Web 2.0 is the big buzz in website traffic these days. For those of you who aren't yet familiar with what Web 2.0 is, for online marketing purposes, basically it is a shift away from website design and marketing tactics directed at search engine rankings and towards designing sites and using marketing tactics to appeal directly to the intended end-users. Web 2.0, also called "social marketing" is a conglomeration of news sharing sites, social networking sites, content sharing sites, and anything else that allows direct interaction between people on the internet. It's really "word of mouth" marketing in the online world.

While most successful websites continue to get a significant amount of their traffic from search engines, relying on search engine traffic (generated either through "organic" placement in search listings or through paid placements through systems like Google Adwords), can be a risky and/or expensive proposition. Just because a site is #1 on Google today doesn't mean it will be tomorrow. In fact, a slight change in a search engine's algorithm could take your site from #1 to #100 (or 1000, or 1 million) overnight, and the majority of your traffic could literally vanish. If you're relying on paid advertising like Adwords, you may have noticed that competition for good keywords is constantly increasing, and therefore the cost of purchasing good placement for your ads is likewise rising steadily.

By comparison, sites that get the majority of their traffic through Web 2.0 techniques are much more stable and maintain a low overhead. There are a couple of big advantages of using Web 2.0. First, you generate free links to your site, and that tends to help your search engine placements. Second, your site gets direct exposure to your target market - for free! Why do you want good search engine placement in the first place? So your target market will find your site, right? Well Web 2.0 puts your site in front of your target market AND helps improve your search engine rankings at the same time!

OK,Web 2.0 sounds good so far, so why isn't everyone doing it? Well, because there's one small hitch. Marketing your site effectively with Web2.0 techniques is a lot of work and is very time consuming. So, if you're looking for easy money and want the ultimate "get rich quick" system, Web 2.0 marketing is definitely not for you. On the other hand, if you don't mind working hard consistently for a year or two to build an authority site that gets consistently huge traffic and can be monetized any number of ways for ongoing high profits, Web 2.0 is probably not only the best way to go, it's rapidly becoming the ONLY way to go.

To do Web 2.0 effectively, you need to have some resources and tools at the ready. First and foremost, you'll need a list of all the social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, news submission sites, blogs, video sharing sites, etc. in the niche you are working in. There are various sources for this information, including searching Google for key words in your niche, and also searching terms like "social networking". One of the best sources for this information that I've found is "The Authority Black Book", by Jack Humphrey, which is available as a free download (see my resource box for more information).

Second, although you can of course do everything manually, using Web 2.0 effectively is time consuming, so you'll benefit considerably by using whatever tools you can find to at least partially automate the process of both creating content to attract prospects in your niche and for submitting your content links to the various Web 2.0 sites you want to target. Various tools are available for speeding up link submission and generating "buzz" for your content, which increases your popularity on the Web 2.0 sites, increasing your visibility and links to your site, which ultimately provides SEO benefits. Some of these tools are competely free, such as Onlywire and SocialMarker, which allow you to submit a link to any URL on your site to mutiple sites simultaneously (once you've set up accounts at all of those sites you are using these tools to submit to).

By putting in the hard work initially and streamlining the process of content generation and promotion whenever possible, you will reach a point where you get strong traffic to your site on a consistent basis through your Web 2.0 efforts and are no longer subject to the whims of the search engines.