Social marketing is on the rise and it’s here to stay. Are you still trying to figure out how to leverage social media for your business?

A few months ago a cheat sheet was introduced as a tool to help marketers get organized with Web 2.0 and social media marketing. Many new services have emerged since then. Therefore, several of those respective web sites have been added to this page as a quick reference linking to 100 free social marketing resources and online directories.

Bookmark this page or add it to your favorite places for quick and easy access to several of the top services by category. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list, and some of these sites may not be the top choices internationally. However, it is a valuable resource for leveraging many of the top networks in the U.S., and can help you gain some international exposure as well.

Basic services must be free to qualify for inclusion on the top 100 list below. For your convenience, each title is linked directly to the respective site’s home page. I hope you will find this to be a helpful resource for your business.

Free Social Media Resources (Top 100)

Aggregation Tools (5): Bloglines, FriendFeed, Lifestream.fm, Lijit, YouBundle

Blogs (7): Blog.com, Blogger, Livejournal, Posterous, Tumblr, Typepad, Wordpress

Blog Directories (10): Blogapedia, Blogarama, BlogCatalog, Blogdirs, Blog Flux, Bloghub, Blog Listing, Blogtoplist, BritBlog, Technorati

Bookmarks (12): Delicious, Digg, Diigo, Fark, Mixx, MyBlogLog, Newsvine, Propeller, Reddit, Slashdot, StumbleUpon, Yahoo! Buzz

Comment Systems (2): DISQUS, IntenseDebate

Free Directory Listings (25): Akama, Bateekh, BizHWY, Cardboard, CrunchBase, DMOZ, EVliving, GetFreeListing, Google Local, IllumiRate, Jayde, Jigsaw, Librarians’ Internet Index, Little Web Directory, Manta, MerchantCircle, NextMark, Simple Directory, Spoke, SuperPages, Tradevibes, TurnPike, WebBuyersGuide, Web World, Yahoo! Local

Name Checks (2): Namechk, Usernamecheck

Post Documents (3): eHow, Google Docs, Scribd

Post Presentations (3): AuthorSTREAM, Myplick, Slideshare

Post Videos (2): Vimeo, YouTube

Press Releases: (4): i-Newswire, PR.com, PressReleasePoint, PRLog.org

Publish Articles (5): ArticleDashboard, Articles FACTORY, Ezinearticles, IdeaMarketers, Yahoo Articles Group

Social Networks (8): Biznik, Crowdvine, Facebook, LinkedIn, Naymz, Ning, NowPublic, Plaxo

Twitter Tools (5): Grader, MyTweeple, TweetDeck, TweetLater, Twitter

URL Shorteners (4): bit.ly, doiop, memurl, TinyURL

Wikis (3): Pbwiki, Wetpaint, Wikipedia

Tip: Since PageRank is important to your exposure on the Google search engine results page (SERP), you may want to check out the page rank for each of these services as well. That can be done for free online by using the PageRank Checker (higher = better).

Tip: adding your blog to the directories can improve your search rankings and exposure; the same is true for your web site and your business. That’s the reason for including 35 directory listings (25 free directory listings + 10 blog directories) in the top 100. You only need to do it once, so take advantage of them.

Originally posted on: Nextmark.com

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