In the second part of this blog, we will look at the last five tips for socializing your affiliate site.

Tip #6: Embrace Social Search
After bookmarks, networking, and shopping, search has become social! New custom search engines can be built on top of the big engine’s indexes. Anyone can handpick sites relevant to a certain topic and have their own specialized Google engine. What does that mean to you, the webmaster?

In order to be picked as a “social search worthy” site by those building custom engines, or to be rated well in a user-tweaked search engine, there is a golden rule: build a quality site. Explore custom search engines relevant to your business and niche and submit your site to them.

Adapt tagging if you haven’t done so until now. (See Tip #5 on Tuesday’s blog.) Social search sites are frequently bundled with social bookmarking and aggregate tagged websites from similar services. By being present in social bookmarking sites and having your content properly tagged, you increase your chances of being picked up by these search engines and their users.

Build your own search engine to enhance your site.

Tip #7: Build a Wiki
Building a community of users around your chosen niche brings many benefits, and it has never been easier to accomplish – at least on the technical side of things. In a thriving community, your users will generate quality content that the search engines will gladly index, helping your SEO efforts.

In addition, your loyal users will refer others to your site if they find it noteworthy.

Tip #8: Datafeed 2.0: Try a Mashup
It has never been a better time to get into datafeeds. Affiliate networks have launched APIs that allow easier, continuous, and more customized access to product data. Not only that, but you can complement your merchants’ product feeds with free data from other services to build up a content-rich site. (See Tip #3 on Tuesday’s blog.)

Think of your niche. What kinds of data are useful for your customers? How can you combine this data with affiliate feeds to make it even more useful for them? How can you twist the data and combine it with affiliate links to convert more visitors into shoppers?

Tip #9: Redesign with Web 2.0 in Mind
Clear design is good design, and it is now the standard, literally. Building sites using current web standards (using XHTML and CSS) brings many benefits, and fewer headaches about cross-platform compliance and accessibility.

Clever uses of new techniques (e.g., AJAX) make websites more responsive, easier to use, faster, and sleeker than their Web 1.0 predecessors. The clean and polished look of current web design trends accentuates the things that create the real value of a website: the content or service it offers. That results in a better user experience. Learn more about web standards and use them to speed up your site and make it more accessible to wide variety of browsers and platforms. Take advantage of the many available AJAX scripts (see Lightbox link below) to enhance your site.

Tip #10: Research Expected Trends
Finally, use the new social web as your market research playground. User-generated content is, by definition, a gold mine for researching what your audience is interested in and what they say about those topics.

Watch for tags that begin to pick up a larger volume of content, tags that appear on the “popular” pages of social sites. Find your next niche by browsing “related” tags on social bookmarking sites for unique combinations. See what’s most popular on the “popular” pages of sites like Digg.com, or Technorati.

Research international markets by exploring local social bookmarking and networking sites. See if there is a rising search interest for your topic in a different market. You can get ahead of local competitors by being the first to localize your established niche site in new markets where that niche is only just gaining ground.

Implement one or all of these tips, and you will be well equipped for the socializing your site.

To help you get started, we have compiled our top 10 tips for socializing your affiliate business. Some of these tips take just about an hour to implement, and others are more ambitious projects.

In this two-part blog, we will begin today by looking at the first five tips, then finish on Wednesday with the remaining five, that together make up a blueprint for a well-equipped affiliate site.

Tip #1: Blog and Syndicate
Blogs and RSS are the stepping stones into the new social web. Blogs come in all shapes and forms, and they bring the most benefits if the blog is tailored to your specific business and audience. If you have a deals site, start a deal blog where you post your top deals often (daily, or at least a few times a week).

If you have a content site, create a blog where you post articles as blog posts, or simply link to what’s new on your site whenever you update your main content. Set up RSS feeds of your content for syndicating your content around the web, and to enable readers to keep up with your new posts.

Tip #2: Let Your Users Contribute
Is your site set up to leverage user activity? Does your site have features that allow sharing and participation? Do you allow visitors to share their views and comment on your content? Do you have a blog with an RSS feed to initiate a conversation with your visitors? Can your users build their own version of your offerings to share with their peers? Think of ways your audience might contribute to your site.

Tip #3: Leverage Free Content
The other side of user-generated content and easy syndication is that the web is now a repository of content up for grabs. From social bookmarks to photos and video, you can enhance your site with all kinds of syndicated content created by users on other sites.

Pick a few relevant RSS feeds from blogs and Flickr, and you have a constantly updated sidebar that helps keep your site fresh and interesting even on days when you don’t update with new content.

Tip #4: Add Social Bookmarking
There are plug-ins for most CMS tools that display an “Add to…” link on each page of your site, enabling users to quickly save your link as a bookmark on their chosen online bookmark manager. By using this tactic, every page will encourage users to save and share your site, hopefully resulting in free viral traffic from these increasingly popular services.

Tip #5: Implement White Hat Tag and Ping
Tagging, the organizing principle behind most of the user-generated content sites, is one of the building blocks of social media. It is also very simple to implement on your website, and the results can be impressive.

Content aggregators like blog search engine Technorati will pick up your content more easily and display it when users browse or search for the given tag. Unlike old-school directory submissions and categorization, the process can be automated.

Keep tags relevant to your content! (Add a tag because it describes your content, and not if your sole justification is to market it under that keyword.) Only tag and submit actual content worthy of submitting! (Would you want to read it if you were a member of the community?)

Do not ping and save excessively! (Ping and save when you updated the site with something worthy of submitting.) Do not register multiple accounts for submitting your links – ever! You will get caught and banned sooner than you can imagine.

The next five tips will be revealed in Wednesday’s blog.