These sites serve as private news hubs where information is collected (aggregated) from blogs or other syndicated content that the user has decided he/she wants to be kept up to date on. The users are also provided with simple methods to share their chosen feeds with other like-minded users.

1. Technorati: the grandfather of the lot, Technorati is a search engine that specializes in providing current content from millions of blogs from all over the world.
2. Bloglines: subscribe to feeds, groups, or websites and share your favorite content. Bloglines also allows you to create a custom blog within your profile.
3. Newsvine: this excellent site is similar to Bloglines in that you can submit your own articles and have your own blog hosted within their system(s).
4. Google Reader: add a multitude of feeds, categorize them and share them (if you wish)

Associated Marketing Strategy
Each of the above sites has varying characteristics that should be considered separately when marketing:

• Technorati: first setup a free account at Technorati and claim your blog. Once it is claimed ensure that you tag each of your blog postings using categories or labels depending on the blog software you are using. If your software does not offer tagging functionality Technorati has a tagging help page that will provide you with instructions to add custom Technorati labels to each blog posting. Once your blog is set up appropriately try to use descriptive keywords when tagging your posts so your content is more likely to be found.
• Bloglines & Newsvine: create a profile of your favorite web feeds and articles including your own (if they are of a high enough quality) and share them with the community. Create a custom blog and separately post teasers of your articles that link to the main article on your own site.
• Google Reader: create labels (aka. tag) using keyphrases that are popularly searched and then share the labels with the general public; label sharing is found in the “Settings” and then “Tags” area of Google Reader. Then attach top quality content from your own site and other sites that you find in your day-to-day online activities.

In each case where you create a unique blog or share a label make sure to link to these pages from a social media section of your website and/or site map. These links will provide the search engine spiders with crucial access points to your socialized content. After a while, gauge the success of each social site for driving traffic or backlinks by checking your backlink reports (Yahoo or Google webmaster areas) as well as your own website analytic reports and add more backlinks to one if it is standing out as a particularly positive performer. These extra backlinks should not be from your own site but from offsite areas such as forum signatures, online bios, syndicated articles, etc.

»» Please Continue to “Collaborative Directories “
OR choose from the following directory:

1. Social Networking Sites
2. Business Networking Sites
3. Social (Collaborative) Bookmarking Sites
4. Content Voting Sites
5. News Sharing Sites
6. Collaborative Directories
7. Video Sharing Sites, and
8. Photo Sharing Sites

You can also download our PDF called “Do it Yourself Social Media Marketing” created June 27th, 2007. Please note, any changes or updates that have occured on our website since then may not be reflected in this document.