If you read my marketing blog on video marketing, you know I believe that using several marketing techniques for your site is the best way for smaller sites to market. My video marketing brings me 3 to 5 new members a day and another marketing technique I will discuss below also brings me 3 to 5 new members a day. If each marketing technique I use can bring me 3 to 5 new members, it can add up to success
 
What Marketing has in Common with vldPersonals
 
When a member joins your dating site he fills out a profile. To help their profile be recognized by other members, they network their profile by signing guestbooks, creating blogs, uploading a video, commenting on other images, etc. Each time they network, a link is created pointing to their profile.
 
Marketing your site is the same concept as a member networking their profile on your dating site. You network your site by writing articles and providing a link pointing to your site, you posts in forums with a link in your signature pointing to your site, you comment on blogs with a link pointing to your site, etc. So marketing is really nothing more than networking your site throughout the internet in the same way members of your dating site network their profile in their quest for love.
 
RSS
 
One of the better ways to market your site is vldPersonal’s default RSS links. For that matter, some of the mods I had Ramil do for me included RSS for marketing purposes. I’m working with Ramil on a future custom page mod hoping to include RSS in the mod to give me another way to market my site (I plan to use this custom page RSS feature for affiliate marketing).
 
If you are not familiar with RSS here is a good link explaining RSS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
 
Where are the RSS links in vldPersonals? By default the following areas have RSS links:
 
1. The news on your site has a RSS link. If you are using firefox browser, it is easy to find the RSS link. For example, in firefox, if you click the following link: http://www.filipina-lady.net/news/ you will see in the browser URL window a little orange box that represents the RSS link for this page. If you click the little orange box, you will go to the RSS page and see your RSS link in your browser window. My RSS link for news is: http://www.filipina-lady.net/news/rss/
 

 
2. If a member creates a blog, they have their own individual RSS link. I found this quite unique. I thought there would be a RSS link for the Global Blogs but vlad wrote the script so each member’s blog has their own RSS link. For marketing purposes, I use the RSS link of the admin blog only. Here is my RSS link to my blog (admin): http://www.filipina-lady.net/member/1/blog/rss/
 
3. Events also has their own RSS link but I do not use Events on my site so I can’t show you an example, but if you do use Events, it probably is a good marketing tool.
 
I’m going to stop here. The above RSS links is plenty for marketing. I know that the individual guestbooks and saved searches have their own RSS link but I don’t consider these two RSS links very effective for marketing.
 
Besides the above RSS links, I also have a RSS link for blog comments. This is not a default vldPersonals RSS link but came with the Blog Mod that Ramil did for my site. Blog RSS comments and News are probably my two most effective marketing tools.
 
Ping.FM
 
Once you know your RSS links, you can use those links to automate your marketing (networking) efforts on other sites. One of the best ways to automate your networking is http://ping.fm/
 
To automate ping.fm there are several steps involved. Understand that at first it takes a little work to set things up, but once you have every thing setup, updates are done automatically. Besides, if you think the effort to setup the following for marketing your site is a lot of work, than your site is doomed. Believe me, the effort you put into networking your site is ten times more work than it took to setup your site. It never ends and requires your constant attention to maintain your site or to get ahead of your competition.
 
Follow these steps:
 
1. First you need to have a twitter account. http://twitter.com/ If you don’t have one, sign up.
 
2. Once you have a twitter account, you can use twitterfeed to automate your process. http://twitterfeed.com . When you signup for twitterfeed, use the same login details you used for signing up for your twitter account.
 
Twitterfeed allows you to add your RSS links for updating your social networking accounts to include twitter, facebook and ping.fm. The beauty of ping.fm is that it has several more networking accounts that that will automatically be updated by twitterfeed.
 
3. If you don’t have a ping.fm account you will have to create one. If you login to your ping.fm account you will see a list of social networking sites that can be automatically updated. Obviously, you will have to make sure you have an account with each of the social networking sites listed at ping.fm.
 
As I said above, initially there is a lot of work involved in setting up your accounts but once they are setup, updating the accounts is done by the your vldPersonal RSS links.
 
That’s it. Now every time I update my blog (admin blog), news or a new blog comment is made (Ramil’s mod) the social networking accounts I belong to are automatically updated which helps me network my sites throughout the internet.
 
Below I show the process in images: