When creating your personal profile page, be sure to include hyperlinks to your personal blogs, favorite articles, and website if you have one. This is an excellent opportunity to expand your marketing network to include other projects that you have going on at the time.
Step Four: Setting Up Your Personal Profile Settings
Nearly every social bookmarking service allows their members the choice of making their bookmarks available to the public or to keep it private (only for personal use/viewing). If you are joining a social network partly due to building a Internet marketing social network, then it is extremely vital to make your bookmarks public, so that other members in the social bookmarking community can visit, read, vote and leave comments on the websites and articles that you have discovered or liked.
Step Five: Getting To Know Your Surroundings
Before you start getting bookmark crazy, you should first take time and explore the social bookmarking community that you have joined. Checkout what other members are discovering on the Internet and take the time to visit, read, vote and leave comments on other members' bookmarks. Explore the forums and groups that many of these social communities have setup for its members to enjoy and interact with each other in. Just get to know who and what other people are doing, so that you will be in the know (in the loop) always.
Step Six: Make New Friends
One of the single most important steps to building and maintaining a successful Internet marketing social network is to make as many friends as possible. Social networking is all about your friends and how many quality friends that you are able to make in the longrun.
One of the best ways to make friends in social networks is to invite anyone to be your friend that has left positive comments on any of your bookmarks that you have added and introduced to the social network(s) that you belong to. Just don't get disappointed if not all of the people that you have invited to be your friend choose to make you their friend in return. Some members of these social bookmarking communities are not interested in making friends, because they are rather using these bookmarking services to replace the traditional search engines, so to discover new and exciting places to visit on the Internet.
Another good way to make quality friends (the kind of friends that will be most likely to visit the articles, websites, videos, games and movies that you discover and bookmark) is to invite any member in the community that routinely bookmarks subjects and topics that are of interest to you. Just remember, not everyone will be interested in making friends, so invite as many members as you are able to, to be your friend. Especially, invite any member who is interested in the same things that you are interested in or write or blog about on the Internet.
Step Seven: Get Personal With Your Friends
It is one thing to invite and make new friends, but it is something else entirely to make new friends with a personal touch. After you have made a few new friends make sure to send each of them a private message, just to welcome them into your friend's network. This type of personal touch makes your new friends feel special and leaves a good impression on them about you.
Step Eight: It's Bookmarking Time!
Now, that you have joined a social bookmarking community, setup your personal profile page, explored your environment and made a few new friends, it is time to start bookmarking your favorite websites, blogs, articles, videos, music and photos. Yes, you can bookmark your own blogs, articles and websites, but don't stop there - bookmark all of the places that is of interest to you whether it's yours or somebody else's.
Try to avoid bookmarking anything or place that contains adult content that children should not see. The places and things that you choose to bookmark will either reflect positively or negatively on your social reputation.
Step Nine: Building and Maintaining A Positive Reputation
As we discussed before, the reputation that you develop on the Internet and especially in the social networks that you are participating in is very important not to screw up. Some people believe that they can have it both ways, but once you develop a good reputation, and then reverse course the other direction, just kiss everything that you worked for good-bye. People do not like peopling who are mean, nasty, crude, or bookmark anything that would generally be unsafe to visit. Be nice and show respect for everyone even those people whom not nice to you. Just ignore those people are disrespectful and move on with your good reputation still intact.
Step Ten: Create or Join A Group
Most of the social networks on the Internet offer tools to its members, so that they can create or join a community group to get to know other members better. The groups vary widely in topics and subjects, but joining or creating one for you is an excellent way to make more friends. The best thing is that these friends share many of the same interests that you have and are more likely to want to visit your blog, website or read an article that you have written.
Step Eleven: Be Helpful
It is very important to be friendly and respectful to everyone that you meet in these social networks no matter if the people that you meet are nice to you or not. Be helpful and help other new members find their way around the social community when they need some help. Always invite anyone that you helped to become your friend as you and that person have already something in common. You both have established communication with one another in the form of helping each other in a time of need. People do remember the kindness of others, even if they say nothing at the time.
This concludes the second article in the series of five Internet marketing articles that are being written, so to help anyone wanting to learn Internet marketing basics and techniques. Bookmark this article for easy reference and subscribe to Nelson Doyle's RSS Feed, so that you do not miss out on the future articles in this series.
The third article will be published in the next couple of days.
