Social Bookmarking

April 7th, 2008 | by Chris |

I want to talk this week a little about social bookmarking sites and how to use them. They are websites where their users can bookmark webpages that find interesting on the web and share them with other users. The most favorite bookmarks, as they are counted from their algorithms, make it to the first page of the networks which can drive a lot of traffic to the lucky webmasters.

Other elements are that you have the ability to socialize with other members, add them as friends see what they are bookmarking or comment on submissions and many are offering unique features and ways for users to interact and bookmark.

They started back in 1996 with itlist.com which is no longer in service and later start entering the market companies like backflip and blink and today the whole concept spread like wildfire and new ones pop up every day as well as many die.

Well, there are three things that you can use them for

1. Drive Traffic to your site

Obvious one, but there are two kinds of traffic direct and indirect.

Direct traffic is from users of the social bookmark sites who happen to see the bookmark on the site or through an internal search in some of them. In short whether they loved or intrigued by the title and short description and followed the link to your site for more.

Indirect traffic is when someone don’t use such a site and while searching with his favorite search engine, for usually a long tail keyword, the bookmark appears in the results and by going through the social bookmarking website he may end in your webpage. This can happen usually with Digg.

Puesta de sol
Photo by chausinho

2. Linkbait

Linkbaiting is when you put a very good webpage or whole website with content, video or images that other webmasters, in your niche or not, would love to link to, thus getting big amounts of backlinks for your seo efforts plus any traffic they can send you.

3. SEO

Most of them are using the nofollow attribute in their links and is debatable how much weight such links can have in the eyes of the engines. Most specialists however agree that they do have some effect hence they recommend to include bookmarking for your search engine optimization purposes among the methods you use for that purpose.

Now that we defined the benefits you can get by using them let’s throw in some negatives.

First of all most marketers complain that traffic from there converts badly and most visitors never come back to the site or sign up for any newsletter. If you try to sell something is even worse. Of course it depends on the niche and unless you try it yourself you can’t be sure for your case and website.

If you want to promote in the marketing or in our case network marketing niche things are even worse as we may be looked with suspicion by other members non-marketers.

So if you are targeting direct traffic it would make more sense for niches with somehow broad appeal for newsworthy or intriguing items. In places like digg you may have chances to make it to the front page.

For the other purposes we mentioned is a great tool and you should start using them if you don’t already do so.

But which bookmarking sites should you use and how?

Well, I am sure you agree that patience is a virtue so you have to exercise it until Wednesday.