AmabelMagallon643

Social Bookmarking is the practice of posting links to articles and web pages to various "link aggregator" or social bookmark sites, for example Digg, Stumbleupon and so on. Bookmarking sites rise and fall in popularity rapidly, but they generally have a few common features:

1. Users can submit links which other users can browse, providing a good way to expose your content.

2. Links go into large pages of lists, that are normally very easy to navigate, and are generally usually divided up into a "main page" of the best links during the day, and various sub-sections which help you to definitely get exposure in more relevant circles.

3. Links normally can be "voted on" to determine which links acquire more airtime on the front page of various sections. The more votes your links get, the harder traffic they get.

4. Some sites, like Digg, fasten a weighting to certain actions and users, so a person who submits very popular links will have a vote that carries more importance.

5. Most social bookmarking site users are fairly jaded with regards to the internet, and will ignore items that aren't interesting, funny, or very entertaining. This is not a place for your boring press releases.

6. Most bookmarking sites normally have some kind of "social" element to them, allowing users to generate profiles, have a friends listing of other users, etc., with the hope of getting users to share with you content between themselves.

Those are the basics, so let's have a look at how best to approach social bookmarking. I'm going to use Reddit and Digg as my main examples, having said that that Reddit itself takes a great deal of familiarity with its culture prior to being able to submit links that anybody even selects.

Choose your niche

Social Bookmarking - Submitting a write-up on growing bonsais to the front page of Reddit won't make you any money - you'll get 30 visitors maybe, none of whom will buy your products. But submitting it to /r/bonsai, even though it only has around 1,100 readers, will probably garner you more attention from interested people.

Ironically, submitting to /r/trees could have much less of an effect, because /r/trees is focused on marijuana culture. The lesson here is: know your subreddits.

Write an appealing title, and use a picture

Social Bookmarking - Standard newspaper/advert headline formats don't work too well on the web, because everyone has become safe from them. Instead you have to think of a clever title that interests people enough to find out more about what you're writing, or otherwise promise pictures of cats.

Most bookmarking sites include a thumbnail from the page you're linking to, or one you provide. Go ahead and take trouble to do this - it generates greater click throughs.

Keep at it, and make your links easy to share

Social Bookmarking is about persistence, so if nobody selects your first link, make another article, think of a more clever title and attempt again. Put a social bookmarking widget on your blog or website, and encourage people to share with you your articles. If you've submitted them already, and the've accounts, it only takes another to click an "upvote" or "like" button.

Regardless of anything else, having links to all of your articles on half dozen Social Bookmarking sites is great for SEO.