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Chatrooms, tacky banner exchanges and cutesy emoticons dominated the Web 1.0 world. Web 2.0 moved away from all of that moving into interactivity, dynamic and user-generated content. In order to effectively navigate the Web 2.0 world, you'll first need to recognize the icons of this new social networking and social bookmarking world. With websites impacting web surfing like Myspace, Bebo, Facebook and Ning, social bookmarking websites including Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and the biggest success story in dynamic, interactive content Wikipedia, Web 2.0 has truly come into his own.

Savvy Internet marketers look at the new social interactivity as a dynamo of solid traffic. Using a 2.0 platform guarantees interactivity, community and a stream of visitors looking to buzz backlink and comment on what's going on in the Web 2.0 universe. Through word-of-mouth, email and traditional publicity, people are flocking to sites that perpetuate the feeling that they are important. While all this traffic is terrific, getting the snowball rolling can prove a bit daunting at first.

Is it as easy as it seems?

Nope, it ain't. Web 2.0 marketing requires tremendous amount of time and effort, and yet you can't always figure out for sure whether you will get casual visitors (who just hang around and leave) or hardcore shoppers who're willing to swipe their cards. Here then are some fundamental guidelines for making your Web 2.0 marketing campaign successful:

1. First, your website will need to look chic and have quality content that informs and entertains. It must build a feeling of credibility in the person reporting, and it must be easy to read.

2. People hang around social networking websites to kill time, not to buy stuff. So, if you have to divert them to your websites you must use killer tools (entertaining videos, games, audios, commentary, etc.) that will hook them up instantly. You cannot hoist a sales pitch on a Web 2.0 site! You have to be innovative and plant some cool entertaining content if you want to attract them to your website.

3. Approach your Web 2.0 marketing campaign like your life depends on it. If you give it a half-hearted effort, put out boring, non-informative content and then sit back and wit to see what happens. Trust me, nothing will happen. Further, you will lose credibility because bad press spreads faster than viruses on the Net.

4. On Web 2.0 websites, your goal is to make pals, not sell. So, your posts have to be informal and conversational, devoid of heavy jargon.

5. You shouldn't expect Web 2.0 marketing to draw traffic automatically to your site the way pay per click campaigns operate. It doesn't work like that as you are not paying for people to read your stuff.

6. You don't want to start Web 2.0 marketing when your site is just starting or if the site is mediocre and sales are just average. Web 2.0 marketing techniques are good for established, working sites. Marketing this way needs to happen when you have a decent amount of content to offer arriving visitors.

These were the fundamental principles of Web 2.0 marketing. Go for it!