Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is extremely popular with marketers in many niches. Digg, Del.icio.us, and Technorati are social bookmarking sites that allow users to add links to sites they like. Visitors can then go and grab those links and add them to their own lists, making your URLs go viral.

Social bookmarking sites can be great for getting traffic to your own domains. You can bookmark your sites yourself and then hope others will share the links, and in some cases vote your entries up, like Digg users often do.

If enough people vote for a particular story, it might make it to the front page of that bookmarking site. A front-page listing can mean thousands of visitors a day. But because of the very nature of social bookmarking sites, if you want to get a lot of traffic from the bookmarking sites themselves, then you have to make sure that the links you submit are newsworthy – not just your sales pitch page.

Use the news to work your site into the bookmarking bevy of links. For instance – let’s say you’re in the gardening niche and you have a site on growing tulips. A simple how-to site may not get shared a lot.

But let’s say you read an article about a the discovery by a group of scientists that says people who grow tulips in their yards are 60% less likely to develop lung cancer, for example. Then you’d have a pretty decent shot at having a lot of users in both the gardening and health demographic share your links with others.

If your sites tend to be less newsworthy and more general, then you shouldn’t worry about how many people vote for a story or share your links. Just concentrate on using the social bookmarking sites to gain backlinks to your sites.

Concentrate on bookmarking the index page of each of your sites first. Be careful not to bookmark too many of your own sites at first, since that can appear “spammy” – remember to bookmark other interesting sites you see that you don’t necessarily own yourself.

The key to social bookmarking is to become part of the community who shares interesting information. Create a good profile that tells a little about you. Add a picture, and if the site offers it, start building a “friends” list.

Be careful about how many links you add per day. You shouldn’t go crazy and add 100 links the day you sign up to a social bookmarking site. It’s often helpful to keep it to ten or less per day, but check the individual site’s tutorial to be sure.

After you’ve been a user for several weeks, you might be able to add more per day. Just make sure to keep bookmarking stories on other websites. Vote for a few of the stories that made it onto the first page. Bookmark a story at a news site every once in a while, or a funny YouTube video. This helps make your profile a lot more legitimate in the eyes of the community.