How to achieve success with Online Networking

Social networking and bookmarking is an often-overlooked and under-utilised area of search engine marketing. At UnderDesign we have identified hundreds of high-traffic, hugely popular websites from Facebook to Furl. These sites are great for getting lots of inbound links to your website for free and also for generating huge volumes of traffic as well as great search engine rankings.

Taking advantage of social networking and bookmarking

To take advantage of the huge popularity of social networking and bookmarking, you need to focus your efforts in one or more the three areas described below.
Creating your social networking and bookmarking accounts

The first area in which to concentrate is that of creating and configuring accounts for yourself and your business with all the relevant social networking and bookmarking websites for your business. Finding the websites can be a bit of a problem but there are always products and tools that can be bought for a very low cost or nothing at all. For example, at UnderDesign we have produced a list of just under 400 such sites that you can purchase.

Automating your website

The second area in which you might want to consider spending some time in is automating your website. This area does depend on having the time and the skills to carry out this work, or be able to pay somebody (like us!) to do it for you. There are two things that you want to achieve:

1. Set your website up so that you can automatically add new content such as blogs, news items, articles or stories and even events and online newsletters.

The quickest and easiest way of doing this is to have your website transferred or ported over to a Content Management System (CMS) based website.

Choose the right CMS and you will find that you can control virtually every aspect of your website using an interface that is as easy to use as Microsoft Word.

If you currently have to pay your website designer every time you want to change something on your website, you’ll appreciate just how much money you can save by making this change.

But, more importantly, once you can add, edit and manage your own website content, you will be able to turn your website into a dynamic, search engine friendly marketing machine!

2. Add functionality to your website so that every time you add new content - or edit or update your existing content, each of your social networking and bookmarking accounts are automatically updated and links to your new content are automatically generated.

So, in other words, every time you add a news item, write a blog or submit an article, your social networking and bookmarking accounts will automatically be updated with a link back to the new addition. This step is crucial because it achieves two things:
* It automatically creates at least 100 valuable, inbound links to your website, and
* It also creates immediate awareness of the new content on your website and potentially can drive thousands of visitors to your website quickly and easily with no further effort required other than adding the new content.

How easy it is for you to add this functionality to your website will depend largely upon the CMS that you transfer your website to. There are a number of options and each has it’s own pro’s and con’s. If you are unsure of which CMS to choose, feel free to get in touch with us for some friendly advice about the best path to take for your business.