The Clean and Green Club

Finishing up our extended series on Web 2.0, a few more ways to get known (at no cost) in Cyberspace. First, we talked about Facebook and similar sites, then blogs last month, and now, a roundup of other ways to get noticed:

Make Comments on News Articles

Just like blogs, many of the top (and lesser known) mainstream media allow comments on their stories. And the value of a link is even higher. While in traditional media the number of published letters to the editor is sharply limited, blog comment space refreshingly open-ended. Spam comments will be removed, but most legitimate ones will be allowed to stay. As an advocate for decades of letters to the editor as a marketing strategy, I adapted easily to this new reality. (Tip: Keep a copy of the comments you post on other blogs and news sites).

“I Found Something Cool” Sites

Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and many other sites let you share great discoveries. It’s a bit tacky to flag your own stuff, but you can get away with that once in a while, if you’ve been flagging other stuff too. The sharp marketer can build respect and traffic.

You might notice that at the end of this post (and every post on both my blogs), there are over 30 icons that enable you to click and share my posts with these networks; this is something you can easily set up for your own content, too.

Twitter (and similar sites)

140 characters (typically 10 or 20 words is a very small canvas, but more and more marketers are Twittering (and feeding their Twits into Facebook. You can connect with people you admire by following them, and you can post short updates similar to the Facebook status updates (in fact, you can even set up your Twitter Tweets to show as Facebook status updates). More and more marketers are using this. For pros and cons, click on this link for an extended discussion of Twitter on the LED Digest.