MageeDunston351

Social Bookmarking is the practice of posting links to articles and web pages to various "link aggregator" or social bookmark sites, including Digg, Stumbleupon and so on. Social bookmarking sites rise and fall in popularity pretty quickly, 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 go into large pages of lists, which are normally very easy to navigate, and tend to be usually divided up right into a "main page" of the best links during the day, and various sub-sections which help you to get exposure in more relevant circles.

3. Links can usually be "voted on" to determine which links acquire 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 an individual who submits very popular links will have a vote that carries more importance.

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

6. Most bookmarking sites normally have some kind of "social" element in their mind, allowing users to produce profiles, have a friends list of other users, etc., with the aspiration of getting users to talk about content between themselves.

Those are the basics, so let's check out how best to approach social bookmark creating. 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 a write-up 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, even though it only has around 1,100 readers, will probably garner you more attention from interested people.

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

Write a catchy title, and use a picture

Social Bookmarking - Standard newspaper/advert headline formats don't work too well on the internet, 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 best promise pictures of cats.

Most bookmarking sites include a thumbnail from the page you're linking to, a treadmill you provide. Consider the trouble to do this - it generates higher click throughs.

Keep at it, to make your links simple to share

Social Bookmarking is about persistence, so if nobody selects your first link, make another article, make a more clever title and attempt 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 dozen Social Bookmarking sites is great for SEO.