Social Networking
My Space,
Facebook,
Linked In, and many others are social networking websites. Collectively they are homes to hundreds of millions of monthly visitors, all networking together for various reasons. Some do it to make online friends, others do it to market and promote their websites. As a webmaster, you'll want to use all of these (and others) to get the word out about your new site. It's about reaching a global audience of millions of users, and social networking is the current trend that can help garner some positive feedback and word of mouth for your website. If one community member loves what your site offers, it may soon spread like wild fire within the social networking community.
Social Bookmarking
You want people to love your website. You want them to love it enough that they'll bookmark it. Going a step beyond that, you want them to absolutely adore and love your website so much that they'll want to bookmark it for the entire world to see! Enter social bookmarking, a relatively new concept that has been gaining in popularity as more and more online users jump on the "sharing" bandwagon. Social bookmarking sites such as
Technorati,
del.icio.us, and
Stumbleupon allow users to publicly bookmark websites and share their bookmarks with other users. This "offline" bookmarking allows the user to visit the website at any time and from any location since it's not tied to the machine or application where the bookmark original was added. To get involved with social bookmarking, it's recommended you visit the sites mentioned and do a search online. It's easy to add the HTML code to allow the bookmarking integration.
Forums
Do you visit or participate in forum discussions regularly? If so, make sure to add a link to your website within your signature. A signature is the text that appears at the footer of messages you post in forums. Although each forum has different rules, in most of them you can add one or more links to self-advertise. Allowing the links in the footers helps to prevent forum spam and keeps you from getting into trouble. Their perfectly accepted and can actually be a good source of traffic, especially if you contribute to forums consistently.
