Bookmarking Websites

If you’ve been taking heed of our previous Marketing Tips in the 101 series, you will have built up a very impressive rotation of various social networking profiles by now, each featuring a comprehensive profile representing your businesses’ online image and services available. You will be using forums and news sites on a daily basis, and don’t forget the sites of your suppliers that are an integral part of keeping your business up and running.

In your daily routine of updating your company online, book marking websites are something to be considered as their purposes to you are two fold; firstly, you can build yet another profile and get in contact with customers who already use the service, providing them with yet another platform to make contact with you, but secondly, and most importantly, they can help you when it comes to organising the various websites you use regularly.

For example, Vizcom Design is a busy office. We usually have a lot of projects on the go at once, and most of that time, that serves as the content for the majority of our updates across our Facebook Page, Twitter account and so forth. But, if your own business has one main specific function, such as the fictitious roller skate shop ‘Wheels Of Steel’ (that was also featured in Marketing Tip #7), then there’s only so many times where you can talk about what products you’ve sold that day and what offers and promotions are currently running.

The key with using social networking websites to promote your business is to get a large amount of traffic flowing through your profile, following your page and visiting any links that you publish on your status, and they way you have to do this is by ensuring that your newsfeed stays fresh, relevant and entertaining. Constantly talking about sales pitches and promotions makes your feed extremely boring, and an annoyance to other uses of whatever platform it is that you’re using, so much so, that people may unsubscribe you so your boring updates stop clogging up their feed and stopping them from seeing more of what they want to see from others.

If you don’t believe me, log onto your Twitter account if you already have one, and type in ‘Search Engine Optimization’- make sure you use the American spelling. There will be literally thousands of users talking specifically about this topic, so look for the nearest user that is offering SEO as a business service, and follow them. I’ll give you a week before you’re sick to death of sales pitches and motivational mottos!

So now you have a collection of sites, which you can bookmark online and index them to fit in best with your current routine for your daily updating. You don’t have to make your bookmarks private, but it is a handy place to store the bookmarks online, so you can access them from anywhere- useful too if you discover a new website whilst on a computer other than your business one. After all, how many times have you visited a brilliant website and forgotten its name and any keywords in order to try and find it again?

Online bookmarking just makes your social networking a lot more organised. You can organise the addresses of your favourite sites into groups, such as ‘news’, ‘forums’, ‘customers’, ‘blogs’ and so on, and it’s up to your what bookmarks are available publically or hidden, for your eyes only- after all, if you find a site that’s particularly juicy and chock full of useful information, why share it with the competition? There’s lots of bookmarking websites out there, and if you have some time to invest, why not have a look at their homepages? Most have a recommended section full of the most popular bookmarks made for that day- perhaps one of those could be part of today’s blog posting?

The biggest of the social bookmarking sites is Delicious. Formerly known as Del.icio.us, and consisting of users recommended from the now defunct MyWeb, it was founded in 2003 and at the end of 2008, had more than 5.3 million users. You do need to create a Yahoo account first- which only takes a minute or so- unless you’ve already created one, and then you are taking through a step by step guide to upload the Favourites from your own PC and install the Delicious toolbar.

The toolbar allows you to add any Favourites you save throughout the day to your Delicious profile, allowing other users to see what you’ve been surfing through. Remember that you can set the account to include an element of privacy- if you’re searching through Great Aunty Maureen’s online album of her recent holiday in Skegness, you won’t want your potential customers to see that! Delicious is very easy to understand and it’s up to you what bookmarks you share.

Another popular bookmarking website is Diigo, which used to be known as Furl It (FURL= File Uniform Resource Locators, for you anoraks out there)., which unlike Delicious, privately archives a complete copy of
the HTML of each page that a user bookmarked, meaning that it could still be accessible even if it had been removed or edited. Users could also comment on sites that each other had Furled, allowing a more personal bookmarking experience through recommendations.

Other good bookmarking websites include Spurl, and Google Bookmarks, the latter you may want to add on to your existing Google profile- you just have to moment a to have a quick browse around each bookmarking site to choose which offers the best features and design to cope with your needs, and each offer slightly different features. Bookmarking websites also allow you the flexibility to save web pages to your account if you are using a computer other than your own- useful if you frequently find yourself on shared machines or in foreign climes.