If you are running Apache, and your host allows the use of .htaccess files, then Etomite becomes even more SEO Friendly (Search Engine Optimized), by allowing what we would call friendly urls - no more question marks in the URL (Universal Resource Locater), but virtual page names.

Exponent CMS - (free)
Unlike other site management tools, no additional applications need to be downloaded by a user to permit them to use Exponent. Everything, from user management, to site configuration, to content editing (and content approval for large, multi-admin sites), is done within the system - simply. Exponent does what other CMS systems do - it allows anyone to create website pages, content on pages, and manage where these pages are placed on a website - but it does all this in a completely new way.

EXV2 - (free)
A content management system that is in German. Even when you change to the English version it appears as if everything stays in German.

EZ Publish - (free for lower software - and up to $10,000 for highest priced software)
A Free publishing system but purchasing it can be up to $10,000. No, that is NOT a typo. I am not sure which one is free, you will have to investigate and let me know. The price tag of the higher versions scared me off.

Fundanemt - (free)
Fundanemt is an open source CMS that aims at small and medium sized websites. The system is highly focused on usability. The user must be able to interact with his or hers website without no further knowlegde than that of the average desktop user. Fundanemt should bring the user beyond technology so that the prime focus becomes communication and content rather than technical issues.

FuzzLime - (free)
FuzzyLime (cms) was known as PHP-Update from v1.0 to v2.7. During this time, the script was featured in two UK-based internet magazines - as the .net reader’s site of the month, and on the cover CD of Practical Web Projects. Among the features of the script are support for as many content pages as you want; blogs, which can have files attached to turn them into podcasts, or video clips easily embedded; multiple templates, as well as the ability to easily create your own look; guestbooks, galleries, mailing lists and polls. You can have as many users allowed to update your site as you wish; can offer up RSS feeds so users can subscribe to parts of your site; and the site even automatically maintains a WAP version so people can view your pages on the move via their phones.

GeekLog - (free)
Geeklog is a PHP/MySQL based application for managing dynamic web content. “Out of the box”, it is a blog engine, or a CMS with support for comments, trackbacks, multiple syndication formats, spam protection, and all the other vital features of such a system. The core Geeklog distribution can easily be extended by the many community developed plugins to radically alter its functionality. Available plugins include forums, image galleries, and many more.

GoingOn - (free / hosted platform)
A weblog publishing and community management platform for the Open Media World. Organizations of all sizes can use GoingOn to build interactive communities around their most important initiatives and benefit from the open and compatible “network of networks” environment. GoingOn Networks allows companies to: . Set-up your own brand network within minutes and build an interactive community around your initiatives and ideas . Easy-to-use weblog publishing system that incorporates the latest blogging, search, tagging, and feeds. . Powerful community management system with full-access controls . Real-time access to full range of network traffic, member, and content data & analytics . Fully hosted, scalable and secure platform.

GoLightly - ($295)
An easy-to-use, affordable online platform and consulting services give your organization powerful tools to manage your members, and provide a rich web experience for them to work together and participate in your programs. Includes: Community Home Page (easy to update), Searchable Member Directory, Unlimited Groups, Unlimited Email Lists, Resource Library, all with your Branding

GoLightly Plus - ($350)
An easy-to-use, affordable online platform and consulting services give your organization powerful tools to manage your members, and provide a rich web experience for them to work together and participate in your programs. Includes: Community Plus (see pricing below) All the Community features above plus: Accept Secure Donations Online, Forums/Bulletin Boards, Unlimited Blogs, Unlimited Wikis, Training plus Email Support

iGaming CMS - (free)
iGaming CMS is a content management system designed for gaming websites. The system is written in PHP and requires a Mysql database for operation. Feature List includes Cheat Manager, Company Manager, Content Download System, Custom Fields, Download Manager, Game Manager, Mailbag, News Manager, Plugin Manager, Poll Manager, Preview Manager, Review Manager, Screenshot Manager, Static Page Manager, User Manager, Template Editor, Menu Manager, Module Manager, Diagnostic Tools, Database Tools, and Backup / Restore Utilities.

Insane Visions - (free)
Insane Visions is your source for the best PHP Scripts on the internet. From OneCMS, a gaming CMS that started it all to almost 2 years later to BlogPHP, a simple blog script,amassing nearly 20,000 downloads together and now with our two new Premium paid scripts, AdaptBB and AdaptCMS. We strive to simply provide great products and great support to make webmastering an easier and fun experience.

Intro Networks - (contact them for pricing)
introNetworks Inc. provides hosted and customized solutions for corporations, organizations, event planners, trade associations, and publishers. Create an innovative online community for a product launch, a user group, an annual sales meeting, a global all-hands, or a special event to bring together customers and employees. The possibilities are limitless!

Jaws Projects - (free)
Jaws is a Framework and Content Management System for building dynamic web sites. It aims to be User Friendly giving ease of use and lots of ways to customize web sites, but at the same time is Developer Friendly, it offers a simple and powerful framework to hack your own modules.

Joomla - (free)
Joomla! is an award-winning Content Management System (CMS) that will help you build websites and other powerful online applications. Best of all, Joomla! is an open source solution that is freely available to everybody. The advantage of Joomla is that it is much easier to use than Drupal, however, Drupal is more advanced. Joomla includes Dynamic form builders, Business or organizational directories, Document management, image and multimedia galleries, E-commerce and shopping cart engines, Forums and chat software, Calendars, Blogging software, Directory services, Email newsletters, Data collection and reporting tools, Banner advertising systems, Subscription services, and many, many more…

Jupiter Portal - (free)
Jupiter is one of the most lightweight portal systems available and it`s open source, so anyone can contribute towards it.

KickApps - (free, but on a hosted platform / Affiliate Program)
KickApps is a hosted platform that allows webmasters to quickly and easily deploy user-generated content and social networking functionality directly on their websites. Our company provides a “white label” solution, with all elements precisely matching a website’s existing look and feel. The KickApps platform is highly customizable, scalable and enterprise-quality. Features include Biography and personal questions. As defined by your webmaster, Videos, Photos and Audio. Upload, share, tag, and save favorites, Blogs. Video, audio, or plain text, RSS feeds. Your feeds and new ones added by your members, Guest books. Members can leave and receive messages, and Friends. Link to other community members, invite others to join

Kwiqq Social Website Builder - (contact them for pricing)
Kwiqq is a social networking system designed for rapid deployment, simple setup and easy extensibility. Each installation is fully customisable and skinable. Within each site, each member can build a multi-page portfolio with a flexible layout without any knowledge of HTML. Users can choose a range of tools with which to populate their website. Kwiqq is usable on PDAs, mobiles and is W3C compliant. As part of our service, we will customise your social network to precisely match your users requirements.

Leverage Software - ($299 / month)
The Leverage Software platform empowers you to create online communities for your customers, visitors to your online media properties, partners, members, consumers, or event attendees. Leverage Software has the experience and best practices to ensure your success.

Lithium - (contact for pricing)
Lithium Technologies provides market-leading solutions for building successful enterprise communities, including proven forums, chat, and other social networking tools. Providing our solutions on-demand ensures that your community is flush with new features to engage your members, with minimal impact on your IT group. And it’s all backed by extensive community management and moderation expertise. What’s in it for you? Decreased support costs, increased brand loyalty and sales, and an improved overall experience for your customers.

LiveWorld - (Contact for pricing)
Well-defined and implemented technology and infrastructure support community dynamics. Easy-to-use features empower members to express themselves and interact with each other. Administration and moderation tools enable trained moderators to manage the community, shaping and reinforcing the culture. Reporting and analysis processes and systems reveal what’s happening, how much, and what it means—factors critical to community management, as well as to business feedback and metrics.

Mambo - (free)
The Mambo CMS allows you to easily create a dynamic web site . At its most simple, it can be installed through Fantastico on any web hosting space that offers cPanel hosting and you can quickly have a web site online with a minimum of effort and almost no programming or HTML skills. Don’t let this simplicity fool you though - Mambo is feature rich, highly extensible, and very powerful. Mambo is used for everything from simple, single-page web sites to portals, intranets, and complex corporate application.

MaxDev - (free)
A CMS is an application that provides for the display and management of the contents of a web site. MD-Pro carries this many steps farther by making this management simple yet powerful. Your MD-Pro powered web site can be updated in seconds without any knowledge of programming or HTML. MD-Pro can be configured to allow your site users to send news, comment on existing news, vote in polls, administer their own account via a simple graphical interface and much mmore.

Me.com - (free / hosted platform)
We enables social networking application platform known as SNAPP that includes more than 40 integrated social networking features, which we have developed over the past few years. SNAPP even provides everything that you need to make money with your community through automated contextual advertising. In fact, we share 50 cents of every ad dollar your community generates, which is kind of nutty of us, but reflects our recognition of your importance to our success.

ModX CMS - (free)
MODx is an open source PHP Application Framework that helps you take control of your online content. It empowers developers and advanced users to give as much control as desired to whomever they desire for day-to-day website content maintenance chores. MODx is 100% buzzword compliant, and makes child’s play of building content managed sites with validating, accessible CSS layouts – hence Ajax CMS. MODx makes creating sites that search engines can love almost automatic. What you put in it and however you want it to look is what you get out of MODx.

MiPhoto - ($99 - $139)
MiPhoto is a fully functional website where members can rate and meet other people. Members can see other member’s profile, private message or email other member. MiPhoto Pro can easily be used as a dating website with the aid of the payment system and customized profile fields.

Neighborhood America - (call for pricing)
A very advanced social networking cms software that takes a few weeks to implement.

Netious - (free)
Here you can find and download scripts of a CMS-based web page. It is not just a template. It is actually a service which you can build from scratch not knowing that the source code even exists! And it’s absolutely free!

Ning - (free / hosted platform)
Not really software but a free service online for people to create their own social networks. Ning is the only online service where you can create, customize, and share your own Social Network for free in seconds.

Omnifuse - (contact for pricing)
Omnifuse is a social technology marketing company focused on improving the ways marketers reach consumers and business professionals by building social communities. Omnifuse specializes in the rapid creation and adoption of online social networks using its propriety FUSION platform. FUSION combines social networking software with consumer-generated media technology to provide a marketing and community-building tool for brands, organizations and other verticals

OneSite - (free / hosted platform)
Blogging, Photo and Video sharing, Tagging, Rating, Flagging, Commenting, Built-in Messaging, and Groups built on patent-pending technology. The ONEsite team has the talent and experience to integrate with any system and the capability to launch a community faster than any company in the marketplace.

Ovidentia - (free)
Ovidentia is an open source content management and collaborative platform written with PHP and using a MySQL database. Ovidentia enables you to integrate simply and easily an environment for publishing content on the world wide web or a groupware portal (internet, intranet, extranet) for your company, organization, community …

People Aggregator - (free / hosted platform)
PeopleAggregator brings social web features to existing software or provides a stand alone social network of your own. We’ve got source code available or we can build you a SaaS system to your specifications! Latest features, great service, nice people!

Pheap - (free)
Pheap was created because Spencer believes massive CMSs like Joomla and Drupal are a vast overkill for 80% of website owners. New features allow you to manage content in a database as well. For instance, if you keep a callender of events stored in a database table, you can easily set up a rule that allows you to add, edit and delete those events. All from the comfort of the Pheap admin panel!

PHPFpx - ($300 or $39.95/month)
A CMS software that includes blogs, search, browse, forum, rate, battle, poll, groups, classifieds, quiz, events, chat, and im.

PHP Fusion - (free)
PHP Fusion is a light-weight open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP. It utilises a mySQL database to store your site content and includes a simple, comprehensive adminstration system. PHP-Fusion includes the most common features you would expect to see in many other CMS packages. Feel free to post any questions or report any problems in our community forums.

PHP Nuke - (free)
PHP-Nuke is a news automated system specially designed to be used in Intranets and Internet. The Administrator has total control of his web site, registered users, and he will have in the hand a powerful assembly of tools to maintain an active and 100% interactive web site using databases. There are many similar programs and projects like Slash, PHPweblog, PHPSlash, Thatware, Sips, NewsPro, etc, but PHP-Nuke is designed to be very customizable and flexible, is easy and pleasant to use, thinking about webmasters who pass hours administrating his web site.
PHP-Nuke also offers a very high number of features not present on other systems and on each release we’ll add much more new and cool features.

PHPCMS - (free)
phpwcms is an Open Source web content management system released under the GNU General Public License. You can use it for free. phpwcms is optimized for fast and easy setup and works on any standard web server platform that supports PHP/MySQL and was tested successfully on Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista, Mac OS X and LINUX. phpwcms is perfect for professional, public and private users. It is very easy to learn and gives you the flexibility to separate layout and content. Lots of powerful but simple implemented features assists publishers and web developers too.

PHPizabi - (free)
PHPizabi is one of the most powerful social networking platforms on the planet. With literally thousands of websites powered by PHPizabi including everything from simple friends sites to the most complex networking super sites out there. Easy to install, use, and raising the bar on what it is to provide a reliable, fast, social networking package to raise your business to the next level.

PHP Web Site - (free)
phpWebSite provides a complete web site content management system. Web-based administration allows for easy maintenance of interactive, community-driven web sites. phpWebSite’s growing number of modules allow for easy site customization without the need for unwanted or unused features. Client output from phpWebSite is valid XHTML 1.0 and meets the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative requirements.

Pligg - (free)
A great cms software that is similar to digg.com. This software has come a long way in the last few years…I remember when I tried using it when it first came out and it wasn’t half the software that it is today. One of the most positive aspects of this software is that there is a huge community of supporters. If you ask a question in their support forum, you will get a response almost immediately. I recommend this software.

Pluck - (contact for pricing)
SiteLife Social Media suite generates user content via blogs, photos, comments, ratings and discussion groups to build site traffic & user loyalty.

Plume Content Management - (free)
If you are looking for a simple to use, yet powerfull content management system, you may have found what you are looking for. Plume CMS can be installed through a simple script on all major platforms available, give it a try ! It is so fast to install that you will ask all the scripts to have the same installation procedure. With a single installation of PLUME CMS you can have multiple websites, file management, multiple authors with different rights and websites in any languages thanks to a full utf-8 support. Plume CMS proposes a flexible plugin infrastructure to extend it and is fully accessible with output providing standard compliant code by default.

PostNuke CMS - (free)
Need a robust, interactive, editable website? PostNuke is your answer, you can have your site up and running within minutes of download! Features include: Modular Structure, Customized Functionality through, Third-Party Modules, Advanced User Group Permissions System, Multi-language Support (About 36 Language Packs Available), Embedded WYSIWYG HTML Editor, Site Search, Advanced API (Application Programming Interface), Focused on High Level of Security, and an Easy-to-Use Guided Browser Based Installation and more!

Pringo - (contact for pricing)
Pringo Networks offers a complete social networking and media sharing platform allowing your company to effectively build an integrated online community around your existing user base. Pringo Networks provides the power and flexibility of state-of-the-art social network solution on your site. With features surpassing the leading popular networks, Pringo technology can offer you and your audience the same functionality as MySpace, YouTube, Tribe.net, Bebo.com and then some!

Prospero - (contact for pricing)
Create a social network with the most interactive applications… Message BoardsMore Info, Blogs, Profiles & Social Networking, Ratings & Reviews, Real-Time Chat, Live Event Chat, and more.

Run CMS - (free)
RunCMS is a comprehensive content management system (CMS) where ease of use, speed, & flexibility are the main development keypoints. RunCMS is a CMS coming from the cores of E-Xoops. E-Xoops 1.05r3 was the last version with the E-Xoops name.

Select Minds - (contact for pricing)
Content Management – posting, editing, refreshing content such as news, jobs and polls

SilverStripe - (free)
Content management the way it is supposed to be. Features include Simple. Intuitive and user-friendly, Flexible. MVC framework, Scalable. From 1 page to a million, Fast. As responsive as a desktop app thanks to native Ajax support, Standards Compliant. Fully XHTML compliant, Modular. Easy to extend, Template Freedom. No restrictions on the look and feel of your site, Open source. It’s free in every sense of the word! (BSD), Cross platform (Windows/Linux/Mac) and easy to install (PHP based), etc.

Small World Labs - (contact for pricing)
Small World Labs Platform is designed to provide a base foundation for businesses and organizations looking to grow or establish a community. This foundation includes core features such as friends, forums, private email, photo gallery, video gallery and profile based participation. Online social networks can add additional interactive functionality to the existing website of a membership organization, association, club, team, university, church, or school. If you don’t already have a website, the Small World Labs Platform can also stand alone as your online presence.

Social Platform - (contact for pricing)
Social Platform Enterprise includes many features such as message boards, media galleries, and polls to enable you to develop deep ties across your user base.

Sparta Social Networks - (multiple fees including setup and monthly fees)
Sparta is fully customizable social network software that out of the box lets you compete head to head with the biggest social networks today. Whether you’re targeting a vertical business market, a niche community, a private institution or any other variation, Sparta gives you the tools to compete and succeed against the best of them. You will not find more robust, feature rich, flexible social network software anywhere.

Spip - (free)
SPIP is a publishing system developed by the minirézo to manage the site uZine. We provide it to anyone as a free software under GPL license. Therefore, you can use it freely for your own site, be it personnal, co-operative, institutional or commercial. This site contains the official documentation. In addition you will find links to mailing lists and sites where Spip users provide help to one another.

Telligent Community Server 2007 - ($99 and up)
From a cost point of view, adding Community Server is the most effective and low cost way to increase the traffic to your site. Sources such as Google ads work great for driving in interested customers, but social networking tools can almost guarantee your site’s traffic to increase exponentially.

The Port Social Media Site - (call to find out pricing)
Comprehensive social networking, user contributed content and aggregation tools to build robust private label business and consumer online communities.

TikiWiki - (free)
TikiWiki (Tiki) is your Groupware/CMS (Content Management System) solution. Tiki has the features you need: Wikis (like Mediawiki), Forums (like phpBB), Blogs (like WordPress), Articles (like Digg), Image Gallery (like Flickr), Map Server (like Google Maps), Link Directory (like DMOZ), Translation and i18n (like Babel Fish) And much more…

Toenda - (free)
The toendaCMS Content Management and Weblogging tool gives you a modern, professional publishing system, based on an SQL and/or XML database. With its user-friendly interface toendaCMS is simple and intuitive to use. Making it easy for you to build and maintain your own website without any programming knowledge. It has many good features like a documents and download management and a own imagegallery. But the best thing about toendaCMS is its completely free. toendaCMS is openly available under GPL.

Typo3 - (free)
Below is an extensive list of the features TYPO3 has to offer. Some features are built into the system core (Core), while others can be added by installing third-party extensions (Ext) that are freely available in the TYPO3 extension repository. Includes features such as chat, forum, blogs, classifieds, calendars, form management, and more.

TypoLight - (free)
TYPOlight webCMS is a powerful web content management system that specializes in accessibility (back end and front end) and uses XHTML and CSS to generate W3C/WAI compliant pages. It was developed by Leo Feyer in 2004 and has been released under the General Public License (GPL).

Village Engine - (contact for pricing)
The Village engine is a true social networking site supporting advanced features you will not find in any other software. Strengthen your brand, build customer loyalty or customize your intranet. With any goal in mind the Village engine will easily fit into your business needs.

Web Crossing - ($65/month to $2495/month)
Web Crossing helps companies strengthen brands and build relationships. We are the innovative leader in Internet collaboration solutions used by online communities and project teams.
Website Baker - (free)
Website Baker is a PHP-based Content Management System (CMS) designed with one goal in mind: to enable its users to produce websites with ease. This Website Baker “Start” website is a resource for people wanting to find out more about Website Baker, and get a “start” with the project and our community.

Web Network by Web Scribble - ($199 plus pay for extra modules)
Fully Featured and Customizable Community Software webNetwork™ allows you to start a fully automated social network site similar to MySpace, Friendster, or Tagworld. The fully automated social network software allows you to create an instant community that members can join and participate in. Our community software makes the process of starting your own site site fast and easy. The look of the site can be fully customized to your needs, whether it be a minor change or a completely different design. Take comfort in our company’s strong reputation for great quality and support, knowing that you’ll be in good hands!

Xaraya - (free)
Xaraya is a cutting edge open source framework (written in PHP) on which developers can create sophisticated web applications and designers enjoy considerable flexibility. Selected features of Xaraya are Modular design, Stable, extensive API, Fully internationalized, and XML based templating with BlockLayout But you don’t have to take our word for it…

Xoops - (free)
OOPS is an extensible, OO (Object Oriented), easy to use dynamic web content management system written in PHP. XOOPS is the ideal tool for developing small to large dynamic community websites, intra company portals, corporate portals, weblogs and much more.

YACS - (free)
YACS is an open source, open-standards web dynamic system based on PHP and MySQL with a focus on best practices and code quality. The YACS product has a straightforward and modular component architecture that covers most common needs of demanding web masters. By design, YACS makes an efficient usage of computing and networking resources, and it allows for several kinds of extensions.

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Tips for Viral Success For The Online Social Networker

Are you aware of the importance of viral success? If the term doesn’t mean anything to you, you’d better get on top of learning about your marketing or you’re never going to make it in the world of dog-eat-dog Internet business. Viral marketing is a term that refers to the way that a marketing campaign is picked up and spread around the world, or at least around the Internet, creating success for a business. Like a virus, word about the business spreads. Viral success is a critical component of business success in today’s world, so you should know the strategies for it if you’re hoping to succeed.

Some of the strategies for viral success include:

(1) Move People to Feel Deep Emotions

The most important step in viral marketing is to strike up emotions in people. Whether that emotion is:

· Laughter

· Love

· Hate

· Anger

· Excitement

· Compassion

· Deep Interest

· Feeling That Someone is an Idiot (not an emotion but this works)

Stop trying to please everyone with safe content and try get people excited, agitated, or laughing. Get people’s blood pumping and get those Diggs.

Note: Allow people a place to comment to vent their emotions:

When people are feeling emotions, they want to talk about their feelings with other people. Make sure that you have a place for people to make comments on your article. That is why blog software is perfect for viral marketing. Don’t delete negative comments unless they border on abusive.

(2) Social Bookmarking and Social Networking

Social bookmarking. Of course! What better way to spread the word about your work than through sites that are specifically designed for users to spread the word about what they like. Make the most of social bookmarking by getting your content on the best, most appropriate, sites on a regular basis through a targeted social bookmarking campaign. If enough people pick up on your content through these tools, you can see viral success just from this alone. I wrote an article on ‘Boosting Your Traffic Through Social Networking Sites’ that should help you if you want further help on this topic.

Tip: Take a Multi-faceted Approach.

Even if you do see viral success from social bookmaking, you’ll want to take a multi-faceted approach to your marketing to reach the broadest audience. Some people like to read articles. Others like to watch videos. Still others have their attention caught best by the blogs they subscribe to. Use a multi-faceted approach to reach more people (and then use social bookmarking for all of these things to spread the word further and more quickly).

(3) Tap into the Viral Power of Celebrities or Popular Fads

The idea is very simple. Take advantage of the popularity of a celebrity, fad, newsworthy story, or other highly searched keyword. For example, writing an article about Britney Spears has a higher chance of viral success than an article about dog farts. The below tools will help you find out what the most popular searches are for that day, week, month, and year.

· What is popular today from Google Content - http://current.com/topics/76253632_google_current?sort=currentness

· Google Trends -
http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

· Ask.com Top Searches -
http://about.ask.com/en/docs/iq/iq.shtml

· Lycos 50 -
http://50.lycos.com/

(4) Sequels of Successful Content

Many webmasters make the mistake of not trying to take advantage of past successful content launches. If you created an article that was hugely successful then you should try making sequels of that article. You can post a Part II, Part III, etc. with useful tips, tools, or further in depth coverage of the same topic. Some ideas for additional things to add to a topic are:

· Online related resources

· Useful tools

· Real world examples

· Video follow-ups

· Discussions about the comments you received regarding that topic

· Extras or goodies

· Post about other articles on the net with opposite views from you and argue the topic

· Interview someone with experience on the topic who has your view

· Interview someone with experience on the topic who has an opposing view and argue your case

(5) Sex Sells

If your target market is male, half naked women will really get you far. Sex is known to sell everything from beer, cigarettes, guns, cars, and everything in between. Although sex has nothing to do with any of these things, it peaks the male viewer’s attention enough to listen to or click through to whatever you are promoting. I don’t use this tactic, but I know that it works.

(6) Offer Something Free

Offer people something valuable for free to get people to come to your site. For example, there are plenty of people who are hungry for useful information on specific topics such as “How to Drive Traffic to Your Site” or “How to Start an eBay Business”. When people are desperate for information, it is easy to get them to download a free ebook. If one person reads your ebook and it is helpful to them, they will tell everyone about it. You will soon have a huge number of people coming to your site to download your free ebook. Of course there will also be people who send other people to your ebook. How will those people know about your web site? They will know your url because your will plaster your url all over that ebook so that people who get your ebook from someone else will visit your site. Essentially, it is one huge advertisement for your site…unless your ebook is a piece of junk. Make sure to write valuable content that actually is helpful to readers, or nobody will send it to anyone else or add a link to your site.

(7) Video

Video is one of the hottest things on the web today so you should be incorporating it into your site. If you create a video that evokes strong emotions, people will share it and share it faaaaaaaaaaaaaast. That’s the essence of viral success. You will know quickly if your video clip is a success. Make sure that you have plenty of CPU and bandwidth available on your server…or it will crash and crash hard.

What sites should you submit your videos to?

At the minimum you should list your videos on YouTube.com, Google Videos, and Digg.com but there are other alternatives that you should submit them to if you have the time. Here is a list of alternatives to YouTube. I suggest that you take a look at these sites to see which ones are worth while for you. You should also submit your videos to the normal social bookmarking sites as well.

(8) Improve Your Content

Don’t have content for content’s sake. There’s been a big push recently to get as much content as possible on websites so that search engines see keywords in that content. But as users get savvier about the web, they are getting increasingly interested in the quality of content. It’s easy for them to just click away if your content isn’t good, so make sure that you’re not sacrificing the content just to get the right tags and quantity of content on the site. No one is going to spread the word about content that is bad.

(9) Text (SMS) Messages

People these days love to text one another so give them something short and easy to remember to text to others. Brand yourself with a great phrase that reminds people of who you are and what you do; your own slogan if you will. Make it text-worthy and brief and you’ll see your name cropping up in conversation.

(10) Forwarding Emails

According to a study done by MarketingSherpa, the top viral marketing strategy used by B2C companies in the US last year was email forwarding. I find this hard to believe, but I will explain to you what the process of viral email forwarding is:

You have received email forwarding campaigns before. I get them from my Mom, my Dad, My husband’s Grandmother and his Mother, as well as many of my friends. These are emails that have been forwarded from one person to another to another to another and so forth. Usually the ones from my family are emails that say things like “Don’t honk your car horn because there is a murderer out there who will shoot you if you honk your horn”. Do you get those too? I consider forwarded email junk and throw these emails away, that is why I am not the best person to explain email forwarding to you since I hate these campaigns. The great thing about email forwarding campaigns is that they can continue to accelerate as new groups of people are exposed to the campaign.

How Do I get people to forward my email to other people?

· The only way that someone will forward your email to other people is:

· There is a mutual benefit for them to send the email to others.

· Person shares your interests and thinks their friends will be interested as well

· Email has a great deal or free item.

· Upcoming event that they would like to share with others

· Scare tactic (like the above example) – please don’t do this.

(11) Use Signatures with Your Sites Info at the Bottom of Every Email

Every email that you send out should contain a signature. A signature is at the end of your emails and should look something like this:

Rachel Goldstein
Social Networking Articles
Social Networking & Social Media Articles
http://www.socialnetworkingarticles.com/
rgold@socialnetworkingarticles.com

You probably won’t get a ton of traffic from this but you never know when someone will see your signature and give you the big break that you have been hoping for. Every little bit helps.

(12) Networking on Message Boards, Chat Rooms, and Community Sites

Message boards and chat rooms attract individuals in need of advice. Take advantage of this. Just make sure not to blatantly market your services. This might infuriate people and you could get flamed or kicked out among other things. The way to network in this situation is to be as helpful and knowledgeable as you possibly can. If you are in a graphic design message board and someone is baffled about how to use layers in Photoshop, you could explain the process. You could maybe mention that you use Photoshop daily when running your design business. THEN at the bottom of the page use a signature.

Tip: I suggest searching the forums in your niche for specific articles that you have just written. This way you can say things like, ‘I just wrote about the topic of your question, take a look at this article.” However, you have to be established in that forum for a while before you try that or people will think you are spamming (I know because I run a large forum and I catch people doing this all the time. I don’t mind if they are already established and offer help to people who need it.)

(13) Become an Expert in Your Niche Market

There are Question and Answer sites all over the Internet. By offering answers on these questions, your name (and url) will get around quickly. Some Question / Answer sites are:

· AllExperts.com

· Yahoo Answers

· Answers.com

· Experts Exchange

· Wiki Answers

· MyLot

· CareerBuds

There are many more similar sites, and I will most likely link to them in an article later on.

(14) ‘Invite Friends’ or ‘Send Article to Friends’ Button

Placing a ‘Send Article to Friends’ button on your articles is always a good idea. Webmasters don’t use these types of buttons as often as they used to because of social bookmarking sites. However, if you have room on your article pages, I suggest that you place both social bookmarking and ‘send article to friend’ buttons.

On the front page of your site you should place an ‘Invite Friends’ button. If you have room to place it elsewhere, I suggest that you do that too.

(15) Submit Mini Articles to Article Banks

You want original content on your site so that you don’t get busted by Google for duplicate content. However, you still want to get your site’s url out on the net. My suggestion to you is to write great content for your own site and never send these articles out to article banks. My suggestion is to keep those great articles on your own site and write mini-articles to send out to article banks. At the bottom of the article, you can write the url to the full article. If this isn’t allowed, then you should write the full url in your signature. Make sure to utilize the signature with information about your site and list your urls.

I think this is all that I have in me for today…I will have to write a part II of this article at a later time.

Think of viral marketing as putting your name on the lips of the people that you want to talk about you. Basically, give them something worth talking about – in the form of good content – and give them a way to do it – through a social bookmarking site – and you’ll see viral success.

Technorati Tags: viral networking, viral marketing, viral success, tips for viral success, social networking, social network, marketing, networking, social media, social bookmarking, video, video clips, networking online, viral success online, online social networking

Tips for Boosting Your Traffic on Social Networking & Bookmarking Sites

There’s a good chance that you’re already on one of the major social networking sites. You reconnect with former school friends on Classmates.com. You keep track of all your social contacts on MySpace. Or maybe you have a networking of professional contacts on a site such as LinkedIn. But are you harnessing the power of those social networking sites? Are you using them to direct traffic to your own site? If not, you could be missing out on a big opportunity for increasing your site traffic and generating attention to your site. Here is an article introducing you to the basics of social networking and what it is.

So What Are Some Ways That I Can Utilize Social Networking and Social Bookmarking Sites For Traffic?

(1) Utilize Your Existing ‘Real’ Friends

One great way to use social networking to increase traffic is to get all of your friends on a particular network to support your content on other sites. For example, you might post an article to a major social bookmarking site such as Digg or Del.icio.us. Then you can send a message to everyone that you know on your social networking sites asking them to take a minute to support your post on the bookmarking site. You can even encourage them to have their network support you as well. This increases your credibility on the social bookmarking site (because you’re getting a lot of Diggs on Digg for example) which will draw attention to your content there and send traffic to your site. **tip** If you are able to, organize an article post time so that your friends can digg, tag, or stumble your article within a 24 hour period (preferably within the hour). A site called exchangemytags.com will be useful for this task. Keep your eyes on exchangemytags.com which will be launching very soon.

(2) Make Friends with Strangers to Make a Large Network of Connections

Of course, you can also use social networking sites to make connections with complete strangers. This only works for some people because users tend to be wary of networking with complete strangers. However, if you develop a strong profile and a pitch to users of the networking sites, it can work. This is best for people who have a niche market that they want to work with. For example, if you work in the music industry, you can make friends with bands on a site like MySpace music; they’ll be interested in networking with you because it can be a mutually beneficial situation. Then you can use your increased network to drive traffic to your site.

(3) Bookmarks on Social Bookmarking Sites

Yesterday I published a blog entry with a few hundred social bookmarking sites. You need to utilize this list in order to submit your links and articles to these sites in order to utilize the strongest source of potential incoming links. Believe me when I say that it works. If you work hard enough at it, you can get more people coming to your site than from Google. At the minimum, you need to utilize the most popular social bookmarking sites which are:

Backflip

BlinkBits

Blinklist

BlogMarks

BlueDot

De.lic.ious

Digg

Diigo

Facebook

Furl (Looksmart)

Google Bookmarks

Magnolia

MyWeb Yahoo

Netscape

Netvouz

Newsvine

Popurls

Reddit

Simpy

Slashdot

Spurl

Squidoo

StumbleUpon

Technorati

YouTube / Flickr (media only)

(4) Picture Perfect

You may not realize it, but by passing on uploading your picture, you are also passing on an opportunity to get more people clicking on your articles. Why? Well, for one, it is known that spammers never take the time to upload a picture. Second, it is called ’social’ networking and ’social’ bookmarking sites. If you are trying to be ’social’ then you should put a face to your name.

(4a) Get a Funny or Extremely Cool Avatar for Your Picture

A great way to get pictures to click on your articles is by using a funny or extremely interesting picture as your avatar. You are trying to get people talking about you and your avatar so take this seriously. Find or create an avatar that matches your personality and one that is either very humorous, super weird, or just really cool. I found a lot of funny avatars and avatar tools on the following sites:

Avatarist

Avatars DB

Forums Extreme

A Parody Image Generator (really cool for avatars)

Gizmos (You can animate yourself talking)

Create My Picture (You can create a picture a cartoon face for an avatar)

27 Avatar Makers from Mashable

(5) Dress Up Your Profile

Think of your social networking profile pages as ‘real’ web pages … because really they are. Profile pages get spidered by search engines and they have links to other pages on the net, just like any other web page. You can utilize this profile to promote your web sites as well as your profiles on other social networking sites. For example, if I have a profile on MySpace, StumbleUpon, and LinkedIn, then I will want to link to:

• StumbleUpon and LinkedIn from MySpace
• StumbleUpon and MySpace from LinkedIn
• MySpace and LinkedIn from StumbleUpon

Not only will this increase the number of hits that I get on my profile pages via search engines and direct clicks, but it will also increase the number of friends that I have. The more friends that I have in my network, the more popular my profile and articles can become.

You should also add content and fill out information on your profile to show that you are an avid member. Add keyword relevant content on your profile page without being ’spammy’ about it. This will help with internal searches and possibly also with Google and other search engines. You can add content relevant feeds to some profiles with rss2image and other services.

(6) Add Social Bookmarking Buttons / Widgets / Chicklets

You might not like the way that they look, but I have to admit that social bookmarking buttons are what get me the most traffic. I use a service called AddThis, and it works great for me. Here are more social bookmarking widgets and tutorials that might help you:

3Spots

Add to Any

Add to Any Bookmark

Add to Bookmarks

Apostolos Dountsis Social Bookmarks Plugin for WordPress

Badged.net

Beautiful Beta: Dynamic Rollover DHTML Social Bookmark Buttons

The Bookmarketer

Bookmarkz!

Blogger Social Bookmarking Tool

Buttonr.com

Darxr.net: Social Bookmarks Sidebar Widget for WordPress

Dashboard Widgets

Easy Wordpress Widget for Social Bookmarking Sites

Ekstreme: Social Bookmarking Submission Code

Gath Adams: Build Your Own Social Bookmark Widget

GrayWolf’s Social Bookmark Scripts & Widgets

iFeedReaders

Oscandy: The Multiple Social Bookmarking Widget

Manhattan Service: Social Bookmark Tool

OnlyWire

Pheedo

PopMarks

Postli

PunchCard Manual

Romlet

Socialbookmarker

Social Bookmarks 3.1

Swicki Builder

Shout List Icons

Social Bookmark Script: Web 2.0 Optimierung

SocialBookmarkIt

Socialize It

The Socializer

Tips n Tricks Social Bookmarking Buttons

Top Ranks Social Bookmarks Creator

WebCosmo

WpBlogBMLet

WidgetBox: Ultimate Social Bookmark

WP Plugin: Gregarious

YouFame.net: Social Bookmarking Widget Generator

Your Minis Social Bookmarking

YourMinis: Web2Bar

Your Minis: Web2Bar

(7) Leave Valuable Comments and Reviews

You might not like taking the time to leave thoughtful reviews and comments, but this is what needs to be done to be a successful social networker. Think about it, don’t you like people more when they are nice to you? I know that I like someone much better when they say nice things to me, especially when they are saying nice things about the articles I wrote or the site that I designed. Try only writing comments that you really mean, don’t be insincere, people will see right through the smoke.

(8) Tag Effectively

Make sure to take your time and tag your articles and sites effectively. These tags / keywords are how people find you. Take some time out to see how other people are tagging and copy methodology that seems to work.

(9) Titles That Catch the Reader’s Eyes

Unless people find your article’s title titillating , they won’t click on it. Even if your article is just so-so, if you spin the title in a way that makes it sound exciting, you will get people to click through to read it.

(10) Content is King

Nothing is more important than content. If you are a good writer and you write about interesting topics, you are going to do well on the social networking sites. People seem to like top 10 lists, top 20 lists, etc. I suggest that you look at digg.com to see what gets the most diggs. I have failed multiple times on getting a post digged or stumbled, even when I thought that it was the best article ever. You don’t always win.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS THAT YOU KEEP AT IT AND DON’T GIVE UP … YOU WILL SUCCEED!

Technorati Tags: social networking, social bookmarking, increase traffic, social networking traffic, social bookmarking traffic, traffic strategies, social networking strategies, social bookmarking strategies, social media, web 2.0, stumbleupon, digg, de.licio.us, networking, linkedin, myspace