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Social Bookmark - 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 rapidly, but they generally have a few 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 are generally usually divided up in to a "main page" of the best links of the day, and various sub-sections which help you to get exposure in additional relevant circles.

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

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

6. Most bookmarking sites will often have some kind of "social" element for them, allowing users to create profiles, have a friends listing of other users, etc., with the hope of getting users to share content between themselves.

Social Bookmark - 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, having said that that Reddit itself takes a great deal of familiarity with its culture before you are able to submit links that anybody even selects.

Choose your niche

Submitting an article on growing bonsai trees to the front page of Reddit won't do you any good - you'll get 30 visitors maybe, none who will buy your products. But submitting it to /r/bonsai, even though it only has around 1,100 readers, will most likely garner you more attention from interested people.

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

Write an appealing title, and use a photo

Standard newspaper/advert headline formats do not 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 add a thumbnail from the page you're linking to, or one you provide. Go ahead and take trouble to do this - it generates greater click throughs.

Keep at it, and make your links easy to share

Social Bookmark - Social bookmarking is all about persistence, so if nobody clicks on your first link, make another article, think of a more clever title and attempt again. Put a social bookmark creating 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 an additional to click an "upvote" or "like" button.

If nothing else, having links to any or all of your articles on six social bookmarking sites is great for SEO.