There is a great article in the new Fast Company Magazine all about the do it yourself social network “”Ning”.

The article begins by letting us in on a little secret:

Here’s something you probably don’t know about the Internet: Simply by designing your product the right way, you can build a billion-dollar business from scratch. No advertising or marketing budget, no need for a sales force, and venture capitalists will kill for the chance to throw money at you.

The secret is what’s called a “viral expansion loop,” a concept little known outside of Silicon Valley (go ahead, Google it — you won’t find much). It’s a type of engineering alchemy that, done right, almost guarantees a self-replicating, borglike growth: One user becomes two, then four, eight, to a million and beyond. It’s not unlike taking a penny and doubling it daily for 30 days. By the end of a week, you’d have 64 cents; within two weeks, $81.92; by day 30, about $5.4 million.

Yeah we all remember that little game, “I’ll give you $1 Million today or one single penny and double everyday for a month, which would you rather have?

Me? I’ll take the “Viral expansion loop” - but I want to call it the “Viral Spiral”.

This article goes on to explain how the viral loops (spirals) work as an accelerant for internet businesses - take Google, PayPal, YouTube, eBay, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Flickr as good examples.

So where does Ning fit in?

Well they use this concept on steroids! What they’ve got going is a “double viral loop”.

Only Ning, Andreessen declares, benefits from a “double viral loop,” which spreads two ways, because every network creator is a user and any user can become a network creator. Say someone sets up an Angelina Jolie net with 10 members, which grows as each person draws in others. Then an adoption site breaks off, a Jon Voight hate group rises up, and a Brad Pitt love club forms. Meanwhile, a Lara Croft nostalgia net launches, spawning a legion of soft-core cyberporn spin-offs. Soon you have 2, 3, 10 networks — all expanding simultaneously. Meanwhile, the original group is attracting even more users. Ning swells like a river fed from an ever-growing number of tributaries.

You can read the rest of the article here

Alright, not sure exactly what social bookmarking really is? No worries, the guys at Common Craft have created a short movie that explains the basics. So if you want to get an understanding of the concept of Social bookmarks and bookmarking, have a look.

Now for the purposes of marketing your small business online, with a little help from a whole gaggle (I think that’s the first time I’ve actually used that word in a sentence) of social bookmarking sites, you can increase traffic and increase ranking.This movie walks you through the sign up, bookmarking, tagging and retrieval process on the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. This is a great start, but did you know that there are literally hundreds of social bookmarking sites. In addition to del.icio.us, some other great bookmarking sites include: propeller, Digg, ka-boom-it and more.Now for the purposes of increasing business, you follow the same steps as described in the video, only you are using the description and tagging features to force your keyword (tags) to begin showing up in searches. The real beauty of this isn’t simply getting your own page to show up, it’s getting multiple pages to show up on google’s front page for your terms like this example below:

All the links marked in red ultimately lead to the main site. Wanna find out how to accomplish this? Go here and sign up to receive my FreeMarket Media Group Starter Kit.

One of the greatest opportunities you have to market your website online is by using social bookmarking sites to, yes to bookmark your website. There are a lot of choices out there for this and a few rise above the crowd. One of those is Ka-Boom-It.

Ka-Boom-It is a Social Bookmarking site for news and information. They are VERY Internet Marketer Friendly. You can post your News stories, Blog Stories, New Websites, and more. Make Friends (Ka-Boomers) and have fun. Just about the only thing they ask is that you limit your sales page posts but do not discriminate. They don’t allow porn or hardcore adult sites. (They will be deleted, and this is a good thing).

So let me give you a little strategy. You post a compelling article on your blog, full of keyword rich content. (I will talk about this in a later blog post). This blog post (or sales page) gives the now pre-screened reader information about your product or service with a call to action. Now you bookmark this page at Ka-boom-it.com.

Within this bookmark you get the opportunity to add keywords that are relevant, a title (should contain your keywords), a article summary and a link to your website.

This becomes a part of an overall strategy to create relevancy, inbound links, generate traffic and interest as well as ultimately incresing your bottom line.