#1 Social media. Social media works quickly and if you have a large following on any of the social media sites, you can generate a ton of traffic to your website quickly. The key is to create attention grabbing posts that arouse curiosity, make people laugh or stir up a controversy. You want to generate click through to your website.

Make the most of your social networking tactics and use technology to get the job done. For example, one StumbleUpon post can be integrated with both Facebook and Twitter profiles so you’re making waves on all three social sites at once.

#2 Article marketing. Article marketing works well when you concentrate your efforts on quality article marketing sites with large audiences. One well written and informative article, rewritten a few times, and submitted to a handful of directories can generate the traffic you’re looking for. Be sure to include a bio box that includes a call to action and a link to your website to motivate click throughs.

#3 Blogging. Post on your own blog or be a guest blogger on a blog with a large number of subscribers. Like social networking, if you offer an informative, controversial or entertaining post, you’ll have people clicking through to your website like mad. Of course, if you also promote this wonderful blog post(s) via social media, you can double your traffic results.

#4 Video content. It’s amazing how quickly a video can go viral. Like print content, videos that entertain, stir up a bit of controversy or offer tremendous value cause a buzz. They’re forwarded to friends and downloaded on laptops and mobile devices around the globe. A good video can generate all the traffic you need. Again, integrate a bit of social media to promote your video, blog about it too, and you can multiply your traffic results.

#5 Partnerships. Partnering with a relevant or compatible business can work quite well to generate traffic fast. The key is to come up with a mutually beneficial agreement. Find people in your industry that are willing to work with you and help each other drive traffic. A partnership may include guest blogging on each other’s sites, swapping advertisements or even promoting one another in your ezine.

It’s possible to drive a ton of traffic to your website fast. The trick is to have a plan in place, know your audience and your goals, and take action.

To your success!

Of course I’m not mean that we should totally ignore SEO and only focus on Social Media. Search Engine Optimization is more technical but it’s always good in keywords research, keywords targeting and attract free traffics for our website/blog. For long term advantages, we really need to look into it seriously and can’t ignore it’s importance.

Social Media on the other hand is very powerful and here’s some of my reasons:

1) Get indexed within 24 hours – Your brand new website/blog will get indexed by Google within 24 hours by using social media. See my posts:

• Power of Social Bookmarking – My Babymoon Travelling Information Guides
• Just A Casual Blogging

If you only focus on SEO and the new website may need to get up to 4 weeks or longer time to get indexed by Google.

2) Networking – I like networking and enjoy the online atmosphere. We can share ideas and goals with each others and people will also get to know you more personally. It gathers like minded people together in a community and we grow by learning from others ideas.

3) It’s kind of Viral Marketing – You can get very up to date information through social media. Twitter is a mini blogging that gives very updated information and once you put your information on to social media, it is shot to websites all over the world.

4) Broadcast – All you need to do is just to do a broadcast on all your social media sites and all your networks friends get the information you are trying to deliver. It’s a very easy way to drive traffic and without any spamming.

5) Branding – The last thing I love is social media helps in the branding. Branding is important in Internet Marketing and you don’t need to be the professional in your niche but you should be the authority in your niche. Social media is a great tool for branding.

Social media is closely related to Web 2.0 and therefore we must take note of the following when implement the social media marketing.

1. We must be a real user - Here we are not referring to get a robot to work for us. What I mean is to show your real interests and vote for your favourite or what you found interesting. If you are getting your staff to involve at social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg or Delicious, it’s important for them to focus on the topics or articles that they like so that they might not lose interest in social media.

2. Get involved in social media sites and understand them – We need to get involve ourselves in different top social media sites and to understand how the sites are working. It’s ideally to use it on a regular basis especially with the social bookmarking sites.

3. Focus on your niche – We might find some top sites like StumbleUpon or Digg drive many visitors to certain people. However, it’s always good for us to identify our niche and focus on sites that can drive correct traffic. Although focus on a niche might send fewer visitors, but those visitors will likely find the content more relevant and help to increase your conversion rate.

4. No control on them – We totally have no control on the results and also the results can’t be guaranteed. It’s just like we don’t have any control over the search engine rankings.

5. Digg is not the only social media site – Many people know the powerful of Digg and the Digg effect. However, Digg is not the only social media site and failure in Digg doesn’t mean that your website or campaign failure. We can always drive massive traffic from other social media sites.

6. Good contents not always mean good traffic – The main key is what is the social media users want at the particular site. Althought you have generate very good content but it doesn’t guarantee you the traffic and there might be very few users really picked it up.

7. No heavy pitching or selling – Many content sharing sites don’t allow advertising content and we should go light on selling or promotional messaging. Instead of writing about how great our products are, we should go for the benefits or features of the products.

8. Always offer value especially to your niche – Value means different things to different people. Same contents but always mean different value to users and we should always create content that offer value to our niche.

9. Participate personally in communities – It’s always essential for us to participate personally and engage with communities on social networks. Leaving comments on blogs and forums or joining groups on Facebook are good ways to build online presence and get people to notice about you.

10. Should also use other strategies – Don’t only rely on social media marketing. Other strategies like SEO, LSI or PPC Campaigns are also important to bring in the great results.

Before I go further, let me do some introduction about my new website. This is my brand new “one page only” website which the title is “Babymoon Travelling Information Guides”. Many of you know that my I named my two year old daughter “Baby Moon” and I found that “babymoon” has a wonderful meaning.

Babymoon – a vacation taken by couple that is expecting a baby in order to allow the couple to enjoy a final trip together. The main objective for Babymoon Travelling is to let parents have a relaxing and enjoyabe time while awaiting for the newborn.

I am about to finish writing a book on Babymoon Travelling, but to provide good valuable information to those who wishes to travel a babymoon holidays, I have this new website seeking your help to Share your knowledge, ideas as well as experiences you think should be in my book.

I published my website on 17th November and the next day it has get indexed by Google and ranked in first page. Last night I have submitted videos to youtube and my website get rank #1 today (22 Nov 2008).

*click to enlarge (result – 22.11.08)

Keyword – Babymoon Travelling (#1 & #4)

Keyword – Babymoon Information (#14)

Keyword – Babymoon Guides (#14)

Keyword – Babymoon Singapore (#13)

Enjoy the video – The baby in the video is my Baby Moon =)

So, now you might want to know how my “one page only” website get indexed by Google within one day and what is the secret behind? I would tell you that there is no secret, what I have done is very simple – Social Bookmarking! I have only done Social Bookmarking and please do not doubt about my answer. I have submitted my website to many social bookmarking sites and this is the result.

What’s my result of get rank within #20 of organic keywords search? I think you should know the answer – TRAFFIC! I get more than 200 visitors in one day right after my babymoon travelling website was published.

I hope you like my sharing and please participate in my Babymoon Travelling Information Guides. I will send you a FREE COPY for your participation and valuable time to make this a complete and meaningful ebook.

The logo is my lovely Baby Moon =)

Join my facebook group – Babymoon Travelling Information Guides

1. Participation generic amoxil levels – Actively participate at social sites such as StumbleUpon or Digg is a good way to increase your visibility and develop your brand recognition. You can maintain high submission volume so that your profile to become more familiar to other users and broad visibility will give you lots of opportunities for networking, which helps you along the way. But please remember, only submit good stuffs and don’t spam.

2. Continuous presence – Not only you need to actively participate, you also need to continuosly presence at social media sites. It is not a good strategy to actively involve with certain site and then disappear for few weeks and then back again. You might find the other users have unfriend you. It is good if you can make it a habit to get yourself involve with the social media sites everyday.

3. Joint ventures – Normally at social sites, people often vote because of the submitter and not the story. Do you have the experience that when your friends ask you for favour and you will help? This is exactly the same at social media and you need to take the initiative doing someone a favour and ask nothing in return. It’ll come back to you because this is the unspoken rule of reciprocation. Always think further and think about how you and the other user can collaborate in mutually-beneficial ventures.

4. Conversation – Keep in mind that conversation is a big part of social media. Communicate with others and you’ll learn new things. Conversation also an integral part of building relationship and make new friends. It will help to enrich your social media experience and always make it easy for others to contact you.

5. Value leads to trust – You should provide value in order to build a successful brand through social media. By providing value, you earn trust and your attention and brand grows. It then leads to greater benefits in the future in terms of traffic, reputation or connections.

Hope the above helps in building your social media profile and your online reputation.

Since this is a powerful strategy, why still have people who ignore the efficacy of social media? Basically there are few reasons:

1. they don’t know much about social media
2. they are interested but don’t know how to use it
3. they don’t believe social media strategy can bring values to their business

Let’s see the main benefits of social media for your website
Borrowed trust – Search engine will trust your website if your website receives a large number of natural, permanent links from trusted domains. A new website normally find it difficult to gain links from authority sites but a trusted domains make it easier for links to come in. Those trusted domains have some “certified” value and if the visitors come to your website through them, you gain the trust of search engine.

Referral traffic – Many people will claim that the social sites normally send them useless traffic because the bounce rate is high and visitors normally come to the website and click away. This is what happen normally but we shouldn’t ignore the referral traffic that social sites bring us. Referral traffic is the traffic that come to your website after they come across your content through the social sites. Since they have interested in your content at social sites, they tend to visit your website and come back to you again and again.

Why should practice Social Media Marketing?
1. It is low cost or zero cost – Compare to PPC, it is totally free if you done by yourself. If you consider to hire writers to designers to do for you, the returns still often exceed the cost.
2. Easily controlled – Social media traffic can be very easily controlled compare to search engine traffic. And the advantage is, once you have social communities, they can be a great source of web traffic.
3. Natural – The most important is you get natural links and your website is exposed to large groups of people.
4. Community specific – It’s an easy marketing method and usually community specific.

Community specific?
Social media marketing is characterized by communities and it allows users to do many or all of the following:

• Create profile
• Grow a network of friends or colleagues
• Collaborate with other community members
• Submit content
• Vote on content
• Tag content
• Comment on content

I hope by now you see the benefits of social media for your website and I’ll share with you more about social media. Subscribe to my RSS if you like my post and I invite you to join my community and grow your community as well.

Questions in my mind

• The purpose of social bookmarking sites are for people to bookmark their favourites, what and how should I do to promote my own site?
• Can I bookmark all of my posts?
• What is the correct ways if I want to bookmark my posts?
• How many social bookmarking sites should I have? Can I register as many accounts as I like?
• How to allocate my time at social bookmarking sites?
• Will I become a social bookmarking spammer if I bookmark too much?
• etc

I then tried to find from Youtube how people do social bookmarking and I really watched it for several times because I hope I can get any ideas how to do social bookmarking.

After I watched the video, I know how to social bookmark my favourites but those questions in my mind still have not been solved.

Until recently, I finally know what is the best practices of social bookmarking.

Best Practice of Social Bookmarking
Always bookmark good stuff – Good stuff like useful information or good websites that other people are interested in.
Bookmark frequently – Don’t just pharmacy open the accounts and post few things and then nothing else. Try to bookmark several times a day.
Bookmark new stuff – When discover new stuff, try to be the first to bookmark and share with others.
Don’t focus on one topic only - Bookmark on several topics because normal people are multi interested.
Comments on other people’s bookmark – Don’t just bookmark your own stuff, do comments on other people’s bookmark. However, it takes time.

And there are something we must remember

• Too active in social bookmarking is dangerous! Don’t be a social bookmarking spammer.
• Dangerous if you have multiple accounts from same IP address.
• Always use pen name for social bookmarking sites.

Social bookmarking is a powerful tool but we must be very becareful and not to become a social bookmarking spammer. Social bookmarking spammer will get penalise by Social Bookmarking sites and also by Search Engine.