Our final analysis of internet marketing and social networking tools focuses on “linkbait” and how you may make your site “linkable” and clickable to the wider community of daily web visitors. We’ll also review digg, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us, and a few other internet tools.

A top suggestion is to use your person-to-person skills and visit, comment on, and even contribute to blogs that you enjoy reading. In this case, I don’t mean doing a drive-by comment, but I mean you actually take the time to understand this person’s platform, to provide helpful comments, suggestion, or criticism, to subscribe to their feed, or to otherwise engage with the blogger: seriously consider the blogger as a business associate. You never know the results of this type of networking, particularly with influential bloggers in your industry or field.

If you are already contributing to a blog or if your website has regularly updated links, you’ll want to “digg”, “stumble”, and send your links to del.icio.us.

There are a number of web visitors who get most of their news through news readers, through pre-set alerts on certain subject keywords, or through aggregators. Being specific in every item that you post, including keywords or search engine phrases, will help interested parties “find” you.

Digg

www.digg.com
Digg is a community of users who “tag” interesting news or links with notable content. Because you may see at a glance how many “diggs” a link has received, you may use this site to get an inkling of the zeitgeist for the current Digg community, as voted by the users. There is no censoring, editing, or “gaming the system” at Digg, so you receive a good list of current items that people have collectively contributed their opinion on.

I use this to find links that I might not have been exposed to or heard through my usual chnanels. You may also search on a specific keyword to see what’s “Digg-worthy” in the web and blogosphere for your industry, field, specialty, or particular contact.

StumbleUpon

www.stumbleupon.com
StumbleUpon is a toolbar that allows users to find sites, videos, and photos that other people have deemed worthy to visit, based on your specific interests. StumbleUpon learns based on patterns, so if you’ve tagged something that you like, it will adjust and send you more and better-targeted recommendations.

The toolbar goes on your web browser (it’s a free download) and allows you to use it to play a more randomizing game of finding interesting links based on your own self-directed interests.

Del.icio.us

www.del.icio.us
Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site: you may use their toolbar or go directly to the site to save your bookmarks, tag them and find them again. There is also a toolbar addition (another free download) so you may post a link that you visit directly to your bookmarks list.

I have found this tool helpful when I travel and when I switch from one machine to another: it’s an easy way to keep my bookmarks on the net instead of locked up on my own hard drive.

The site is also an interesting way to find links that have been bookmarked by multiple people according to specific keywords. Check the popularity of your post or export a del.icio.us “RSS feed” to your own site, displaying your own links (helpful if you manage large lists of links on many different subjects).

Additional Tools to Consider

Your own blog.
If you are professional, or at least if you believe in your products or think that you’re pretty good at what you do, you’ll want a blog. You may set this up using a hosted service; however, Jakob Nielsen the king of usability, says that “having a weblog address ending in blogspot.com, typepad.com, etc. will soon be the equivalent of having an @aol.com email address or a Geocities website: the mark of a naïve beginner who shouldn’t be taken too seriously.”

I highly recommend you invest in the $10 for a domain and $50 for hosting per year, and get a blog installed, either Wordpress, Movable Type, or Typepad. There are a number of resources on the web, as well as experts who will install these tools for you.

Blog posting is automatic trust-building (if you’re a trustworthy person) and gives you an extensive, categorized, searchable platform to share your knowledge, information, and inside scoop in your field.

With quality blog posts, you provide yourself with some fodder for talks you may give, a book you may put together, or a presentation for your next trade meeting or conference.

E-mail Signatures as Advertising
With so many e-mail that you send and receive, it makes sense to add a one-line “pitch” about what your company offers. I add it to my e-mail signature as Website Design :: Business Solutions. Because it’s always there, people may always find me. I also use “minority owned web design” and get a number of matches from that. These are nice phrases for what we do, and it gets my message for supporting minority women in business (and all women in business) out there.

An Opt-In Mailing List
I despise nothing more than spam, but listserv e-mail ranks pretty high up there, as well as e-mails where my name is in the To: line along with everyone else’s name and e-mail address (no wonder I get so much spam). I prefer my name to be BCC’ed and hidden from everyone.

If you are sending out messages for your company or organization, make sure to offer a way to opt-in AND opt-out. This way, you may cull your list of bystanders or un-interested people… and you only maintain a list of people who love what you’re doing and are happy to see your message in their in-box. NOTE: I recommend you refrain from sending excessive announcements or PR reports. Once a week is a bit much, in my opinion, unless it’s statistics or a report that I’ve expressly requested. I think every three weeks is good: perhaps once a quarter would work if you don’t have frequent news.

Always offer a way for people to update their e-mail address or to change their contact information on file with you. Nothing is more frustrating to me then trying to unsubscribe multiple ways and multiple times, with no change or no response from the organization.

Referral Lists
Women entrepreneurs are champions for working together to cross-promote each other. An excellent example of this is BNI bni.com, where non-competitive individuals join together to expand the referrals and resources available to their clients. For example: insurance, home mortgage, and financial planners always work well together. Graphic designers, web developers, and printers also work well together.

To compare this to your situation, think of a circle of related careers that you may belong to, then find a way to cross-link to those associates: all of you will benefit. You might add their business cards to a binder of materials in your office. Or, you might provide a link directory on your site of people you know and trust. You may also have person-to-person gatherings to find out ways you all may work together, both online and offline.

Take it Easy

Finally, I encourage you to relax. There are so many tools out there, with new ones popping up every single day. If you’re in business and you’re using the web to market your services, find a “groove” that matches your needs. I recommend using three or four channels from this series and targeting your message. By refining your approach, measuring your lead generation and understanding “soft data” on ephemeral qualities like reputation, authority, and “whuffie”, you enhance your understanding of your target market. You’ll prefer this over broadcasting wide and far and receiving low or no response.

My prediction is that, in the future, as more and more women start to use the web to promote their businesses, we will see a much more collaborative and open-ended (rather than competitive and proprietary) solutions. I look forward to it!

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