There’s a Blog in my Soup

Are you Using Social Bookmarks like a Pro?

When you add a social bookmark link, whether it’s one of your own or not, you are helping other people sort the web, so to speak.

By tagging each link that you submit, others looking for the same material are able to find only the best information on a given topic.

By building a network of friends, and working to expand your network as far as you can, you can in turn build your brand recognition, and your website’s traffic as well.

If you have really good content to share, or really targeted content, it will get shared between many different users. Don’t ever discount Social Bookmarking - it does work.

Now that you know what social bookmark links are - are you using them?

You should have a script or program setup where every page that you want traffic to is easily bookmarkable.

The best way to do this is add a script or plugin (if you’re using wordpress or another such blog platform). You can use third-party widgets two good ones are: AddThis and Sharethis

You could lose out on a huge amount of traffic and clicks to your website if you’re not using bookmark icons on every important page. Here’s a good video overview to make social bookmarking even more clear:

Social Bookmarking in Plain English:

Social Bookmark Strategy: Diversify.

When you do decide to add social bookmarking links to your blog or website, you absolutely must go big - add at least 10-20 of the most popular sites. The major ones include digg, stumbleupon, reddit, mixx, delicious.

You absolutely must build networks of contacts on these social bookmarking and news networks, the more the merrier because they will be able to see the links that you bookmark, and they will share them and it will make for something pretty darn exciting - if a web page goes viral on a social bookmark site it can bring as many as 50,000 hits over a 1 week period.

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My wife and I are planning on going on a roadtrip - to visit the top Blogger(s) in ALL 50 states. This is going to be a HUGE Blog promotion.  

Our Goal: Find & Interview the most popular / successful bloggers from all 50 states. (We might even choose 2 for some states. We will be doing an interview via text, audio, and video. If you prefer not to do audio/video that’s fine as well.

Photo Coureoousy of Hometown Invasion.

If we choose your blog, you will receive:

1. Permanent Blogroll Link.
2. Your interview will be taken in video, audio, and text formats - in order to gain the highest exposure. They will be submitted to ALL video / ipod networks.
3. You will also receive exposure in many blog posts leading upto the roadtrip.

What we need to make this a success:

Currently, our resources are a bit limited, as we are a new and growing blog. Donations via paypal would be greatly appreciated - they can be sent to: yourstruly AT patrickcurl.com - or you can click the button on the sidebar(Note: Paypal just doesn’t play fair with wordpress posts / pages) .

All donations of $20 or more will receive a 100+ word review. All donations of $40 will receive a 300+ word review.  All donations of $60 or more will receive a 500 word review, and a 6 month link on a blogroll labeled “Roadtrip Sponsors”.

Before we go we’re trying to raise enough money to buy a laptop, and a new video camera. If you would like to sponsor or donate one of those to us - we would make sure you’re on the list of stops, as well as receive a 1000 word review, and a permanent link on our Blogroll.

We could also use help in promoting this - if you could write a blog post about it, we would really appreciate it. Who knows - we may choose to stop by and interview you!

We are going to be doing a blog post each day, seeking bloggers from each 50 states - so stay tuned if you’re interested in being a part of this!

Other ways you can help us out:

1. Follow us on Twitter.
2. Subscribe to this blog.
3. Add me to your facebook friends.
4. Blog about this Promotion.
5. Send a link to this post to all of your twitter friends.
6. Bookmark this post.
7. Digg this post.
8. Stumble this post.
9. Sphinn this post.
10. etc… Do anything possible to get the word out. The more people we have in on this, the more exciting this will be. We may also visit a few locations on our way, and do mini-interviews on a bunch of bloggers.

PLEASE DO NOT COMMENT on THIS PAGE - IF YOU’RE RECOMMENDING A BLOG TO VISIT. I will be putting up a page for each state by letter, please comment on that state, and I will choose the best blogs from each state. (1 letter per day, actually.) Please do feel free to comment on your thoughts of this program.

I’m also thinking of having EACH Blogger contribute a ‘Souvenire’(spell?) and having a big contest when we get back. Let me know your thoughts. Comments are greatly appreciated!

Official Pages to Join:

• Bloggers in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas - Please Leave a Comment.
• Bloggers in California, Canada, Colorado, Connecticut - Please Leave a Comment.

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Twitter is a Monster of a Promotion Tool - Let’s Try an Experiment…

Over the past two weeks, I’ve learned a lot about maximizing twitter. Before, I didn’t know the point of Twitter, now because of Twitter, I’m getting steady traffic around 800-1000 hits per day. (Not too shabby after 15 days, being back up and live, and having roughly 30 blog posts so far.)

On top of the subscribers, the diggs, and the traffic - I’ve also met some wonderful people, found some interesting blogs, had some interesting conversations, and increased the conversation at my site. I’ve gotten a total of 88 comments on this blog, since March 17th.

March 17th was also the day my traffic began going up, up and away.

The next experiment is actually a Twitter Meme.

Goal: For each participant to receive the following:

1. More followers on Twitter.
2. More RSS Subscribers.

How this works:

1. Subscriber to my Feed. Via RSS, or Via Email.
2. Follow me on Twitter:  PatrickCurl
3. Put a comment stating that you subscribed & Followed. In your comment - provide your RSS FEED link, and your Twitter Profile Link.
4. Please follow / subscribe to those who have commented before you. If you like, you can come back regularly and subscribe to the new people on the list, it is highly recommended, but not mandatory.
5. Send this link out via Twitter, and See if we can’t get 100 subscribers / followers per person listed. (Here’s the tinyurl to make it easier: http://tinyurl.com/37k65m )
6. We would also ask that each person who joins this movement - write a quick blog post about it - and link to this post (as this is where all the subscription / follow links will be.)
7. You can also send out the blog link that you just wrote to Twitter, as well for added exposure.

As you can see this is a great way to promote your blog - but it is also an experiment, I’m excited to see the kind of momentum we can build on Twitter.

Other things you can do is stumble this post, digg it, sphinn it, favorite on delicious, etc…

Popularity: 100% [?]

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