The incredible power of tagging
In addition to creating RSS feeds, one of the great things about sites like Squidoo is that you're allowed to add "tags" for your entries. This lets you to take advantage of one of the fundamental aspects of human nature: that we're all inherently lazy.The general Joe Bloggs inhabiting Squidoo land won't think too much about the tags he adds to his material and will mostly likely only add one or two very general tags, as will everyone else.
That means most people are "competing" for a handful of very general tags.
However, if you come along and add a more detailed three-word keyword phrase as a tag (a keyword phrase that you'd like to rank on), then there's a good chance that you'll find your material appearing in the search engines for that phrase.
For example, if you've tagged your Traffic Travis review on Squidoo as "Traffic Travis Review," your Squidoo lens might well appear in Google as "Traffic Travis Review on Squidoo".
These types of phrases are often searched for within the network itself as well.
The benefits of interacting with Web 2.0 sites
It's important to realize that Web 2.0 sites are self-sustaining networks. This means they use their own algorithms to determine which sites they should make more prominent in the network. Sometimes it comes down to how many backlinks you have, but a huge part of how your value is judged comes down to the internal factors of the site.Remember that these are social sites so don't just put up content and walk away - to get the most out of Web 2.0 sites you need to be an enthusiastic participant, commenting on other pages, voting on other sites and add friends.
For every action you take, you get a link back to your page, and the system recognizes that you're active on the site and favors you accordingly.
Everything you do produces a benefit - that's the fundamental difference between Web 2.0 sites and the sites of old.
Promoting your promotions
In the previous lesson we saw how to promote your own websites by creating networks of backlinks. But this isn't the be-all and end-all of web 2.0 marketing. Don't overlook the usefulness of promoting the sites that are promoting your affiliate sites, or in other words: promoting your promotions.Instead of just submitting an article to ezinearticles.com and getting a little bit of traffic from people who find that article through the search engines, why not try promoting that article so that it goes up in the search engines and brings you even more traffic?
Why limit yourself to just one site high-ranking site in the search engines when you could have ten?
Using Wordpress.com in your Web 2.0 strategies
Be extremely careful when using Wordpress.com.For those of you who aren't aware of this fact: Wordpress.com is different to Wordpress.org. Wordpress.com allows you to host a blog on their servers, while Wordpress.org gives you the software to host your own blog on your own server.
You can do what you like with Wordpress.org, but Wordpress.com is very wary of anything that smells of commercial interests.
If you want to use a blog to promote products, don't use Wordpress.com - go to Blogger or Yahoo360 (or similar). That said, Wordpress.com is still very popular; it has a huge fan base, an excellent Alexa ranking and it gets indexed very quickly.
However, you should never put a salesy call to action into a Wordpress.com blog - instead, say something like: "to continue reading about this, click here", so that your commercial interests remain separated.
Lesson Summary
Four bonus tips for web 2.0 marketing:- Remember the long-tail when adding tags. Three-word phrases are likely to rank much higher than one-word, generic phrases.
- Web 2.0 success relies on your continued interaction with the sites you choose to use. The more you use them, the better your status.
- Consider promoting the articles that promote you so that you can get traffic from multiple sources.
- Finally: take care not to be too salesy when using Wordpress.com.
