Mulligatawny Monday | 10 Free Ways that Giving Helps You Market

If you really want to understand marketing in the Web 2.0 age without going broke, a surefire way to have a better overall comprehension is to learn the art of giving. Most Web 2.0 sites that will help you market your site will Only work if you make a conscious effort to share your resources. Think of it as networking amplified and assisted by web tools. The technical details of how to maximize social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, collaborative tools and widgets are all useless without the underlying new first rule of the Web.

In order to receive, you’ll have to start out by giving. The trick is to go beyond the golden rule of doing unto others as you’d have them do unto you, into the Platinum rule of doing to others as they want to be done unto.

And if you can figure out how to anticipate needs, you’ve got a bigger head-start than any me-centric marketer, no matter how large their head start in experience might be.

Let’s look at 10 of the free ways you can use Give Marketing to enhance your entire marketing strategy.

Give Marketing Tip #1- Giving Sincere and Useful Comments on Blogs. Don’t make the mistake of leaving a message just so you can leave your link. Build relationships.

Give Marketing Tip #2- Giving Testimonials. Send audio and a picture, along with your most sincere praise when you’ve found a tool you love. Even if the tool was free. Also great as a blog topic.

Give Marketing Tip #3- Giving a Detailed, Helpful Answer in Forums Don’t forget to fill out the signature panel if the community allows. Even those that don’t will allow you a profile.

Give Marketing Tip #4- Giving a Heartfelt Compliment (Anywhere Public) Testimonials are a type of compliment, but not all compliments are testimonials. You can give a compliment without having tried a service, product, tip or tool. A compliment can be about how a site looks, ease of use, or the quality of the packaging the product comes in.

Give Marketing Tip #5- Giving a Contact Everyone knows someone another person would like to get next to, so make a list of who you know, regardless of industry, and how you could help them by introducing to someone brilliant you’ve recently met. The gesture is never forgotten, and fortuitous unions often provide additional kickbacks.

Give Marketing Tip #6- Giving a Digg. Digg is s social bookmarking system in which the participants vote on a story. If a friend is involved in a good story, submit it at http://digg.com.

Give Marketing Tip #7- Giving a BUMP. Digg’s community are centered mostly around World News and several aspects of Technology. BUMPzee is the best of the blogging community tools like MyBlogLog and the social bookmarking of Digg mashed together in a yummy chocolate/vanilla swirl. You don’t have to be a blogger to use it either, and if the community that your BUMP goes in doesn’t exist, you can create it at http://bumpzee.com .

Give Marketing Tip #8- Giving a Plug. PlugIM is quickly becoming the Internet Marketer’s preferred place for marketing tips and news. It has a Digg-like interface, but it’s smartly niched for the huge legions of online marketers and the online Business to Business crowd. At http://www.plugim.com you can expose news where all the right people will see it in two minutes flat.

Give Marketing Tip #9- Giving a Trackback or Link Back Got a blog? Learn about Trackback, a method by which a remote blog can automatically like back to you when you reference a post of theirs. If you don’t, give a link to a site you believe in.

Get to giving. It might even be fun in and of itself.