KyrstinRideout671
Social Bookmarking is the practice of posting links to articles and web pages to various "link aggregator" or social bookmark sites, such as Digg, Stumbleupon and so on. Social bookmarking sites rise and fall in popularity rapidly, but they generally have a couple of common features:
1. Users can submit links which other users can browse, providing a sensible way to expose your content.
2. Links enter into large pages of lists, that are normally very easy to navigate, and tend to be usually divided up in to a "main page" of the best links of the day, and various sub-sections which help you to definitely get exposure in relevant circles.
3. Links can usually be "voted on" to determine which links get more airtime on the front page of various sections. The more votes your links get, the more traffic they get.
4. Some sites, like Digg, attach a weighting to certain actions and users, so a user who submits very popular links will have a vote that carries excess fat.
5. Most social bookmarking site users are fairly jaded in terms of the internet, and will ignore items that aren't interesting, funny, or very entertaining. This is simply not a place for your boring press announcements.
6. Most bookmarking sites usually have some kind of "social" element for them, allowing users to produce profiles, have a friends set of other users, etc., with the aspiration of getting users to share content between themselves.
These are the basics, so let's take a look at how best to approach social bookmark submitting. I'm going to use Reddit and Digg as my main examples, however that Reddit itself takes a great deal of familiarity with its culture prior to being able to submit links that anybody even clicks on.
Choose your niche
Social Bookmarking - Submitting an article on growing bonsais to the front page of Reddit won't get you anywhere - you'll get 30 visitors maybe, none of whom will buy your products. But submitting it to /r/bonsai, though it only has around 1,100 readers, will likely garner you more attention from interested people.
Ironically, submitting to /r/trees will have much less of an effect, because /r/trees is dedicated to marijuana culture. The lesson the following is: know your subreddits.
Write an appealing title, and use an image
Social Bookmarking - Standard newspaper/advert headline formats do not work too well on the web, because everyone has become resistant to them. Instead you should think of a clever title that interests people enough to find out more about what you're writing, or at least promise pictures of cats.
Most bookmarking sites include a thumbnail from the page you're linking to, or one you provide. Consider the trouble to do this - it generates much higher click throughs.
Keep at it, making your links easy to share
Social Bookmarking is focused on persistence, so if nobody clicks on your first link, make another article, come up with a more clever title and try again. Put a social bookmarking widget on your website or blog, and encourage people to talk about your articles. If you've submitted them already, and they'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 a dozen Social Bookmarking sites is great for SEO.
