One quick and easy way to get some links to your website is through online social bookmarking. Unfortunately, since it is so easy many people abuse it and the social bookmarking sites are always on the lookout for activity that seems in the least bit spammy.
You need to take care when using social bookmarking as a website promotion strategy and not overdo it. Using a social bookmarking tool that spams the sites is a sure fire way to get your accounts deleted and lose all your links! That’s not to say that all tools are bad – it’s all in the way that you use them – but more on that later – for now let’s get on to the basics of online social bookmarking.
What Is Social Bookmarking?
Sometimes referred to as Social Media Marketing, this refers to leaving a link to your site at certain social bookmarking sites. These sites exist so that people can leave links to certain sites of interest in a particular topic. Many of the sites have a voting capability where other users can vote if they like they site.
The whole idea behind them is so that like minded people can “tell” each other about different websites on a particular topic that are interesting.
Unlike what many people think they were not created to give you one-way links to your site, but for a social experience on a particular topic. Therefore, if you play by the rules and become a contributing member of the community by voting on others links and adding links to good quality sites other than your own, you will be much more successful.
How Online Social Bookmarking Works
1. For each of the social bookmarking sites that you want to leave your bookmark at, you will need to register and get your username and login. Yes, this is tedious work, but it need only be done once for each site.
2. Then, when you write an interesting post on your blog or page on your site that you want to get some link juice to, you simply login and post a link back to that post or page. You will be allowed to leave a title, a short blurb about the content and tags. The tags, of course are critical as these are your keyword phrases. You also want to have your keyword phrase in the title.
3. That’s it! As you can see, this is much easier than writing an entire article – all you need is a short blurb!
Social Bookmarking Sites
There are thousands of sites you can submit your bookmarks to, but who has the time for that? If you are doing it manually, you might want to focus on a few of the “best” – these are the ones that I feel will give you the most “bang for the buck”:
*Note: these are not all “do follow” links but I think the ones that don’t have do-follow still will gain you visitors and I know digg really helps get your pages indexed.
What NOT To Do
Being that social bookmarking is so easy, you can really over do it by bookmarking every single page on your site at all of the social bookmarking sites (there are thousands) . I’ve found that the best thing to do is bookmark your pages on only a few sites and also bookmark other pages from authority blogs as well. That way you are not spamming the site with only your bookmarks. If you really want to gain some clout, go ahead and interact by voting or commenting on other peoples bookmarks.
Online Social Bookmarking Tools That Make The Task Less Tedious
Easy as it may be, it can be extremely tedious and time consuming to log in to each of the social bookmarking sites and go through the motions of submitting your bookmarks.
I don’t know about you, but I value my time highly so anything that can automate these tedious tasks and free me up to do something more interesting (like sit out on the deck, or go shopping) is nothing to sneeze at – especially if it doesn’t cost anything!
I’ve found 2 social bookmarking tools that can help you out – one is free and it semi-automates the task and the other costs about as much as a dinner out and is way more automated.
In my opinion, you should go for the second one that is more automated as it will save you a ton of time, but if you are just starting out and on a tight budget this first tool can help out a lot (then when you are making a lot of money come back and buy the second tool!).
Social Marker
You can find this online social bookmarking tool at http://socialmarker.com and, as I said it helps to semi-automate the task of social bookmarking.
On the right, you will see a section where you enter in the details of the page you want to bookmark – the title, link, text and tags. Then under that, you simply check off the social bookmarking sites you want to put the bookmark on.
Then just click the “submit” button at the top and it goes through each site and automatically fills in the information – you have to manually click the submit button at each site so it is not totally automated! Sometimes, you also have to fill in the information manually as the auto fill doesn’t seem to work in all sites.
Here’s a video that will show you just how to use Social Marker!:
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