Social bookmarking websites are no doubt the buzzword of the recent months. What is social bookmarking? Let’s turn to the definition:

Social bookmarking is an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others – personal knowledge management tool [wikipedia.org]

As a site owner I consider these websites as a source of traffic – thousands, in fact millions of users get registered with these websites. There was a recent announcement that MySpace is website #1 in traffic in the USA (though Yahoo! did not agree with the stats). Social bookmarking sites become a considerable source of traffic for those websites that due to some reasons do not enjoy much traffic from search engines. They are also a nice source of extra visitors for the websites that are on top of the search engines.

There is no recipe for attracting visitors from these places. There is a wide variety of types of social bookmarking websites (see the list). MySpace is probably the best known among webmasters. The most common methods to get traffic from MySpace – bulletins, auto-adders and other methods that resemble me of spam. Evidently, not a long lasting way to promote your website. But there are more legitimate ways to brand your website on MySpace.

I would recommend exploring the list and registering with those services that might be a good fit for your website. See what kind of people populate the place, how they interact, what they search, etc.

Here is the list of the most popular social networking websites at this moment to check:

MySpace – Best for: Teens, Young Adults

Bebo – Best for: Teens, Young Adults

Tagworld – Best for: Teens, Young Adults

Orkut – Best for: Young Adults (Brazilians)

AIM Pages – Best for: Teens, Young Adults

Hi5 – Best for: Teens, Young Adults

Panjea – Best for: Teens, Young Adults, Artists

Cyworld [US] – Best for: Teens, Young Adults, Koreans

Tagged – Best for: Teens

Popist – Best for: Teens

Friendster – Best for: Young Adults

Tribe – Best for: Young Adults

Facebook – Best for: College/University students

ConnectU – Best for: College/University students

Yahoo! 360 – Best for: Adults, Middle-aged

PeopleAggregator – Best for: Adults, Middle-aged

MommyBuzz – Best for: Moms!

MuslimSpace - Best for: Muslims

Stardoll – Best for: Kids/Teens

Imbee – Best for: Kids

Dogster – Best for: Dogs; their owners

Catster – Best for: Cats; their owners

Fuzzster – Best for: Fuzzy pets; their owners

BookCrossing – Best for: Book lovers

Boompa – Best for: Car lovers

Spout – Best for: Film lovers

MOG – Best for: Music lovers

Yub.com – Best for: [Online] Shoppers

Yelp – Best for: Anyone in the U.S.

LinkedIn – Best for: Employed individuals; business-folks

biddingBuddies – Best for: eBay members — buyers/sellers

Faqqly – Best for: teens, young adults

[tags]MySpace, Bebo, Tagworld, Orkut, AIM Pages, Hi5, Panjea, Cyworld, Tagged, Popist, Friendster, Tribe, Facebook, ConnectU, Yahoo! 360, PeopleAggregator, MommyBuzz, MuslimSpace, Stardoll, Imbee, Dogster, Catster, Fuzzster, BookCrossing, Boompa, Spout, MOG, Yub.com, Yelp, LinkedIn, biddingBuddies, Faqqly, social bookmarking[/tags]

A merchant account is not for every online seller to run his web store (it mostly depends on the scale of your business – most individual online entrepreneurs are more than happy with PayPal services).

I have been using PayPal for years and was happy with their service all this time. Yes, PayPal had some issues 5 or so years back, but they have resolved them.

I was always interested to get some extra features that were not available in their ‘Help’ section:

- give my customers discounts
- sell gift certificates
- provide shipping options
- paypal coupons

I know of O’Reilly’s ‘PayPal Hacks’ manual and this forum

One more way to find PayPal solutions is PayPal Help website – one page with a selection of tips and tricks that will help you to extend the limits of PayPal as a payment solution for your online business.

Summary: now everyone talks of GBuy and how it will take away PayPal customers. But PayPal was the first company who paved the way to this sort of services for small and middle online businesses. I am sure it will help them to stay in the game. Google is a great company, but it tries to be everything and everywhere online.
[tags]paypal, merchant account, gbuy, affiliate marketing, home based business, online business, work from home, google, links, seo, website promotion, e-commerce[/tags]

I have recently posted about my experience of link building. In continuation of my article, ideas on the future of link building expressed by Abhilash just prove my own conclusions – link building is and will be just a waste of time, you will not achieve the desirable effect by adding your website to directories, submitting press releases, contacting webmasters for a link exchange and leaving your signature in forums and blog comments.

To summarize the observations in the article: websites will have no way to gain links, but buying them (and taking into the account many things to make that link work for you) and getting natural links. Yes, Google has progressed greatly and is very good at spotting and closing any flaws that webmasters are lucky to find when working at the link popularity.

SEO is not likely to last long since now. It simply does not work. Webmasters can work at their websites improving the quality of content, but I think ‘big companies’ will take niches one by one leaving individual webmasters no space for activity.

Summary: I have an impression it is time to change the industry. Or at least it is time to look around for other kinds of projects.

Those webmasters who started 5-7 years back have advantages over those who joined the game 1-2 years back. They have more online property and space for manoeuvre.

[tags]link popularity, links exchange, affiliate marketing, home based business, work from home, dmoz, google, links, seo, website promotion, e-commerce[/tags]