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With the millions of blogs and websites competing for the time and attention of internet users, social bookmarking can be a huge help in getting your website or blog noticed. Social bookmarking has proved to be one of the top techniques to promote your website and guide traffic towards it, and the beauty is that it is actually quite simple to do.

The first thing on your checklist should be visiting a few of the top social bookmarking websites, such as Digg, del.ic.ious, and F ur l. If you are really clueless about social bookmarking websites, then do a simple search engine search and you will get a ton of results. Sign up for a free account at the social bookmarking website of your choice, and when you do so, you will get to select a ‘button’ that you can add to the end of each of your blog posts. What this does is enables users to bookmark your blog or website easily.

For example, if a visitor likes your website and is a member of the social bookmarking service ‘Digg’, he/she can click on your button and this will lead them to the Digg website where they will have to log in. After that, your blog post, article or website will appear as a bookmarked URL. This also gives the visitor the ability to post a comment on your post and this can prove to be very beneficial to your website in terms of traffic.

The more people that click on the social bookmarking link for your website, the more links you will have on the website pointing back to you website. This should increase the traffic on your website when people logging on to Digg are looking for posts relevant to them and find your site bookmarked. Also, as more and more people visit your website they may also social bookmark it themselves, either on the same social bookmarking network or on other sites, both of which will lead to even more bookmarks leading back to you.

However, just registering yourself with a social bookmarking service does not mean that your job is done. You shouldn’t simply stop after pasting a button under your blog posts and expect everyone to remember to click.

You must become an active member of these social bookmarking sites. What is meant by ‘active’ is that you must actively visit the social bookmarking site in question and find topics that relate to you or your online business. This allows you to bookmark, post and add comments of your own.

Believe it or not, this really does increase the traffic on your website. If you bookmark some one’s website, it is likely that they will also bookmark your site, and there should soon be a network of links pointing back to your site.

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Cost-per-thousand (CPM, with the ‘M’ coming from the Roman numeral for 1000) advertising is where you would show 1000 impressions of an advert on your site and get paid for doing so, no matter what action your site visitor takes (if any). In fact, even if the site visitor has not seen the advert at all makes no difference whatsoever – you would still get paid.

From this, it must be obvious that CPM advertising is the lowest quality advertising of all of the options that we have so far considered, as you can place the ads in the most obscure places on your page and still get paid.

Logically, this lack of quality therefore explains why the pay outs per one thousand ads are usually only a few dollars, so you are not going to get rich through featuring CPM ads.

On the other hand, some people do make reasonable sums from building pages that are packed with CPM advertising materials and then showing those pages through high volume traffic generation programs like traffic exchanges.

And, even if you do not want to go along that route, the point about CPM advertising is that it is effectively money that you get for doing almost nothing, so there really is no reason why you cannot make a little extra cash this way.

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This requirement to take two actions naturally means that a proportion of the people who initially indicate their willingness to subscribe to your mailing list do not actually complete the process to do so.

People will inevitably disregard the request to confirm their e-mail address and their willingness to receive information from you.

Some marketers are not willing to accept this potential loss of list members, taking the view that the fact that the subscriber chose to complete the initial form should be enough.

Therefore, they add the subscriber to the list as soon as the subscription request hits their autoresponder account. This is what is known as building a single opt-in mailing list.

It is not, however, a method of building your mailing list that you should adopt, for two main reasons.

Firstly, such a system is still open to abuse. For example, there is nothing to stop a malicious third-party adding your name and e-mail address to a mailing list subscription form on a pornographic or gambling related website, so that your mailbox is flooded with unwanted and perhaps offensive e-mail.

This could clearly never happen if you are specifically required to confirm that you want to receive the information concerned as you are by the double opt-in system.

The single opt in system is also far more likely to create other types of spam complaints. People can complete a subscription form that they see on a particular website and then completely forget that they ever did so. If such a person then decides to make a spam complaint, it is your word against theirs as they will most probably claim that it was not them who completed the form in the first place. If, however, they have confirmed their request for information under the double opt-in system, then there can be no argument.

The second reason that I believe using a single opt in is a shortsighted position to adopt is that if someone really wants the information from you, then asking them to confirm is no more than a logical business decision.

If they are unwilling to undertake a task as simple as clicking a link in an e-mail, then they are never likely to buy anything from you either.

If, however, your autoresponder system has put an additional ‘hurdle’ in their way and they have been willing and able to negotiate it, then they have just qualified themselves as a real live prospect, one who is willing to take action. In other words, they have demonstrated that they are exactly the type of person you are looking for as a potential future customer.