Social bookmarking has a ton of potential from an online marketing perspective. If your story hits the front page of Digg or Stumbleupon it can bring tens of thousands of visitors in a day. The chances of getting your story on the front page is slim but it can’t happen if you don’t encourage your readers to “share” your pages or submit them yourself so add bookmarking (Sexy Bookmarks, Add This) and tweet buttons to your site. I use the Sexy Bookmarks, Tweetme and Facebook Share and Google +1 WordPress plugins on this site. AddThis is another popular one.
There are hundreds of social bookmark sites out there. Some are truly “social” nature and are intended to help people find popular content that others liked and others are simply an online alternative to browser favorites. The true “social” bookmarking sites have social networks for various niches within the site. You can get in the social networks by following the top users in your niche. Some of networks can be tough and don’t look fondly on new users just jumping in and promoting their own stuff. You need to build a reputation, and some followers, before you can have much influence. The top users in a niche are almost guaranteed to get a ton of diggs to anything they submit or digg so building a reputation has its benefits.
Bookmarking Strategies
For digg and Stumbleupon it’s best to submit content manually and whatever you do don’t submit only your own stuff. Contribute to the conversation, and if other users like your contributions you will build a following and become an authority with the ability to drive a lot of traffic to content you recommend. Lisa Parmely at Inline SEO has an interesting strategy called authority tagging which makes sense and she has had good results with. It’s sort of manual automation without looking like a spammer.
Tagging – Use It!!!
Most social bookmark services incorporate some form of tagging. Be sure to use as many tags as they allow. Most sites create a backlink to the URL’s you bookmark from your account page at the site and on separate tag pages. One bookmark can create 20+ backlinks at some sites if you tag properly. Don’t use tags that are very specific, long-tail type terms because that tag is probably not used very often so the site won’t create a separate page for it.
My advice is to use mostly broad terms related to your niche since the tag is used in the URL and creates a better backlink. Also include a few very general tags so your bookmark gets picked up on some of the more popular tag pages which often have some authority. For example, if your article is about “Hurting Your Back While Playing Tennis in Worn Out Shoes” you wouldn’t want to use the title as a tag but rather use tags such as tennis injury, tennis back injury, back pain, tennis, sports, fitness, health.
Some of the sites I have noticed that do a good job of providing you many backlinks from tag pages are URL.org and Jumptags.com.
RSS Feeds – Boost Your Bookmarks
Most sites provide you with an RSS feed for your user account. This feed has all your bookmarks in it and these are backlinks to the pages you bookmarked. To get extra benefit from your bookmarking efforts submit these RSS feeds to RSS directories to provide extra link juice to your bookmarks. Automated RSS submission tools let you submit RSS feeds to hundreds of RSS directories and search engines at the push of a button.
Automated Bookmarking Tools
Aside from helping get pages indexed, the real power of social bookmarking lies in the fact that you can get massive amounts of backlinks pretty easily with the help of automated bookmarking tools. Bookmarking tools let you get thousands of backlinks at the push of a button. Scheduling bookmarking tools to drip feed links to old content, especially content that has good internal linking, is a good way to keep it indexed and show the search engines that readers still find it relevant.
Paid social bookmarking tools make it very easy to get thousands of backlinks to any page you want each month. Free tools make easy to get hundreds of backlinks per month with very little effort.
Best Social Bookmarking Tools
- Bookmarking Demon is the best automated social bookmarking tool. It is an absolute monster.
- Synnd is most cutting edge bookmarking tool. It is a true “social buzz” creation tool. Amazingly powerful and now has a free “Lite” version that is great.
- SocialAdr is an awesome free automated bookmarking tool.
For more free and paid bookmarking tools see my list of automated social bookmarking tools
