My Viral Blog

The face of the internet is changing and for many sites it will be time to make massive changes or face extinction, advertising and good content will not be enough to guarantee survival it will require a  lot more effort on the part of site owners in order to maintain traffic numbers and positioning on the search engines.

It will be important that site owners and webmasters ensure that evey piece of content on their sites is also registered on as many social networks as is humanely possible, the greater the saturation of pingbacks from the social networks the better they can expect their sites to perform, of course this means tons of extra work.

SEO and site submissions will fade in importance replaced by social bookmarking and good marketing practices, various forms of advertising will still be a strong influence in a sites prominence on the internet but without the addition of social linking sites will suffer badly in the coming year.

Socializing your site will entail a little more than simply installing one of the many social bookmarking scripts though, site owners and webmasters will need to establish a strong presence within each network, building friendships and groups of followers, these are extremely important as these same people will be the driving force behind your sites promotion and the root source of your sites traffic, initially you will need to establish your self within the network and it is a good idea during the first few weeks to post often but avoid any direct advertising of your sites, many networks will only allow advertising is certain locations and it is imperative you stick to their rules or face being banned.

When joining a network it is always a good idea to use your real name over an alias and where possible a photo of yourself (I suggest a good clear head shot photo over a full profile as it allows viewers to look into your eyes and establish a sense of trust).

Avoid making outlandish claims and avoid conflict at all costs, you can still prove your point with out getting nasty and gutter talk will upset more than just the person it's aimed at, be polite at all times and remember you are trying to build respect and trust, it will pay off in the long run as people begin to see you as a pillar of the society.

Once you have established your self within these communities it's time to look at ways you can promote your sites, my favourite is to include links within my signature as this will be seen in all areas of the network and in most is not deemed to be against the rules.

There are 4 main traffic areas in most social networks where you need to be very active these are

• The Network Forums.
• The Network Article section
• The networks Groups
• The Networks Blogs

Most networks also have a classified section however i would not waste time or money there as people generally visit a social network to meet people and gain information not to visit the classifieds (would you go to the swim pool to do your grocery shopping ?).

Posting articles in a social networks article system or blog system needs to be done right in most cases you will be allowed to use some html and this is very handy as it will enable you to put links to relevant articles on your sites within these postings, forums and group areas are normally controlled more rigidly and posting of links is generally frowned upon so you will need to rely on your signature to get people to your sites.

Performed correctly social bookmarking will rocket your sites value and turnover, it will expose your products and services to millions of users and with the launch in 2010 of Googles Caffeine search system and personalised search will see it gain page 1 on a regular basis across a much wider range of queries, You will be seen as an authority figure in your field and could even see approaches from other companies wanting you to feature on their pages and in their publications.

As a webmaster your New years resolution should be to become hyper active as a social networker and Survive the coming Netquake.

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