1. LinkReferral

It´s a hugely popular linking system, which lists registered members links according to subject categories. Each member has a chance to be reviewed and visited by others by providing a few reviews (and visits) in exchange. The system is simple and effective, especially if you are on tight budget. However, it´s not completely fair. For a fee of USD 35/month, you will be placed on top of all referred links - hence, gaining substantial traffic without having to spend time referring and visiting other sites.

2. Link Back Link

It´s a simple blog which promises to provide a link to your site in exchange for a backlink. It does not cost anything, plus the link comes with a brief review of your site.

3. Blogorator

It´s a little script that you can install in your sidebar. Visitors get a chance to rate your site. With higher ratings you get more visibility on blogorator. The tool seems not to have the same popularity as technorati (#1 for blogging promotion) or even zimbio, both reviewed earlier. However, due to its addictive and easy use, I predict that Blogorator has a nice future ahead.

I might add a few more free blog promotion tools to this blog in the future. If you are fond of some other alternatives, such as Blogrolling, leave a comment so that we could discuss it.

As an increasing number of businesses venture out into the realm of social media, an increasing number of platform options are begin developed for these businesses to choose from.  But with all of the options, how do you choose.  The key to this dilemma is fairly simple.  If you truly understand your target market, you can develop a tailored social media campaign around your user, thus choosing only the platforms that your users frequent.

The key to developing this tailored strategy is as I said earlier, “understanding your target market,” a concept that most companies think they know, but are often mistaken.  See if you can answer the following questions about your target market:

1. Who is your target audience?  Are the males or females or both?  What age range do the fall into?
2. What generation category do they fall under?  Millenials receive marketing messages a lot differently that Baby Boomers, and Gen Xers.
3. What does your target market like to do in their spare time?  Where do they spend their time on and off line?
4. When they are online, what websites or types of websites do they frequent?
5. What types of messaging do they respond the best to?  How do they preferred to be communicated with?
6. Why do they purchase your product/service?  What value can it bring to their life?
7. Why don’t they purchase your product/service?  Who do they go to instead?

If you can answer all of the questions above, then you are ready to begin to create a custom social media campaign for your business.  If you cannot answer one or more, of the questions above, you need to go back to the basics, and gather the appropriate amount of information needed to understand your target market.  Build our a demographic profile for each target market you chase after, and really try to understand who they are, and what they want from a company.

Once you fully understand your target market, use the answers to the questions above to guide you to the right social platform.  For example, if you are a company that targets college females, aged 18 to 25, then you want to look at platforms that speak to that demographic (i.e. facebook, twitter).

Lastly, the only way that you are going to learn about the platforms at your disposal, and which ones will fit your audience best, is to take the time to check out each platform on your own, research their demographic audience, and get to know their users.  Knowing and understanding the different platform options is just as important a knowing your audience, because if you don’t understand the platform you are using, all of your messaging could get lost in all of the “clutter” online.

I have recently found a great new tool that allows wordpress users to “ping” multiple search engines with updates about their blog/site, called Ping-o-Matic! “Pinging” these services notifies them that there has been an update to the blog that “pinged”. How each service handles the ping is different. Some simply create a list a recently updated blogs, others create connections between blogs.

Using ping-o-matic is simple. WordPress users automatically use ping-o-matic (ping-o-matic was created by two of the WordPress developers). On the Options/Writing tab on the Admin Screen, there is a field at the bottom labeled: Update Services. Inside this box the following URL is listed: http://rpc.pingomatic.com/. Keep that URL there and every time a new post is entered, all the above services will be notified.

The sites pinged by ping-o-matic include:

Weblogs.com
Blo.gs
Technorati
Feed Burner
Syndic8
NewsGator
Feedster
My Yahoo!
PubSub.com
Blogdigger
BlogRolling
BlogStreet
Moreover
Weblogalot
Audio.Weblogs
RubHub
A2B GeoLocation
BlogShares

Enjoy!!

There are many different blog promotion tools and web sites out in the social world today, but I want to introduce you to a neat new tool called Zimbio.  Zimbio is a complete content management, marketing, distribution, and social news site that can really improve your traffic by sending targeted visitors to your site and supplying a lot of one-way back links to your blog.

Zimbio’s mission is to “help bloggers become an influential player in how stories are created, shaped and shared online.”  This new promotion site enables contributors to build wikizines - interactive magazines that anyone can create or edit - with coverage of current events, cultural reference points, and niche areas of interest, making it easy for people to compile the web’s most relevant and dynamic content into easily-searched topics, so readers can find and react to the full story from multiple perspectives.

“Zimbio seamlessly blends the best of traditional media, participatory journalism, and proprietary technology,” says a representative from the company.  “Stories and rich media from traditional news sources live along side blogs, commentary and opinion articles written or posted by readers’ peers in a new media platform, the wikizine — an interactive magazine that anyone can create or edit.”

Zimbio contributors actively compile personal posts and the most salient and up-to-date content from across the web into a network of wikizines. Contributors can create new wikizines in minutes, shedding light on ideas and stories not well covered by traditional outlets.

Just one more easy to use tool to help bring your blog the traffic it needs!

In an age where social media has taken over the online communication stream, one of the most common complaints that I hear is that there are very few all encompassing social media platforms, that allow users to post content to multiple social media sites from one location. Currently, if you do not utilize an aggregator platform, such as Plurk.fm, you can spend hours logging in to all of your social media platforms, and interacting with your audience. This can cost companies time and money, and it is definitely not the most efficient technique for managing social media campaigns.

One solution, that I recently discovered, is utilizing google gadgets, applications that can be downloaded to a customized google homepage, that allows users to monitor and engage in a variety of social media networks from the comfort of one web page. Currently, these are the social media network google gadgets that I could find:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Myspace
• YouTube
• Flickr
• Digg
• Delicious

These are just some of the applications that I use. Are there other google gadgets or social media aggregators that you like to use? Send us your feedback.

One of the fastest ways to promote your blog is to submit it to social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, and Furl.  The problem with social bookmarking is it can be very time consuming IF you don’t know where to look to find the toll that can cut your time if half….the tool I am writing about is Social Marker, a free service designed to reduce the time and effort needed to socially bookmark a website.

Social Marker is a service designed to aid in the process of submitting websites and web pages to social bookmarking and social news sites like Delicious, Reddit, Digg and Stumbleupon to name a few.  They allow you to select up to 47 different bookmarking services of your choice to submit your articles to.  The only catch is you have to sign up for accounts at all of the bookmarking services you want to use before using Social Market to post you articles to them.

Social Marker works by having you add their bookmarking icon to your bookmarks toolbar. When you find a web site or article that you want to bookmark, all you have to do is click the little icon and then you are taken to the  Social Marker website where the article/page’s information is pre-populated into a form located at the top of the screen. Once you verify that all of the information is correct, you have the opportunity to choose which social bookmarking sites you want to submit your content to.

When you click submit, you are then taken through each of the different bookmarking services you selected to submit your content. Once you click submit on the bookmarking site, you will then be taken to the next site that you selected, and so on. All in all it is a really easy way to submit your content to multiple sites online!

Today I want to introduce you to one of my favorite tools for blog disbursement and measuring interaction: HootSuite. HootSuite is the ultimate Twitter toolbox, allowing users to manage multiple Twitter profiles, add multiple editors, pre-schedule tweets, and measure your success.  This easy to use platform lets you manage your entire Twitter experience from one easy-to-use interface.

Creating an account is super easy, just enter your Twitter username and password, and add a profile for each Twitter account you wish to manage. All of your profiles are displayed in the dashboard, with tabs for Sent, Pending, @Replies and DM inbox, so you don’t have to constantly log in and out of multiple profiles to manage your accounts. You can also click on any of your individual profiles to do all of the above, plus monitor your feed, see sent DMs, and explore profile stats.

HootSuite provides their own metrics for this platform, by utilizing the ow.ly URL shortener to track click-throughs on your links and to monitor which messages perform best with your followers. Visit the Stats tab to monitor total clicks for each Twitter profile.  All in all this is a great tool to promote your new blog posts and drive traffic to your web site or blog.

iVillage, started in 1995, is one of the oldest sites among this lot. It is today one of the best destinations for women providing content on health, pregnancy, beauty, style, among others. You can create your profile, blog, group, and share pictures, videos, and messages among your friends on this site. There are thousands of message boards on varied topics available. You will also find a section on weddings complete with bridal fashion, style, reception and planning, etc. Finally, there are also sections on dating, online courses, and shopping.

iVillage is the leading online destination for women with approximately 16 million unique visitors a month. Annually iVillage records almost 4 billion page views as of December 2007.  The wide network of channels at iVillage.com include Health, Diet, Pregnancy & Parenting, Beauty & Style, Home & Garden, iGo Green, Food, Weddings, Love, Entertainment and more. Additionally, they offer Astrology.com, the #1 source for daily divination content, GardenWeb.com, with the oldest and most engaged web community on any subject and Science Daily, covering over 300 topics including health & medicine, mind & brain, plants & animals, space & time, etc.  This is THE online community to engage with & build relationships with intellegent, powerfull, like minded women.