Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to rank and store websites, blogs, articles, videos and other types of website content. It is also a way for people who make money from websites, blogs, and affiliate marketing programs to increase their visibility and earnings.

Social bookmarking sites are particularly popular among people with affiliate marketing programs because such sites are a free and effective way to get backlinks and drive traffic to websites and blogs.

If you have been thinking about promoting your websites, blogs or affiliate marketing programs through social bookmarking sites, this guide will help you get started.

How to Use Social Bookmarking Sites

First off, you need to find a social bookmarking site and register as a user. If you participate in affiliate marketing programs, your best bet is to choose one of the more popular sites, such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit or StumbleUpon. These social bookmarking sites have the most traffic and allow you to submit and bookmark websites and blogs.

The next step is to get used to the site. To make the most of social bookmarking, you need to make sure that there are other users besides yourself who will be interested in your website content. Different social bookmarking sites have different types of users. Finding a site that works with your niche rather than against it is a must.

Finally, pay special attention to the blogs, websites, and articles that are bookmarked the most and ranked the highest. This will give you an idea of what people like to see. Knowing your audience is essential, particularly if you are promoting affiliate marketing programs or niche-specific blogs.

How Not to Use Social Bookmarking Sites

Nobody likes a spammer. Social bookmarking users are no exception. If you want to promote your affiliate marketing programs, it is best to do it in a round-about way. Sales copy will only make it so far up the ranking.

The blogs and websites that do best in the social bookmarking arena are those that offer entertainment, worthy news, or some sort of draw. In other words, don’t submit content with a title like “Check out These Affiliate Marketing Programs”.

When submitting content to social bookmarking sites, it is essential that you stick to submitting quality content. Once you get traffic flowing into your websites and blogs, the sales will follow naturally, especially if you focus on conversion optimization on your site or blog.

A few other things you will want to keep in mind when promoting affiliate marketing programs and blogs through social bookmarking:



Timing is everything. Articles that get at least 25 votes within the first 15 minutes will rise through the social bookmarking ranks faster than articles that get 25 votes in two days’ time.

Opening several accounts on one social bookmarking site so that you can vote for yourself should be avoided. This will only damage your reputation if you are promoting your own blogs and affiliate marketing programs.

Get your friends to help. This is the easiest and best way to promote your blogs and affiliate marketing programs through social bookmarking.



When done properly, social bookmarking can be an efficient and cost-effective PR tool to get traffic to your website and promote your small business.

www.Paknettech.com

 

Reference: About.com



By: pntglobal

About the Author:

As SEO professionals we are constantly searching for ways to get our sites ranked and indexed better. As part of the online community you would have heard about social bookmarking lately. As a matter of fact, you can spend hundreds of hours of your precious time right now just to find out what Social Bookmarking is all about. Well, not here. I am giving you this information. I have researched and found this to be the most powerful way of getting laser targeted traffic to your website. The best news is, it’s 100% FREE!

When you do a search in a search engine you get all the sites that have something to do with the keywords you typed into the search box. The Social Bookmaked tags are the most interesting feature of these sites. It is obvious that the way things are going social bookmarking is the future of search.

The key to using social bookmarking is tagging. While social bookmarking is a good hobby imagine if you could replace the website option with blogs?. the best way of keeping track of sites which we like was to keep a list using bookmarks or favorites. How Social Bookmarking tool can get 100s of High PR links Automatically!

If you have a website you can easily add (assuming you do your own webmastering or know the rudiments of copying and pasting) a “save this page” to any and all of your important webpages within your site. This gives the user a way to classify rank and organize content using tags. The most popular Social Bookmarking Site is del.ici.ous which has millions of users. Check out http://www.trafficwebsecrets.com/socialbookmarking/bookmarking_demon.html.

Just click on the cloud to see all the pages tagged with a particular label. So while being aggressive is possible when you bookmark; being careful to consider the best interest of the community is certainly warranted. This RSS alerts you to new links in your areas of interest.. Put Social Bookmarking on Autopilot!



By: Jason Bauder

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Social bookmarking websites are becoming more and more popular. They allow you to save bookmarks online and Tag/Categorize them with keywords instead of saving them as bookmarks in the favorite’s list of your browser. This is particularly useful when your browser based bookmarks have become unwieldy. It’s also help since you can access your bookmarks from any computer where you have an internet connection.

I have compiled a list of Social Bookmarking websites from a number of sources. You can find it in the resource box at the end of this article.

Once you have bookmarked them, you can view them, sort them by category/keyword as well as see links from others that have been categorized like yours.

You also establish RSS feeds for each category (tag) that you ’subscribe’ to. This alerts you to new links in your areas of interest. Your bookmark collection/RSS Feed becomes viewable to others who can also copy your bookmarks to their own collection. So now you can aggressively promote your RSS feed to the RSS Directories and Search engines, syndicate them and make them available to a much wider audience.

Social bookmarking sites also help you to meet other people who are interested in the same topics you are and who may also have knowledge of web resources that you don’t.

On Social Bookmarking sites, you first create an account. Then you bookmark interesting and useful things in the area of your interest or expertise. By doing so you create a useful Feed. Once you’ve done that you intermittently, (or aggressively), add useful and interesting items, (that could use additional exposure), from your own content. Make an honest effort to contribute USEFUL information and links. This is all about sharing and exposure. Done properly, you can be as aggressive as you want to be about sharing information. You can share your blog(s), links to your informational/resource sites etc. Think about the fact that when you share links to other’s resources, you’re also effectively promoting their content as well.

This is a way you can aggressively and ethically promote your content and the content of others. I personally have hundreds of gigabytes of my own information and information of others, connected to my notebook. In the final analysis, it’s doing me no good what-so-ever just sitting there. But by organizing it, online, I can help myself, (getting organized, getting my content exposed, etc.) and help others at the same time.

If you spice up your feed with too much sales and marketing related or self promotional stuff, people can and will easily drop their subscription to your feed. And instead of gaining good will and doing a service to the internet community you could get labeled as a spammer and suffer the consequences.

So while being aggressive is possible and acceptable, being careful to consider the best interest of the community is certainly warranted.

Balancing being ethical and providing a useful service to others with promoting your own content enables you to be as aggressive as you like. But remember, in the final analysis, others will make the decision on whether it’s ethical and useful or spam.



By: Greg White

About the Author:

bookmarking software has fulfilled the dreams and aspirations of many webmasters and writers. This software has enabled an emergence of a large number of much needed social bookmark sites that have given an impetus to interaction between online communities, enabling them to share mass information, data, articles and even tidbits of gossip.

Social software has hit the nail on the head by recognizing and fulfilling the requirements of like-minded people. Now such people can share a variety of information such as simple tips, concerned advice or even important data through social networking sites such as Digg and Furl. Thanks to bookmarking software, these networking sites are immensely popular as they allow their users to use tags, categories and other means to get to the relevant content.

bookmarking enables online surfers to share and store information that that they benefit from as well as enjoy. It is the social bookmarking software that automates the task of individually bookmarking each site. The software makes sure that social bookmark networks are streamlined as well so that the users can access the most relevant content.

Social bookmarking software is a good friend to a busy webmaster. Even one good article that is shared and tagged with an anchor text link keyword phrase across many social booking networks will help a webmaster find a place in the top 10 searches in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Today more and more software is being developed with additional features to keep up-to-date with recent developments. You too will notice that the most popular internet blogs or forums have high traffic on account of a provision to its users that enables them to share content and communicate views, advice, ideas and tips.

Similar is the case with bookmarking software that can be a boon to a webmaster getting him increased target traffic by encouraging web users to tag his content.

Bookmarking software has its own set of disadvantages too. Most of the social bookmarking software is created to spam the social bookmarking sites. The software does this by auto-creating random account login names and passwords. Their primary function is to create multiple accounts that bookmark the same url. This always raises a red flag with the bookmarking sites that ban such accounts. Surely you don’t want yours to be in the soup as well?

Social bookmarking software also has very limited features that are not designed to bookmark any sites. Some are just plugins for WordPress blogs and others are simply RSS feeds. Besides all this, bookmarking software is notorious for having duplicate content problem that results in the search engines ignoring your bookmarking links.

All social bookmarking software have their own unique features, some good and bad points, so you have to choose the one that works the best for yourself.



By: Rickie Smith

About the Author:

Social Bookmarking is a very valuable, yet under used tool in marketing your home based business online.  If you don’t know what Social Bookmarking is, PLEASE read on.   You need to be doing this!

It is much like marking a book that your are reading, so that you will remember where your place is when you go back and want to read again.  Bookmarking on your computer is similar.   When you find a website that you really like and don’t want to forget where it is, you bookmark it for your personal use later.

Any internet browser you use has the ability to bookmark your favorite websites.  If you don’t know how to bookmark a page, just look at the top of your browser. There should be something that says “Bookmark” or “Favorites”.   Bookmarking is very easy and it’s a great tool to have.

Social Bookmarking is just like regular bookmarking, except, it’s not just for you.  Social Bookmarking is a way to allow other people to see what you are bookmarking. They can take a look at your websites, blogs, videos, articles, Myspace pages…anything that you have!

Popular websites like Digg.com and Technorati.com give you the opportunity to create an account and then bookmark any and all things that you way to draw more attention to.  When people go to those websites they will have the opportunity to see your site, a place  they may have otherwise never found.

You can have the greatest website in the world for your home based business, but if nobody sees it, then it is not doing you any good. That is why Social Bookmarking sites are so helpful.   They allow more people to see your websites in a shorter amount of time. That means more prospects for you to talk to and obviously more sign ups.

Each Social bookmarking site is set up differently, so it would be very difficult to explain step by step exactly how each of them work.    However, the first step is to decide what you would like to bookmark. It really can be anything.

Blogs

Websites

Business Myspace Page

Videos

Articles

Anything that gets people looking at your business!

Once you know what you want to bookmark, you will want to open a new document on your desktop and start copying and pasting all the URL’s of the things you want to bookmark.  Make sure you copy and paste it right out of your browser so that is correct.  Otherwise when people click the link they will not be able to find your site.

After you have your list of things to bookmark, you need to go to the different sites and set up accounts.  I recommend going to Digg.com first, because it is the biggest and the best.

The final step is to start bookmarking!  Like I said, each of these websites is different, but most of them are user friendly and you should be able to navigate them easily.

Social Bookmarking is a great way to draw more attention to your home based business, so start bookmarking now and get that traffic looking for you!



By: Karla Buzzell

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