Over the last few years social networking has been steadily gaining popularity among Internet users. With hundreds of thousands of registered users and new networking sites created daily if used properly social networking can be very powerful source of traffic to your site. Even though traffic from social networking sites may be not the best quality and may not get you many conversions but it’s free and may have positive effect.

I will describe on the example of StumbleUpon since it’s one of the most popular networks how you can take advantage of social bookmarking sites.

One of important steps is creating a “name” for yourself. By “name” I mean not login or screen name. You want to earn respect from other members.
All websites you bookmark or vote for will be listed in your profile, so bookmarking junk will not help your reputation. From this point of view you need to be careful participating in stumble exchanges like it is very popular on Digital Point forums. Always check if site you are voting for worth recommending, same way as would you place link to it on your own website. Try to stay active and submit something new at least once a week.

Second step is creating network of “friends”. More virtual friends you have – better success you can expect from your website marketing efforts.
Every time you submit new site or vote for someone else’s – your vote will show up on your mutual friends pages. If your friend like the resource you have submitted he will likely to vote or comment on it. Instantly your submission will appear on his or hers friends pages. In other words it’s a pyramid effect at it’s best. If your submission is good and gets enough votes to make it to the front page – you better hope that your server can handle amount of traffic you are going to receive…
Join groups and try to find friends with similar interests – this will increase chances that they will agree to be your friends and vote for your submissions.
Don’t spam your virtual friends with some unsolicited offers or constant requests to vote for your submissions – you risk to lose them!

When submitting new resource try to write relevant title and detailed descriptions. First it will work as a link bait inviting users to visit your site for more information. Second – you will get back link to your site with relevant content and key phrase as an anchor. In addition to sending extra traffic to your site these bookmarks on social networking sites will have positive effect on your website SERPs.

One more time I suggest to be careful with participating in vote exchanges or purchasing votes – most of the time it’s useless since these “paid” visitors are not interested in the content of your site and most likely don’t have many virtual friends who would trust theirs recommendations. If you decided to try one of those exchanges I would suggest to check other peoples threads instead of starting your own. This way you can chose who are you voting for and than ask to return the favor (better by PM).

This is basically it. There are some differences between social networking sites but principle is the same – submit new resources and rate resources submitted by other users. I have been using social networking technique to promote many different sites and result was always the same – increased traffic.

If you think webmaster forums are just a platform to discuss web hosting, domain name and other webmaster stuff alone, then think again! UK Webmaster World forum member Rhys used the graphic design section of UK WW forum to get a professional quality logo designed, at a fraction of the price it would have cost him had he gone to a logo designer on the high street or website.

Rhys started a logo design contest, load of talented logo and graphic designers entered the contest with several creative designs. The logo design contest end today, Rhy chose the a design by Casper, the final logo chosen a clean straightforward design can be found on top of this post.

Some webmasters started reporting changes as far back as last week but it was not until 11th of January 2008 that every the PR bar on every browser went up or down as all Google data centre synchronized their information.
The PageRank update took most webmasters by surprised as no one was expecting PR update so early in 2008.

As usual, there is a mixture of delight and disappointments as webmaster gain or drop PR. How did your site fare in the update? you can discuss it at UK WW PR update thread.