Contrary to popular belief, search engine optimization is extremely easy. You need to think about what it would take for you to become the renowned expert in your field. You must offer content that is original and valuable to a consumer. Only then, will you conquer the major search engines.

One way link building is the core part of search engine marketing. There are many simple ways to obtain one way links: directories, articles, press releases, and most importantly social bookmarking. When you submit your website to a directory, the directory has an editor take a look at your website and either approve or deny it based on their rules. If you are approved, you will gain the all important one way link pointing to your website. Directories need to accept new submissions to keep their content fresh. This makes the search engines and consumers happy.

Social Bookmarking gives YOU all of the power. You select your site and use a social bookmarking website to gain one automatic backlink. It does not stop there! Then, you add tags to the listing. The secret here is that you get a link to your site on every single tag page as well. That can result in anywhere from 10 to 20 one way links per social bookmarking site! You must make sure that your website offers unique, relevant, highly valuable content. If it does, other people will bookmark your website as well. The more people bookmark your site, the better traffic you will gain from that social bookmarking website.

Social Bookmarking is the best way to create an internet buzz about your products or your company. If you offer unique content that people will find useful, you have outstanding odds of ending up on the front page of social bookmarking websites. If your link is on the frontpage, you will receive a large amount of traffic for the effort.

If you do not offer outstanding content on your website, you will still gain the all important one way links to your website. Even negative reviews of your site will not change the ways the search engines see your link. Search engines look for new relevant content. All you have to do is provide it to them!

The most important aspect of social bookmarking is spam. Most sites allow their users to either vote on the importance of a site, or allow them to ignore you and your site slowly goes away. Don’t ruin this great opportunity for the other internet marketers out there. Social bookmarking is based on the idea of a sites popularity being decided by the visitors of that site. Make sure you are adding important sites that you use every day to these sites, as well as your own personal websites. Social bookmarking is meant for the entire community to enjoy. You should cater your bookmarks to a person that would find them, not the major search engines. You can be sure that the search engines will figure out how to find social bookmarking spam, just like they’ve found all of the other spamming methods.

Link exchanges are a thing of the past. The only time when link exchanges work is when they provide useful information and products to your customers. Otherwise, link exchanges are nearly useless. Search Engines have figured out the idea behind the link exchange and have lowered the value of exchanged links to almost nothing.

Links are the most important aspect of search engine optimization, according to all three of the major search engines. Even the links you use inside of your website count. MSN, Yahoo, and Google all analyze your site’s inner linking structure to figure out what keywords are most important to your website. This is the best way for them to find which keywords are important in regards to your company. Spamming of search engines is on the rapid decline, because search engines have become smarter than most of us.

Use your head and you should be soaring to the top of the search engines in no time!

Blogging is becoming increasingly popular and social networks are also becoming more and more popular as well. Social networks include popular websites such as MySpace.com where users can create personal websites and interact with other users. These websites may include a wide range of components including text, images, audio, video and blogs. Here system users can voice their opinions, provided updates on their life, offer insight into current events or accomplish a number of other goals. However, bloggers who utilize a social network to maintain their blog should consider a few different factors. This article will discuss some of these factors including whether to make the blogs available to the public or keep the private, considering the audience of the blog and dealing with harassment through the blog.

Making Blogs Private Or Public

Most social networks enable users to make their website either private or public. Private websites are only available to the user and other users he specifically approves to view his website while public websites are available to all users of the system. These same capabilities also apply to the blogs which are maintained on a social network. For this reason bloggers must determine whether or not they wish to make their blog posts available to the entire social network or to only a fraction of this network.

This decision will be largely based on a matter of personal preference. Social networks can be quite extensive and some bloggers may be apprehensive about their blog being available to such a large audience while other bloggers may have no apprehensions about the size of the potential audience. Bloggers should carefully consider this option before staring a blog but always have the option to change these settings after the blog has been established if they change their mind about the choice they originally made.

Considering The Blog Audience

Bloggers who utilize a social network to maintain a blog should also carefully consider the potential audience for the blog. Most social networks include a broad cross section of the general public. Therefore bloggers should be aware of this audience when posting a blog and should consider how the blog entries will be interpreted by blog audience members. While it will never be possible to avoid offending all potential audience members some bloggers may wish to consider at least attempting to ensure the blog entries they post are appropriate for all members of the social network. If this is not possible the blogger may consider making the blog private.

Dealing With Harassment Through The Blog

Another aspect bloggers who use a social network to publish their blog should be aware of includes the potential for harassment from other members through the blog. This can be in the form of offensive comments posted in response to blog entries. Depending on the degree of the harassment the blogger may choose to ignore these comments or take stronger actions. Bloggers should review the policies of the social network and solicit their assistance in dealing with harassment from other users. In most cases dealing with the problem may be as simple as blocking the user from making comments on the blog but in some cases it may be necessary to contact the social network administrators in an attempt to get the user banned from the system. In this situation the administrators will review the situation and make a judgment regarding whether or not the user has violated the terms of service.

As you guys know, social media is becoming an important factor in marketing. From my own experience, it can bring you a good massive amount of traffic to your blog in a short span of time and it can last for sometime too. You can also read up on one of my post on this blog about How To Generate Traffic With Stumble Upon. Somebody just stumbled my previous post and I received 500+ visitors today just from SU alone, how wonderful is that? Now here’s a big list of social media sites that you can use to submit your articles to and watch your traffic explode!

Allmyfavorites - Create an organized page for your bookmarks that you can share with friends and family, access from any computer.

Backflip – Check out the most popular links each day, set “The Daily Routine” as your homepage so you can visit your must stop sites each day with ease.

Barksbookmarks – is a website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control.

Bibsonomy - BibSonomy is run by the Knowledge Data Engineering Group of the University of Kassel, Germany. Its specifically designed for researchers, in sharing bookmarks and bibliographies.

Blinklist – Social bookmarking with slick interface and new ways for organizing tags.

Blinkpro – Dynamic folders, bookmark all links of a page plus all the usual features.

Blipoo - Meet Blipoo, a social bookmarking site for “cool” people sharing “cool” stories. It claims to help bloggers drive more traffic to their blog because they allow self promotion..

Blogbookmark – Designed specifically for Blog hunters, BlogBookmark.com claims to have the hottest news, gossip, and blog chatter from around the web. I highly suggest that mainstream bloggers bookmark their entires here.

Blog-buzz – Similar to Digg, but for blog posts.

Blogmarks - Save your bookmarks, tag them with keywords for easy searching amongst your list, share with others.

Blogrush - The fastest and easiest way to drive traffic to your blog automatically. Not actually a social bookmark site but helps a lot in building traffic to your blog.

Bluedot - Tabbed user page showing a network of friends, bookmarks, and related tags. Allows you to import contacts from all the major mail services such as GMail and Yahoo.

Blurpalicious – Get Blurped! Not too different from other social bookmarks, but I love the tagline.

Bmaccess – Bookmark a site, add tags, when you look up a tag, you get the names and a little thumbnail image of the site along with it.

Bookkit – BookKit.com is an absolutely free web service designed to facilitate bookmark (favorites) management needs.

Bookmarkall – Organizer for bookmarks, calendar, diary and knowledge.

Bookmarktracker – Free online storage, management, synchronizing and RSS sharing of your bookmarks.

Bookmax – You can store your bookmarks and links to your favorite sites online and access them from wherever you are : basic Social Bookmarking.

Buddymarks – The online personal, group and social bookmarks manager.

Bukmark - Bukmark is a social bookmarking website.

Buzka – is a free and easy way to share your favorite web stuff. You can save and organize all your favorite web pages by creating Spots on any interest or topic.

Chipmark – Browse random “chipmarks”, share them, sort, filter, and get personal recommendations.

Citeulike - Social bookmarking for academic papers.

Claimid – Manage your online identity. Although this is not a normal social bookmarking site, users can bookmark sites which reference their identity and build backlinks in this fashion.

Clipclip - Like an online scrapbook, you clip out the part of the site you want, then share it with whomever you want, and discover new places to visit.

Clipmarks – Allows you to clip just the chosen bits of a webpage, save them to the main website, or even insert them into your own blog. Think of it as fancy block quoting.

Cloudytags - A unique word analyzer connects to your page, gets all the words and suggest you the real tags your site is showing to the world.

Complore – 10MB of file storage, public & private sharing, tag cloud, popular feeds and more.

Connectbean - A themed social bookmarking site for enterprise-scale business.

Connectedly – Import your bookmarks, batch edit them, check in on hot topics.

Connotea – A themed social bookmarking site specifically for researchers, clinicians and scientists.

Contentpop – It has the latest Web 2.0 features such as social bookmarking, blogging & RSS. It also uses the word POP in the title which means it must be good.

Corank – coRank is a site where you can share whatever you find interesting on the web with people who value your opinion.

Crowdfound – CrowdFound is essentially a social bookmarking website, but with a different vision in mind.

De.lirio.us – Social Bookmarking, Tagging, Blogging & Notes. Mmmmmm, Notes.

Del.icio.us – You add your bookmarks and access them from anywhere. Check out what others are saving and see where it takes you.

Digg - Synonymous with social bookmarking: you Digg a story, others Digg it, the more popular it gets the better chance it has of hitting the first page.

Digmypage - Build links, increase traffic, and make money. A fast growing new social bookmark site.

Diigo – Highlight portions of a page, write on it like you would a piece of paper, share with your group, and search all publicly saved pages.

Dzone – Fresh links for developers.

Easybm – Allows users to bookmark their frequently visited sites on their private page, allowing 1-click access to their favorite web sites.

Ecites - Organize your bookmarks by tags, add comments and notes, share publicly, subscribe to certain tags so you can be notified when a new site is added that may interest you.

Enroll - Social bookmarking system based in India.

Entrecard – Not actaually a social bookmark site but rather a great traffic tool for bloggers. Like blogrush but in my own opinion more effective.

Ez4u Social Bookmarking - Ez4u to Bookmark : “Ez4u to Organize Ez4u to Share with Others Ez4u to Remember”.

Fark – Social bookmarling community.

Favoor – Favoor is your personalized new start page. Collect your favorite internet addresses.

Feedmarker – A free, Web based RSS/ATOM aggregator and bookmarks manager.

Feedmelinks – All the usual social bookmarking goodies, but you can also add links via email.

Flipskipper – social bookmarking manager that allows users to pull concurrent searches from Yahoo!, Google News, and del.icio.us when surfing.

Folkd – Folkd is a social web-service about pages, news, audios, videos and blogs.

Frassle – Frassle helps you read and publish weblogs, track bookmarks, and find relevant content organized your way.

Freelink – Freelink.org provides free pages of links that you can access anywhere at anytime.

Freezilla – FreeZilla claims to be the first Web 2.0 freebies and promotions social networking site.

Friendsite – Get free storage and share your photos & videos, get your own url and customize your page, create free evites and invitations, add friends, message people, create discussion forums and groups, blog, share and store your bookmarks & much more…

Fropjack – FropJack.com is a social content website and owned by the ExactSeek company.

Fungow – Fungow was designed to help better organize and keep track of your bookmarks.

Furl – Not only can you do the standard bookmarking and sharing, you can save archived versions of a webpage and even export all your saved pages to a ZIP file.

Fuzzfizz – FuzzFizz is a brand new social bookmarking site, where users vote for the most interesting and important news stories.

Gather - Gather is a place to contribute articles and content, blog, tag and connect with people who share your passions. (Plus you can link out from the articles in this authority site).

Getboo – GetBoo.com is yet another free online bookmarking service which allows you to store, edit and retrieve your bookmarks from anywhere online.

Givealink – Donate your bookmarks to this site to help them recommend sites and get a better understanding of how each person bookmarks.

Hanzoweb – Hanzoweb – Bookmark, tag & share knowledge online

Hyperlinkomatic – Hyperlinkomatic – bookmark list manager.

I89 - Export to several formats, see popular & recent bookmarks, ability to shorten URLs.

Icio - Danish Bookmarking engine.

Ideanotes German - Social notes manager. Easy integration of references to books, news and articles.

Ikeepbookmarks – Folders, search folder names and more.

Iloggo – Simple web based bookmarking tool that you can use f

Indiagram – Allows social bookmarking. Aim is to develop a community that shares information about websites on diverse topics.

Jigg – Jigg.in is a socializing community with the latest stories / news submitted by users and has a familiar name

Jots - Jots is a collaborative bookmarking system that allows you to Store, Share and Discover relevant links. Store your own links and choose whether to share them with the world, with a select group of people or just for yourself to use.

Jumptags – Jumptags.com is a revolutionary Web 2.0 social bookmarking web service for collecting, storing, sharing and distributing web bookmarks, notes, RSS feeds, contacts, and much more. Based on AJAX and other next generation web development techniques.

Kinja – Kinja is a blog guide, collecting news and commentary from some of the best sites on the web.

Leze - German Internet Bookmarking Service.

Librarything – Deli.cio.us for books. Cataloging based on some 30+ libraries using the Z39.50 protocol.

Lifelogger – LifeLogger is a great way to keep things that matter to you alive and sparkling.” And worth considering in a bookmarking campaign.

Lilisto - Lilisto lets you store, manage and find your favorite links (or bookmarks) and removes the need to maintain them through your browser.

Limca Bookmarks - another new social bookmarking site.

Linkagogo – Favorites and Social Bookmarking Application, its unique dynamic toolbars automatically adapt themselves.

Linkatopia – Keep private, share, mark as friends only, edit bookmark dates.

Linkblog – Portuguese Social Bookmarking

Linkfilter – Linkfilter.net is just what the name implies, a link filter. All links are posted and moderated by users. Links can be ranked on several levels: clicks, votes, age, or a combination of all three called points.

Linkkarera - German Social Bookmarking site.

Linkroll – Links open in new window, subscribe to tags, browse by archives.

Linksnarf - Social link sharing with groups of friends.

Linkswarm – Our little collection of links has been prepared by vast forces of evil to allow you a little pleasure. We want to make it all worthwhile for you, so sign up. I

Listerlister – ListerLister is a social list building community where you can create, add to, and vote for both lists and the items added to them.

Loom Delymyth - Collaborative bookmarking application written in PHP.

Ma.gnolia – Discuss all the saved bookmarks in groups, see what the Featured Linker is all about, join discussions in the Hot Group.

Markaboo – MarkaBoo is tool for saving websites, files, and notes from your browser, email or mobile phone.

Marktd – Marktd is a reference & voting system that highlights marketing articles considered valuable by the marketing community.

Memfrag - MemFrag stores your favorites personal notes, making them globally accessible from any computer.

Memotoo – Lets users centralize and share your personal data.

Mister Wong – Bookmark and tag, search for tags that interest you, make buddies with people who have interesting saved sites.

Mixx – An up and coming bookmarking and social news sharing network which should rival Digg, Reddit and others, Mixx blends popular photos, videos and stories.

Mobleo – Allows you to easily add, organize, and share your mobile phone bookmarks with your friends using your desktop computer.

Multiply – Florida-based social network Multiply, which reports nearly 3 million users and $6 million in funding,opened its social bookmarking site recently and has done well. Definite authority.

Murl – My URLs is a free online bookmarks manager, think of it as a bookmarks community.

Mybookmarks - MyBookmarks is a free Internet service that allows you to keep your browser bookmarks and favorites online so you can access them from anywhere.

Myhq - Store your bookmarks in one central location. Fast, text-based, banner free

Mylinkvault – A free online bookmark manager. Other bookmark managers can be so clumsy to use – trying to rearrange your bookmarks can be slow and frustrating.

Myprogs - Social bookmarking for programs you use.

Mysitevote – MySiteVote is a community where you can vote your favorite site/s and view how popular a site is.

Myvmarks – An online bookmark and online favorites manager.

Myweb Yahoo – One button click adds your bookmarks to the search engine giants system, features duplicate detection to help you keep your bookmarks tidy.

Mywebdesktop – A collaboration and communication tool, designed to be as generic and easy to use as a telephone and email.

Netscape - A former contender in the browser wars, and the “mother” of Mozilla, it’s now a a social news aggregator with voting of stories similar to Digg.

Netvouz – Save your bookmarks in folders, tag them with keywords, share them with others or password protect them.

Networkmenus – Social Bookmarking within a web browser toolbar.

Newscloud – Provides community-based media distribution services and solutions along with BitTorrent hosting and consulting for individuals and organizations of all sizes.

Newsvine – Users can write articles on current news events, save links to external content; vote, comment and chat on article pages created by both users and by journalists.

Newsweight – NewsWeight is a democratic news, information, and entertainment resource.

Nextaris – Folders, tags, clippings; store up to 100MB for free.

Oyax - A fast and quick social categorized bookmarking service with groups.

Philoi – Person-to-person link sharing community. Save bookmarks and share links with your friends.

Plugim – PlugIM is a user driven internet marketing community. Submit content, share articles, comment on projects and promote your favorites to the front page. If its internet marketing related, plug it on PlugIM.

Propeller – One of the most active and professional bookmarking site today.

Quikieclick - QuickieClick is a second generation social bookmarking website with a visual twist.

Rawsugar – Can cluster your tags for you based on recommendations by other users.

Reader2 – Share the list of books you read or recommend, find new books by tags/authors. Multilanguage.

Reddit – You vote up or down on a story making it move around on the home page.

Searchles – Owned by the DumbFind search engine, in my opinion Searchles is a much overlooked bookmarking tool and loved by Google, Yahoo and the other major search engines with its passing of link juice and high rankings for terms within search results themselves.

Segnalo - Italian Social bookmarking site.

Shadows – Share your already existing bookmarks, discuss and rate sites and see what you can find.

Shoutwire – Similar to Digg, except instead of “Digging a story”, you “shout it”. Still a way to vote on unique Internet news stories.

Simpy – This social bookmarker does all the usual plus detects links that have changed, and distributes your bookmarks via your blog’s RSS if you like.

Sitebar - A solution for people who use multiple browsers or computers and want to have their bookmarks available from anywhere without need to synchronize them

Sitejot – Free online bookmark manager. Like every other social bookmarking site, it allows users to manage all of their bookmarks online in one convenient place.

Sitestagger – SiteTagger.com is a bookmark/favorite organizer. You can bookmark websites you find on the internet via a simple button/favlet/bookmarklet that you can add to your browser link bar.

Sk-rt – is a social media ranking platform of “pure goodness”, targeted towards women. Given the right story, Sk*rt can send A LOT of targeted traffic.

Slashdot – The godfather of social news, SlashDot bookmarks are still quite powerful .. keep in mind the site has a heavy slant towards Linux and Open Source issues.

SocialBookmarking – User and global tag cloud, blogs, social networking, avatars and more.

Socialdanger – SocialDanger is a Web 2.0 open source content management system

Socialogs A Digg - like Social Bookmarking Service.

Sphinn – Very popular search marketing oriented social news and discussion site run via the Pligg system.

Spotback – Spotback is a personalized rating system that recommends relevant content based on personal rating history using collaborative filtering and aggregated knowledge technologies..

Spotplex – What people most read today.

Spurl – You can upload your existing bookmarks to get started, add more for centralized access, check out hot lists and recommendations.

Startaid – I’ve noticed that StartAid bookmark pages rank highly in Google and other search engines. This basic bookmarking service allows users to describe, tag and categorize sites.

Stumbleupon – Lets you “channel surf” the Internet and review sites; it learns what you like and recommends more of the same.

Stylehive – The Stylehive is a collection of all the best products, brands, designers and stores discovered and tagged by the Hive community

Sync2it - Effortless social bookmarking, millions of hand-picked sites, real-time RSS feeds, public & private collections. Features automatic clustering technology.

Syncone – SyncOne is an Internet aggregator of bookmarking and browsing.

tagfacts Basic bookmarking and tagging, a social knowledge base.

Taggly – Store, share and tag your favorite links

Taghop -Taghop is a collaborative thoughtblog. A thoughtblog is a combination of some of the existing ideas behind blogs, with some ideas of its own. It is a web site, search engine, wiki, blogging system, social network and community site all rolled into one – o

Tagne – TagNe.ws is user-submitted, community voted links and resources related to SEO, Blogging, RSS, Tagging, Internet Marketing and more.

Tagtooga – Says that this bookmarking engine can be used to discover great sites difficult to find in Google/Yahoo by browsing categories.

Tagza – A very young Social Book marking web site mostly being used by Indian and Pakistani web masters.

Tailrank – Tailrank finds the best content from thousands of blogs so you don’t have to!

Technorati- The best place to advertise your site. Technorati is the most realibale authority in sites’ ranking.

Tedigo – Personal and social bookmarking in Spanish and English made simple.

Thethingsiwant – Universal wishlist service with Social Bookmarking and RSS feeds.

Thinkpocket - Lets users pocket websites you find valuable. It is a web service that aims to help store, organize and share your favorite sites

Thoof – Add news stories you find interesting, anyone can “improve” the article by fixing the URL, editing the summary and more.

Totalpad - TotalPad is a new online news and article community where people are free to voice their opinions

Unalog – A basic social bookmarking site, but with the ability to look back at specific days and see what was going on.

Urlex – Inbox, group creation, directory, all of the usual features, plus being able to send your RSS feed to the site.

Uvouch – Another basic social bookmarking site, users can save their findings with one click, at one place and access it from anywhere.

Voteboat- VoteBoat is a user-controlled rating and voting site.

Votelists – VoteLists lets users create a list of rankable items. Other can add items, comment on them, rate them and more!

Vuju - Vuju allows user to submit/publish content which can be tagged and promoted.

Wazima – Coupons clipped by robots. Wazima scours the web and shows you the deals you are most interested in.

Web-feeds - Web Feeds is a social bookmark site with a difference, users moderate and decide which items make it to the home page

Wetogether – Social bookmarking site where people will have great opportunities to promote their own sites.

Wink - A social search engine where users can share results and answer questions. Users build profiles which can link out to bookmark pages or other web sites (hint hint).:

Wirefan – You can vote on links as well as add thumbnails for sites.

Wists – Visual bookmarks, wishlists, photoblogs.

Wurldbook – Share web references and rss feeds with others and more

Xilinus – Organize and manage bookmarks online.

This is a good list of high PRs and popular forums which allow dofollow signatures. Most of them are frequent by professionals and both you and I can definitely find stuff we need and also lend our service when others need them. Do take part actively in these forums and watch your back links explode. Feed the SEO monster!

Warrior Forum – PR 4

As you can see warrior forum is my top choice of all.  Warrior Forum has a pool of professionals and semi-pros who call themselves the Warriors. These warriors are there to share the latest and best tips or ideas you need with regards to internet marketing. The forum is broken down in different topics like internet marketing, adsense/adwords, seo and copywriting etc… Believe me, you will be amazed by the tips and discussion going on there. If you’re a beginner and looking for an answer to a question on related topics, just start a thread there and you can expect to see replies within hours, even faster than your so called customer support team! Whether you are looking for some tips, sharing tips or even hiring freelancers, Warrior Forum has what it takes to stay on top of the list.

Dream Team Money Forum – PR 3

DreamTeamMoney Forum is not far behind Warrior Forum in terms of standard. However, DTM has been recently been hit by a virus and John Raven (Admin of DTM) had such a tough time battling it. The forum spirit kind of died down a little, but nevertheless, I still place it second on my list! John was kind enough to feature my blog there, listed me as an Informative Blog Partner and opened up a sub-forum solely for this blog. DreamTeamMoney also offers a wide range of topics linking to internet marketing and you notice that they have even more topics than Warrior Forum. They have some interesting timely contest everynow and then and you can win some exclusive prizes there, so do check them out!

Site Point Forum – PR 6

Site Point Forum is well known for its market place where webmasters buy and sell websites, domain, links or other web services there. Have a premium, established or startup website for sale? Site Point is the place you should hang out at.

Digital Point Forum – PR 4

Digital Point Forum is another popular forum where most internet marketer meet. If you wish to meet some pros out there, get some great tips or find great resources like ebooks, then Digital Point Forum is your pick.

NamePros Forum – PR 5

Name Pros. Like it’s name suggests, it is a forum specially made for domain names. If you are a domain flipper, then you should not miss this forum out because they have 156,478 active members as I am writing this. Pretty sure you will meet someone who likes the domain you sell.

V7N Forum – PR 5

V7N is a forum that deals with web development. It is probably less heard compared to the rest in this list. Nevertheless, you will be able to find professional advice on computer languages which you never figure out yourself.

5 Star Affiliate Forum

Yes! The place to become a 5 star affiliate. All I can say is that this forum is made for affiliate marketers. If you have been into the affiliate marketing game and do not know of this forum, shame on you!

Blogger Talk Forum – PR 4

For bloggers, by blogger. Visit Blogger Talk Forum!

DN Forum – PR 5

DN simply means Domain Name. This is another highly regarded forum that does mainly domains discussion. Highly recommended for domain and website flippers too!

Seo.com Forum – PR 4

SEO.com itself is a very rare domain name. The fact that the forum master is able to get hold of this domain name deserves our due respect. Check them out for all the secret SEO tricks and techniques you have always wanted to know.

Twitter has an insurmountable number of applications from the very useful to the rather comical . It’s hard to weed through and find the truly great applications/services.

To better help you in your Twittering efforts, I’ve put together a list of 5 great tools to help you monitor your followers and unfollowers… since we all know is about that ratio. Hopefully you find the list useful. If there are some I’ve neglected to add or if you know of other ones please leave a comment with a description and a link

Twellow Followers

Twellow, The Twitter Yellow Pages, has many features that range from extended profiles to Twellowhood (one of my personal favorite Twitter tools on the Internet).

Mixed in with the plethora of features that Twellow offers is an unsung hero which is just simply called “Followers”. With this you can easily see who is reciprocally following you. But, the best part of Followers is… you can follow or unfollow directly from Twellow. No clicking to go back to Twitter, you can get the job done without leaving the page.

Qwitter

Qwitter is a nice little service that emails you when someone stops following you on Twitter with a message, below is an example.

John Gruber (gruber) stopped following you on Twitter after you posted this tweet:

What’s the difference between Arial and Helvetia?

That’s pretty much it… no extra frills.

Friend or Follow

Friend or Follow is pretty self-explanatory, you enter in your Twitter username and it gives you three tabs of information:

- Following
- Fans
- Friends

Following (who your following, but not following you back), fans (who’s following you, but your not following them back) and friends (people who you follow and they follow you back.

TweetLater

TweetLater is an online service that has an abundance of features ranging from scheduling tweets to Ping.fm integration. They offer a free account as well as a paid professional account.

Buried deep within the features of TweetLater is the option to “Follow those who follow you” and “Unfollow those who unfollow you”. This is completely automated and set by the user:

- Follow those who follow you – Automate!
Automatically follow people who follow you and save a ton of time while your Friends list builds itself.

- Unfollow those who unfollow you – Automate!
Automatically unfollow somoene when they unfollow you if that is how you prefer to manage your Friends list.

Twitterless

Twitterless is an online service that notifies you when any Twitterer stops following you, and gives you their username. But, they don’t stop there. They take it one step further and give you a graphed out “follower history” over a period of time to help you understand where your gaining or losing followers.

They also offer follower filters that give you a more descriptive view of your followers. You can filter in real time and search using keywords to see if your followers are talking about anything that interest you.

Article post by Jeremy Muncy

Good news guys! Creator of Atomic Blogging 3.0, Alvin Phang has just launched a twitter product called the Twitter Online System and it has just gone live.

I witnessed Alvin’s twitter follower when it was stuck at 400 and my followers were 600 at that time. After constant testing and researching, he has found a method which helped him increase his twitter followers by 400% and actually monetizing it. He was kind enough to introduce this Twitter Online System to me and you can see for yourself where I am at now, close to 7,000 followers and actually making money from it. Check out my testimonial for him at his website: Twitter Online System

Here is what you will get in this system:

- How Alvin Increases His Twitter Followers By 400% In Just Days!

- The Biggest Mistake Made By 99% Of Twitter Users That Professional Twitter Users Do Not Want You To Know

- Discover The Incredible Tool That Helped Generate A Whopping 230,000 New Followers Online!

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StumbleUpon is a great social networking / bookmarking site to use to drive traffic to your site. But how do you get your articles stumbled? And does every stumble count the same?

In order to get your blog articles stumbled, you will need to promote it in the following ways.

1. Social Promotion Buttons

Social promotion buttons at the end of your posts will help readers easily submit your article to the social network of their choosing. There are several WordPress plug-ins available that include buttons for the most popular bookmarking sites, including StumbleUpon. Sociable, Damn Sexy Bookmarks, and Tweet This are good ones to try.

2. WP Greet Box

The WP Greet Box WordPress plug-in will detect if users have found your article through StumbleUpon. If so, they will get a message at the top (or bottom) of the post welcoming the reader and asking for a Stumble for that article. You can edit the message that greets them, and even create a default message that will ask readers for a Stumble, regardless of the referral site.

3. Sharing with Friends using the StumbleUpon Toolbar

By building a community of friends on StumbleUpon, you will have a list of people to share your article with. Using the StumbleUpon toolbar for Firefox (recommended) or Internet Explorer, you can easily share your posts with a friend using the Send To button. Or, by clicking the comment bubble to the right of the Send To, you can see who has stumbled your post. If you go to the Reviews or Favorites page of one of the users who have stumbled your page, you can hover over the thumbnail of your article, click Share, and then send the article to a selection or all of your friends.

4. Direct Links

In a recent article about how to make social promotion easy, I suggest using direct links to posts on social networking sites when promoting articles by email or social promotion forums. For StumbleUpon, simply click the comment bubble to the right of the Send To button on the StumbleUpon toolbar. You can then send the link to the reviews page as the direct link to your article on StumbleUpon, which will hopefully help in getting more reviews.

Stumbles vs. Reviews

People have two options when submitting your article to StumbleUpon. They can simply give it a thumbs up, or they can give it a review. While having lots of stumbles is a definite perk, reviews are much better. For example, if you use FeedBurner for the feeds to your site, and you have turned on the Stumble It Feedflare option, subscribers in Google Reader (or select other feed readers) will see the number of Stumble Reviews for each article, but not the number of regular thumbs up stumbles.

How do you encourage reviews? Within your Stumble community, one of the best ways to encourage reviews (besides having great content) is to be sure to not only thumb up stumbles sent to you, but to review them as well. Many people like to read their reviews, and if they see that you often review their articles, they will be more likely to return the favor.

Building a StumbleUpon Community

Finding friends for your StumbleUpon network is simple. While browsing blogging sites related to your topic, simply look for the blogger’s social profile links. Also, be sure to promote your StumbleUpon profile on your site’s about page, in the sidebar, or within articles mentioning StumbleUpon. You can advertise it on other social networks by adding it to your links on your Facebook, Digg, Google Profile, or any network that allows you to add links to your other social networking identities. You can even include a shortened link to your Stumble profile on a custom Twitter background.

How Do You Use StumbleUpon?

Now it’s your turn. How do you use StumbleUpon, and does it work well for you?

Guest post by Kristi from Kikolani.com.