If you have ever investigated the various means of driving traffic to your website you’ll know that using social bookmarking sites is definitely one of the most effective.  The problem is that it is so very time consuming which was why I was pleased to discover some social bookmarking software - Socialbot version 3.

Social bookmark sites are a step beyond your favourites folder - they are online bookmarks that users can manage easily and more importantly share with other users.   The advantages of having your sites listed in the social bookmarking sites are numerous but they include obtaining backlinks from these bookmark sites to any sites you have listed, exposes these websites to other users of each sites (some of them have millions of users) and just generally just brings in more traffic.

However all this comes at a cost - to manually create accounts and add individual bookmarks to your sites can be extremely time consuming.   This is something you have to regularly put aside days for if you have any number of sites - believe me I’ve done it manually for some time but still think it’s worth the effort.  One of the other benefits to being listed in these bookmarking sites is the speed at which your pages get indexed from them - extremely quickly !

So Socialbot is a software program that runs under windows and automates many of the tasks that are involved in creating links to these bookmarking sites.    Here’s some of it’s features in no particular order -

Website Spidering - point Socialbot at one of your websites and will spider the whole site and list all the urls.  This is extremely useful as you can then simply select which sites to add.

Currently supports over 120 English language Social boookmarking sites

Automatically submits each selected page to any site you select

Allows multiple profiles - this is extremely important as you can submit to multiple accounts on each bookmark site - more links

The software installs very easily and is an attractive well written product.  I first tried spidering one of my main web sites and it scanned and listed the 200 pages very quickly.  There is also a filter setting which will allow to you specify pages to ignore in the spidering process.

You get a long list of web pages listed under each url ready to select and submit. The first thing you must do unfortunately is create user accounts at each of the social bookmarking sites as this is not done automatically.   This is quite time consuming - all the pages are listed and you just click and register at each site but it does take some time to do 120 of them - took me about 2 hours I think. 

To be  honest there’s no real way around this - I have used some very expensive software (about $900) which did automate this but it created  random user accounts which mostly ended up getting banned on the bookmark sites.   So you should build in this effort before you use socialbot - however this is a one off job for each profile so it’s not too bad.

After I had registered at all the social bookmarking sites I decided to use the software to start adding my links.   I specifically selected a group of my web pages from the spidered list and then selected all the social bookmarking sites.

Then it was just a matter of pressing the submit button - socialbot then went to each bookmarking site and registered each link.   Even automated it took quite a while but the advantage was I just let it get on with it whilst I did other things.

Socialbot registered my selected web pages and I logged in to a few random sites just to see they were all listed.  It’s a very useful program and well worth the investment I made in the product.   Remember though only add a few pages at a time to these sites - don’t spam them - I will never generally add more than 10 pages a day but I do use Socialbot now pretty much everyday to add mine and my customers pages.

The process definitely boosted my traffic and I’ve started to see quite a lot of visitors from these social bookmarking sites.  One of the most instant benefits I saw was indexing - any page added seem to get indexed almost immediately and my indexed pages under Yahoo and MSN jumped up almost overnight - I have hundreds more pages indexed now.



By: Joe Simpson

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Content syndication and distribution online is getting a shot in the arm from social bookmarking.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content.

Heidi Cohen, who teaches in New York University’s Masters Program in Direct and Interactive Marketing, says in her ClickZ column that what makes social bookmarking important to marketers is that it’s another cost-effective way to augment search marketing efforts, distribute content, and aid branding.

Savvy marketers who want to take advantage of this new trend are often held back by the technical nature of social bookmarks. If you are a big corporation with a highly trained IT department, it should be no problem. But what if you are a small to medium business? Can you still apply these new social media tools to your web content?

Luckily the explosion of consumer generated media has brought with it a slew of easy to use tools that make it really simple to add content yourself and encourage your readers to add and share content too.

Some of these tools, like blog platforms, have the social bookmarking links built in.. But as Cohen points out, in her article, bookmarking is not just for bloggers. You should also add the bookmarking links to your press releases and other good web content, - such as articles and destination information or product specials and updates.

One way to make the most of all these social media tools is to find a system like PRESSfeed that allows you to

add the content to your site

syndicate it in an RSS feed

tag it for Technorati

create a tag cloud

offer social bookmarking links so that your readers can tag and share the content.

And it’s all as simple as working in Word.

Remember that the success of social bookmarking depends on the quality of your content. People won’t use save and share boring content. It has to be well researched and well-written. And it has to meet the needs of your audience and be something of value they want to pass along to a friend.



By: Jayden Adams

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Most people that have websites know that one of the best ways to market it is by back links and social bookmarking. By definition, social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of meta data. The concept of shared online bookmarks dates back to April 1996 with the launch of itList the features of which included public and private bookmarks. Within the next three years, online bookmark services became competitive, with venture-backed companies such as Backflip, Blink, Clip2, ClickMarks, HotLinks, and others entering the market.

One of the main advantages of SMB is the fact that a lot of these social bookmarking sites have a lot of regular users and traffic which means that information on them tends to get better positioning. Also, links to your own website or blog when posted to a site like MySpace creates back links. Obviously search engines really value links to your site and it’s an indication of the popularity of your site. This also allows you to have a higher PR (page rank).

So how is something like this achieved? Well you could do it manually, one site at a time, over a period of time, but this can be quite time consuming! Another terrific alternative would be to get social bookmarking software which would pretty much automate every aspect. This would not only be easier but also less time consuming. A sort of, set it and forget it deal. This software not only automates social bookmarking but also automates other things such as news postings and video postings. It allows you to have complete control over the entire process without getting “slapped” on the wrist by Google. It does this by setting your back links at a “human” pace which is absolutely essential if you don’t want to raise red flags with Google!

For the amount of back links you would ultimately get with a piece of software like this, the price tag is well worth it. This isn’t saying you are going to have to pay hundreds of dollars for it however. So far, I’ve seen sites offering this software for around $197, which in my opinion is a really nice price for what you get. Remember, you won’t have to sit there for hours on end anymore, and you can simply set it and forget it!

If you would like more information on this type of software or more information about social bookmarking it’s a good idea to visit the following websites:

Wikipedia

Social Marker

YouTube

Top Rank Blog

Social Marking

If you would like to read some books, you can also visit places like Amazon and look into some titles, such as these:

- The Truth About Profiting from Social Networking (Truth About) by Patrice-Anne Rutledge

- Plug Your Business! Marketing on MySpace, YouTube, blogs and pod-casts and other Web 2.0 social networks by Steve Weber

- Social Marketing Success in Under 30 Minutes a Day by Andrea Kalli

- 7 Smart Ways to Use Social Bookmarking by Online Business Institute

- MySpace Marketing Secrets! by Rodney D. Jones



By: Kristi Ambrose

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Today there are literally hundreds if not thousands of social bookmarking sites on the Internet. It would be virtually impossible to choose the top social bookmarking site because there are too many variables involved. The easy answer to this question is, however the top social bookmarking site is the one that performs the best for you.

Today, you can look at social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Stumbleupon and see how they allow the readers to get involved in the process of voting for your articles. With Digg if they like your article they can Digg. At Stumbleupon if they like it they can Stumble it.

What they are really saying is that they have read your article and they think it adds value to the Internet today. This is much of what Web 2.0 is all about.

It allows the reader to get involved in the process and have a voice about things that they like and dislike. This is why blogging and social bookmarking have become such a great combination.

Social bookmarking is nothing more then telling people about a blog article that you have written. It’s a way to let readers as well as search engines know that you have made an update to your blog.

Depending on the platform that you use to blog, bookmarking a blog post is very easy to do because of plug ins that make it that way. This is especially true with WordPress where all you do is click a button and then choose the corresponding social bookmarking website you want to notify.

The whole point of all of this is as an Internet marketer is to drive traffic and ultimately make sales. Other things such as opt in e-mail subscribers, RSS feed readers, and these sorts of things are made possible by getting the traffic to your blog as well.

Once you get the traffic there you can use these other methods to keep in touch with them. But social bookmarking is what helps get them there to begin with. So for every blog post that you make you should be bookmarking it to your favorite site.

Whether it is Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Propeller, Technorati, or other social posting sites such as Onlywire, you want to be sure and social bookmark every blog post as many different ways as possible. Ultimately your traffic and your future business will thank you all the way to the bank for it!



By: David Ogden

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