Basic Internet Marketing Tool: Social Bookmarking to Build Links

Social bookmarking is an extremely popular tool in an online marketer’s toolbox. The purpose of this post is to help you use social bookmarking as a basic internet marketing tool.

Social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, and Technorati allow users to add links to sites they like and other visitors can grab those links and add it to their own lists, making your URLs go viral.

Social bookmarking sites can be great for getting traffic to your own domains.  You can bookmark your sites yourself and then hope others will share the links and in some cases vote your entries up, like Digg users will do.

If enough people vote for a particular story, it might make it to the front page of that bookmarking site.  A front-page listing can mean thousands of visitors a day.  But because of the very nature of social bookmarking sites, if you want to get a lot of traffic from the bookmarking sites themselves, then you have to make sure that the links you submit are newsworthy – not just your sales pitch page.

If your sites tend to be less newsworthy and more general, then you shouldn’t worry about how many people vote for a story or share your links.  Just concentrate on using the social bookmarking sites to gain backlinks to your sites.

Good bookmarking practice

Concentrate on bookmarking the index page of each of your sites first.  Be careful not to bookmark too many of your own sites at first, since that can appear spammy – remember to bookmark other interesting sites you see that you don’t necessarily own yourself.

The key to social bookmarking is to become part of the community who shares interesting information. Create a good profile that tells a little about you. Add a picture, and if the site offers it, start building a “friends” list.

Be careful about how many links you add per day.  A good practice is to keep it to ten or less per day and you could automate bookmarking your own articles/blog posts.  This is explained here: 4 Ways to Social Bookmarking and Automation.

Just make sure to keep bookmarking stories on other websites.  Vote for a few of the stories that made it onto the first page.  Bookmark a story at a news site like FoxNews.com every once in a while, or a funny YouTube video.  This helps make your profile look a lot more legitimate in the eyes of the community.

I use OnlyWire to bookmark my blog posts automatically. What do you use for social bookmarking? Please share your experience in the comments section.

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