If you missed our mailing yesterday, then you won’t want to miss reading this post. Qassia is an up and coming social community that awards you with backlinks in exchange for your “wiki-like” writeups.

Read about Qassia social community here

[NOTE: Qassia does send you a "validate yourself" type email to create your account. Be sure to give a real inbox or you will have wasted your time. Validate and return to the site to continue setting up. Your DASHBOARD gives you access to all the different aspects of how to setup your Qassia and what's what on how to write.]

After signing up, you’ll want to do a few things before you start posting. Always, in any community, fill out your profile and upload a picture or your avatar. This particular social media community is not that indepth (nothing at all like Facebook or Myspace), but letting others know who you are and what you do is always critical. Make your information fun and informative, they like that

Then you use the “Add Intel” links to begin adding your tidbits to their wiki-type setup. You need to have a bit of backbone when publishing since 10 other people will read what you’ve written and “grade your work.” We note that not everyone plays fair, and while some questionable entries get okay marks, other pieces of information that would be of use to all don’t always get the proper marks. We think the members of Qassia just don’t “get it” yet, but hopefully do over time.

The great thing is reading is subjective. So don’t be disappointed (or even elated) about your marks. That’s not the point

Gaining valuable backlinks in the search engines for your tags and “reports” is the point. Quassia promises great things in the search engines, so why not be a part of it.

As with all new programs or websites, we are suspending judgment until it’s been around long enough to receive some sort of grade itself. However, if they stay on track with their goals, why not be in at the start of something new that has the potential to really boost your website, blog, etc., into the search engines.

Qassia, after joining or even if you don’t join, please take the time to tell us about your experience here on this blog.

Never pass up the chance to branding yourself!

Enjoy!

UPDATE: Our own Qassia url is already in Google! We only started yesterday…! Now to see if and/or how long before our tagged stuff appears.

Today’s post on social bookmarking can be found over at our favorite content sharing website, Hubpages.

Social Bookmarking: A Useless Tool or Clever Marketing Strategy?

After reading it, and we sincerely hope you will, please take a moment and share your thoughts, comments, input at both spots – hubpages and here below in our comment section.

Quick Reminder: One of the greatest benefits to social sharing sites like hubpages and our blog is your ability to voice your thoughts – and give yourself a nice link back to your own website

Knowledge, sharing, and marketing all in one fell swoop… it doesn’t get much better than that!

And as a P.S. of note, we’ve run across numerous excellent resources we’ll be sharing with you throughout the coming week(s). It’s amazing what you discover when you begin your journey around the (best) social communities on the net! In fact, we don’t even know where to begin having found “standalone” topics that do – in the long run – interrelate. Don’t worry though, we’ll figure it out

Again, we hope you enjoy our newest hub, please let us know (by voting and sharing on the hub itself and back here, too, everything counts as a marketing link for yourself!)

Just could not resist making entire pages on nothing but Hubpages how-to information (see below for this YouTube software review).

We’ll be doing our own videos (or at least that’s the plan) but why reinvent what’s already out there in-plenty?

True putting one’s own style into video is always an excellent marketing strategy – one we will be trying our hand at in the near future and posting helpful suggestions, hints, and (free) resources to use to make your own business marketing videos.

In the meantime, enjoy some more “hub-ba!”

Everyone is buzzing about it – the magic “Web 2.0″ word is drawing people like bees to honey. But there’s one slight catch to the whole thing… there are so many of them, what to choose? Where to start? How to work them effectively so you get what you need without ticking a bunch of people off (which you really want to avoid!).

That’s where our suggestions come in handy. We’re actively using the resources we talk about on this blog. You’ll see down below (or off to the side) coverage we are giving to Facebook. Well here’s our next suggestions – Hubpages.com

BUT… before you rush off please finish reading this post. It will save you hours of work and, more importantly, your reputation online if you approach this (or any) social media website with the right mindset.

If you’re reading this blog (and we sincerely hope you are and telling others all about us, hint, hint), you’ll notice that versus posting an entire article here, we present a summary of what to expect and then send you out to hubpages to read the rest. It’s not laziness on our part, lol, but a really good marketing strategy that you, too, can benefit by using.

The really great part is that you don’t even need your own website to get started. If you do, great! If you don’t, don’t worry about it (though down the line you should plan to have at least a blog of your own).

You’ll first signup for a Hubpages account. From this one account, you create multiple “hubs” which are nothing more than a fancier way of saying “individual pages” under your one account. Yes, you can post numerous “hubs” from just one username login area. It’s great!

Which means you can write about ANYTHING that you’re imagination, and research, can dream up.

Each new hub gets a new name – typically it pulls from whatever title you’ve given your initial page. For instance, if we did an article about:

“How to Benefit From Using Hubpages”

the url would look like this (this is fictious)

/hubs/How-to-Benefit-From-Using-Hubpages

So you see hopefully right off the bat that placing your keyword into your title is a primary objective, right?

The idea with Hubpages is, after posting many (this will not work as a “do it once” strategy and should be avoided if you don’t plan to build multiple “hubs”), the search engines will pick up your hubs and create even more valuable backlinks to your hubpages and (ultimate) your website or blog.

Now versus reinventing the wheel, we’ve downloaded the nifty pdf that Hubpages provides to its users. You can:

Download the HubPages User Guide Here
Download and Read First!
It is highly recommended that you get this download first.
Read it through, it’s a clear step-by-step process guide, and then start
your own Hubpages hubs.
WORD OF CAUTION: This, nor any social media, is NOT the place to do blatant advertising! If you do, you will ruin your reputation in a heartbeat! Our suggestion is get the guide, read the guide, and then go travel around within Hubpages before doing anything. Get a feel for what’s what, who’s doing what, how they are doing it. Look for “high score” pages. You can bet these people understand the process and are working it properly.