Many small business websites miss out on an easy link building strategy that allows website visitors to quickly share website content. This strategy is called social media sharing or social bookmarking.

When I bring social media sharing up to my small business clients, they often tell me they don’t have time for social media. (Which often leads to a lengthy discussion outside the topic of this article…) In response, I tell them that it doesn’t matter whether they use social media or not, because their website visitors probably use social media. And we can make it easy for those visitors to share links to their website all over the place with buttons.

Sharing Content with and without Social Media Buttons

First, I’m going to share some examples with you. You’ve probably even experienced these situations yourself many times.

In the examples below, I use Facebook, but in reality the visitor can share content with any social media website such as LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, or StumbleUpon.

Which of the following do you think is easier?

Social media sharing works like this:

• A person visits your website and likes what you wrote on a web page or in an article.
• They want to share your web page or article with their own friends on Facebook.
• On your website, they click on the sharing button for Facebook.
• The visitor’s Facebook feed is update with a link to your web page or article.
• In comparison, this is what the visitor would do on a website without social media sharing buttons:
• A person visits your website and likes what you wrote on a web page or in an article.
• They want to share your web page or article with their own friends on Facebook.
• They copy the URL of your web page or article from the browser.
• They go to their Facebook profile.
• They paste the URL as a link to your web page into their Facebook status.
• They add an optional comment about the link and then Post it to their feed.

The Pros and Cons of Social Media Sharing

As with any approach in website design and SEO, there are tradeoffs of the best strategy to use. This often depends upon the content on your website and how your website is designed. Here are some things to consider before you dive in.

Pros

Use of social media sharing can add links to your website, increase website traffic, and enhance brand awareness.

By reviewing the analytics from your social media sharing, you can determine the most shared pages and the most popular social media sites for your content. You can then use this information for developing future content and social media campaigns.

Cons

Because social media sharing uses code outside your website, it can slow down the loading of web pages.

Showing counter buttons on seldom shared web pages can look like you don’t get many website visitors or that people don’t enjoy your content.

A data warehouse or DW is an electronic database capable of storing information directed to fulfilling requests for users’ decision making tasks. The right data warehouse design is therefore important since some design models can’t be effectively used by users within an organization for proper decision making. An accurate data warehouse design model should be highly dynamic, current, and extensive in order to give users a more accurate representation of the data contained in the DW as it changes.

Likewise, the chosen schema for the database must be directly created and organized according to the model for it to serve as an efficient management, decision-making, and communication tool. Prior to actually completing a data warehouse design, architectural goals must be first specified and understood very well. Since the main goal of the warehouse is to efficiently serve its potential users, the need to understand different user types, their interaction characteristics with the database, and their particular requirements is of the utmost importance.

In this light, designing an effective data warehouse design must satisfy specific requirements for it to be useful. First off, it should provide a streamlined and effortless experience to users to become successful. It should likewise work without any interference to OLTP or online transaction processing systems and offer core storage area of consistent and pertinent data. In addition, the data warehouse must also be capable of quickly processing and answering complicated user questions and offer an array of robust tools for data analysis which include data mining and OLAP / online analytical processing.

Furthermore, for a data warehouse design to function properly, it should have particular characteristics. It must be built according to a dimensional model and store historical data with both summarized and detailed data versions. It should also be capable of focusing on one subject whether it is finance, inventory, or sales and merging unrelated data coming from various sources while still maintaining consistency throughout. Note that the size of a data warehouse is irrelevant and is generally dependent on the data amount required to be accessed by users.

An effective data warehouse design begins with taking into account all the requirements of specific users. These typically include the executives and information consumers which make up 83% of users, 15% knowledge workers, and 2% statisticians. Users can get data directly from the relational database of the analytical services output which include data mining and OLAP. Direct questions to the DW relational database must be restricted to queries that can’t be possibly answered via the existing means, which are typically more effective than direct questions and provide reduced load to the database.

Specialized applications and tools for reporting normally accesses the data warehouse directly. Information consumers don’t actually directly interact with the data warehouse and usually get reports via email or through a web page containing information sourced from the database. Executives may order other users to generate reports or utilize standard reports from the DW. On the other hand, analysts write complicated questions to acquire and accumulate particular data that can’t be accessed by conventional means while statisticians regularly obtain information by using specialized analysis applications.

As you know by now, ultimate success of a data warehouse design model is primarily dependent on its users’ approval since without them, an organization might as well confine their data to conventional data storage facilities—i.e., on disks, hard drives, paper, and kept in the company storage room.

Freelancing on the internet has quickly become one of the main sources of work at home money. If you are interested in freelance web design there are many options out there for you. First off, you have to have the skills necessary to actually do the designs you will be hired to do. Of course you can talk to the employer before hand, but you still should know the basics of web design. You should also know how to use web design software, such as Dreamweaver. If you have no idea what Dreamweaver is then maybe freelance web design isnt for you. If you do then maybe freelancing is for you. Do you have a passion for creating websites and designing websites to be a appealing to the eyes? The freelance web design may be right up your alley. Freelance work is hard but it can be very rewarding too.

The first thing you want to do is get yourself a good program for freelance web design. A great program that you can try is Dreamweaver, you can get a free trial at Adobe.com, or, alternatively, you could download a free alternative program that you can find through Google. There are a few free web design programs, so if you do your research you might be able to find one that works for you. There are a couple good freelance programs that you can use to do freelance work, but they might not be as good.

If you want to find freelancing websites there are many to be found online, even thousands. Sign up for freelance websites. This will be your source of income from freelancing. Make sure you have a lot of practice. If you think you are ready to start freelancing web design online, then you can sign up for websites like, oDesk, Fiverr, and many others. The pay will depend on which site you choose to sell your services online, although the great thing is that you can sign up to more than one website and you can work as much as you want. This is a great opportunity for people who want to work at home and have experience designing websites. This career path can potentially be very lucrative to the right person interested in freelance design.

If you are new to freelance web signing and arent sure if you have what it takes to offer services at a high price then you can try a couple little micro jobs at Fiverr and see how much you can do, or how much hard work you can handle. If you have confidence in your work than you can go over to more legitimate freelancing sites. There are many freelancing sites and many guarantee payment for the work that you do, such as oDesk and Fiverr. These are not the only freelancing websites but they are a great way to find new customers for your products or the work that you do.

If you want to be a freelance web designer, then there many options for you. Just know that it is hard work and is not always easy. Yes you get to work at home and make your own hours, at there are still deadlines and you still have to put in the work for the money. It is in no way a get rich quick scheme or anything of the sorts. You are essentially selling your service and finding the right people to buy it. Thats where websites like oDesk and Fiverr come in, because you can put your services online and fill in the dots and make connections to future clients. As long as you have faith in your website design work I see no reason why you shouldnt try out freelancing web design. Its a great way to make a good amount of money and work from home part time or full time.