I have chosen to focus on promoting freeradicals.ning.com by harnessing the power of social bookmarking. There are many sites that offer this as a free service and I have chosen to use delicious.com and Yahoo My Web. Social bookmarking is the perfect solution to getting noticed on the internet, it works simply by letting you bookmark your web pages such as the home page to free radicals or a blog relating to the site and tag them with relevant tags such as ‘World, World Events, World news etc..’. Your bookmarks and tags are uploaded to the social bookmarking servers and these can be made visible by anyone. Other users of social bookmarking can now see my bookmarks and can rate them, the higher the rating the more hits you might receive on your website to which the bookmarks relate to.
Better still is that all common search engines such as Google and Yahoo use bookmarking sites when querying user defined searches. They do this because social bookmaking is user created and therefore seen as a creditable source of information. Therefore if someone was to search for “ways in which to change the world” in a simple search engine a result may pop up from a bookmark of mine relating back to my website. This draws more people to the site and therefore raises the chances of receiving more subscribers.
There are two simple buttons that feature on your web browser when you sign up to delicious, the first would be your tag button. I use this when I am on a page I wish to include on my delicious catalogue of bookmarks. The other button brings up your bookmarks with an option to search for specific ones you have tagged. Below shows a screen shot of my web browser with del.icio.us in operation.
To further increase my chances of being notice I also subscribed to Yahoo My web, similar to Delicious however I can import all my Delicious bookmarks over to My Web including their tags. Below shows my Yahoo my web in action.
Using a blog is a simple yet effective way in which to attract attention for your website. Even by writing this blog I am generating awareness of my website free radicals. When creating a blog it is important to tag them so that people searching for specific information stand the chance of coming across your blog which subsequently relates to your site. Every new blog can e viewed on a separate page from your main blog spot, therefore there is more potential for me to bookmarking them using my social bookmarking method. The more blogs and tags I include means the more social bookmarks I can add resulting in a greater chance of receiving hits for my site.
Another benefit of Social bookmarking is that others can use my bookmarks to use in their own list of favourites. Like a true Web 2.0 application Social Bookmarking allows users to generate the content. For example if a bookmark of mine relating to a debate about overpopulation on free radicals is regarded relevant to someone else, they may decide to bookmark it as a favourite amongst favourites. This results in your bookmark now being used by two users and therefore is now being displayed twice, greater increasing the hit ratio for Free Radicals. Advertising in such away can develop very quickly and your bookmarks can be spread amongst user to user creating an almost snowball effect. Eventually with enough bookmarks and enough tags my bookmarks may turn up in simple searches on common internet search engines.
Another way in which to market my web would be to look at new current trends in within the internet. Facebook for example has over the past year gone from a small social network to a seven and a half billion dollar e-business with millions of users from around the world. I could use this site to promote my free radicals site by simply creating a group and detailing my site within there. With the ‘create a group’ feature on facebook I could assign a name such as “Let’s change the World”. Within this group I can invite all my friends who in turn can add all their friends to the group and soon we would have hundreds of people aware of my site. As Sean Carton recently said on the Clickz Network http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3559851 was “The idea behind all these ventures is a good one: use the power of the Internet to hook people together to create content, share expertise, and provide checks and balances through social interaction”. Facebook would make good use of this because of its popularity on the internet; some groups made on the network by just everyday users have had group member numbers in the tens of thousands.
My Final method of advertising my site would be through getting involved in forums on already existing mediums relating to the subject matter of free radicals. Web sites such as the wwf.org, foe.co.uk, bbc.com etc all have their own community forums to which have people debate and argue about matters relating to specific issues. By signing up to these different sites I could use their forums to suggest that people who are interested in topics such as this and would like to make a difference should head over to www.freeradicals.ning.com where you can talk with others about similar issues and more. The only problem here is that people could perceive this as spam and essentially see me as hurting the existing community by advertising my site and put people off using the service in the first place. It is important to maintain respectability within a community therefore in order to spread the word of free radicals I would need to prove I am first of all interested in what the community has to say by offering my own opinions and responses to current debates. This would be a very long process getting involved on each of the forums and having a say but it is what must be done in order for my target audience to have any credibility in my own site. As Sean Carton adviced for e-business entrepreneurs, ‘Get ready to work, Make sure you have the budget and the institutional will to continue the project – indefinitely’.
