LinesCurcio162

Social Bookmarking is the practice of posting links to articles and webpages to various "link aggregator" or social bookmark sites, including Digg, Stumbleupon and so on. 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 great way to expose your content.

2. Links get into large pages of lists, which are normally very easy to navigate, and tend to be usually divided up into a "main page" of the best links for the day, and various sub-sections which help you to definitely get exposure in relevant circles.

3. Links usually can be "voted on" to determine which links have more airtime on the front page of varied sections. The more votes your links get, the greater traffic they get.

4. Some sites, like Digg, fasten a weighting to certain actions and users, so a person who submits very popular links will have a vote that carries more weight.

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

6. Most bookmarking sites normally have some kind of "social" element for them, allowing users to produce profiles, have a friends listing 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 creating. I'm going to use Reddit and Digg as my main examples, but bear in mind that Reddit itself takes a great deal of familiarity with its culture until you are able to submit links that anybody even selects.

Choose your niche

Social Bookmarking - Submitting articles 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 here is: know your subreddits.

Write an appealing title, and use a picture

Social Bookmarking - Standard newspaper/advert headline formats fail to work too well on the net, because everyone has become resistant to them. Instead you have to think of a clever title that interests people enough to learn more about what you're writing, or otherwise promise pictures of cats.

Most bookmarking sites incorporate a thumbnail from the page you're linking to, or one you provide. Take the trouble to do this - it generates higher click throughs.

Keep at it, to make your links easy to share

Social Bookmarking is about persistence, so if nobody clicks your first link, make another article, come up with a more clever title and check out again. Put a social bookmarking widget on your website or blog, and encourage people to share with you your articles. If you've submitted them already, and they have accounts, it only takes a second to click an "upvote" or "like" button.

Regardless of anything else, having links to all or any of your articles on half a dozen Social Bookmarking sites is great for SEO.