If a cow is purple in the middle of the woods with no one around to see it, does it really matter what color the cow is?

A lot of us have read Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow, which advocates making products remarkable so that the most powerful form of advertising, word of mouth, will naturally work in our favor. The term for such a revolutionary idea that spreads like wildfire is an “ideavirus”, as in the book Unleashing the Ideavirus by Godin and Malcolm Gladwell.

Here is the question though, are there limitations or even possibly dangers to being remarkable without a platform. When I say a platform, I mean anything which gives you a significant amount of leverage in initially promoting your company’s new offering. For instance in the world of online business your leverage could come from an email list of 100,000 members or a Facebook profile with 2000 friends.

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Assuming that you have a WordPress based blog, and your own hosting, then there are several ways that you can add social bookmarking buttons to your posts. This post will briefly go over two options for adding this functionality to your site.

The first option that I would suggest is the option that we use here at Feedback Secrets. We use Feedburner.com to syndicate our RSS feed and FeedBurner allows you the option to add social bookmarking buttons to your posts from inside the control panels of your FeedBurner account.

If you are currently using FeedBurner, then log in to your account and click on the “Optimize” tab. Then click on the “FeedFlare” link in the left hand sidebar. Here you will have the option to select various social bookmarking links to be added to the posts on your site. Please note that next to the option for each link is a check box for adding the link to your site and another for adding the link to your feed.

The next option that I would like to suggest is the plug-in available from ShareThis.com. The ShareThis plug-in is probably the most used method for adding social bookmarking buttons to a blog that I have seen. The advantage of this plug-in is it’s clean and unobtrusive look.

The plug-in appears on the bottom of your posts as a single button in the shape of the ShareThis logo. Once you click on this icon you are given the option to bookmark the post with a host of other social bookmarking and social networking sites.

We hope that this brief overview provided you with some idea for adding social bookmarking buttons to your site. If you have used another method to add the functionality of social bookmarking to your site please leave a comment and let us know about your experience and whether you would recommend that method.

The following post about keys to social bookmarking success was submitted by Marsello Oentoro. 

Social bookmarking sites such as Digg.com or StumbleUpon.com’s browser toolbar are great sources of website traffic.  The key is to get enough Diggs or Stumbles to get your latest page of wow content a significant burst of traffic. This usually happens when enough users “vote” for you content, in a relatively short period of time, to make your content the hot story of the minute. Let’s examine some of the ways we can improve our chances of getting there:

1. Remember that Content is King
 
Readers are not stupid; you simply cannot cheat them with a poor or spammy content and expect those readers to return to your site.  If your want to submit weak content to your site, let’s say exclusively for SEO purposes, then don’t even bother bookmarking it.  Keep in mind that if any of these social bookmarking sites comes to the conclusion that you are a spammer, you run the risk of getting your account banned.

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For a small business owner, there is no better feeling than waking up after a good night’s sleep to discover ecommerce, affiliate, or advertising income that was not in your account when you went to bed. The problem is that when you are just starting out is that at times, you can go days without making a cent.

This lack of income can make it feel as if all your hard work is for nothing, like the wheels are spinning but you haven’t moved an inch. The solution is to focus on building equity instead of income.

In the early stages of online business, equity is almost always easier to build than income. Before we get into specifics about how to build online equity let’s start by defining what online equity is. I would define online equity as any measurable statistic, associated with your online business that increases your leverage for making money online.

Let me give you some examples… Gaining 100 new followers for your email newsletter would count as an increase in online equity. In addition adding 10 new pages of content to your website would most likely count as an increase in online equity. Gaining 500 new friends, all interested in your businesses niche, on a social networking site like Facebook would count as an increase in online equity as well.

Let’s take a closer look at our Facebook example. If your particular niche is affiliate marketing, you could search on Facebook for groups that have already been created around the subject of affiliate marketing. Once you have found the groups that you would like to target you can work through the member’s of these groups systematically. For instance you could add 500 Facebook users as “friends” on your profile in a single evening.

Within a 24 hour period, even if only 10% of these users decided to reciprocate (by adding you as a friend), you would still have gained an additional 50 friends by the end of the next evening. If you gain 50 friends in one day then while you sleep the first 20 or so of these followers might have added you as friends. This example is just one way that you can build online equity while you sleep.

The next time that you decide to promote through your Facebook profile, your audience will now be 50 profiles larger than it one before. The larger your following on a particular social networking site, the larger your sphere of influence and as your influence grows so does your leverage to make money online.

What other methods can you think of for building your online equity?