What The Dicken’s Is Social Bookmarking

Traffic, Traffic Traffic!!  You know  just how vital traffic is to your blog, website and your business. You can’t make money on the Internet without traffic.  For some  people getting traffic to their  blog or website is a  challenging  and daunting activity. Where do they start?  What do they do? How do you get FREE  traffic? As we have mentioned  in previous blog posts there are many ways to get FREE  traffic. One of these is Social Bookmarking.

How does Social Bookmarking work?  The basic idea is that instead of  saving bookmarked website links to your  home computer, you save them instead to an online account. Bookmark links in this online account exist in public pages on the website, so a link to your blog or website on a social bookmarking site counts as a backlink.

There are some great  features associated with Social  Bookmarking. These sites usually have a high pagerank in Google so your  Social Bookmarking  backlinks are high quality links. Social Bookmarking sites are places where  people share their bookmarks. So FREE Traffic can often arrive at your bookmarked website or blog  when people explore other people’s bookmarked links. Yeah for viral Traffic.

Before there were so many social bookmarking sites, people browsed web sites on the Internet saving the pages that they liked and found useful to the ‘favorites’ folder in their web browser. Over time they developed quite a list of links, but it was only visible to that individual user, and only on their computer. When users found a web site that they liked that they wanted to share with friends, they would have to email that link. There really was no central location where people could access their bookmarks on the Internet. Enter social bookmarking.

 In this article we will discuss how to use social bookmarking to grow a steady stream of traffic to your site. Now, social bookmarking allows people to basically upload their ‘favorites’ folder to a public web site such as del.icio.us.com. Users can then apply descriptive tags to each item that they submit and share them with friends and the general public. According to Wikipedia, "A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file)." Users assign tags to the bookmarks they submit to describe the site. When visitors search on for those specific tags, sites that have those tags associated with them will come up as results. Tagging is an integral part of social bookmarking because it helps others find your favorite sites you have bookmarked and shared. The main idea is that the best content will rise to the top and generate lots of traffic.

 http://www.del.icio.us.com

Del.icio.us.com is a social media web site that describes itself as, “a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source.”

 http://digg.com

“Digg.com is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web.” Users submit content, which, if it’s good is voted on with ‘diggs’ to move the popular content to the front page.

 http://www.technorati.com

Time Magazine said of technorati.com, “If Google is the Web’s reference library, Technorati is becoming its coffee house.” Technorati collects, organizes, and distributes the global online conversation for blogs.

 http://www.stumbleupon.com

“StumbleUpon is a free service that helps you discover and share websites with others who have similar interests.” Stumbleupon is a combination of a toolbar and web site that generates traffic and quality back links.

 http://www.reddit.com

Reddit.com is another social bookmarking site where users submit content and users vote it up or down.

 Tips for using social bookmarking for getting traffic and links using:

• *Create good, useful content

• Craft catchy headlines

• Write a concise and compelling description that makes users want to click through to the article
• Make it convenient for your web site visitors to bookmark or vote for your site by adding bookmarking buttons
• Network with other social bookmarking users. On some sites such as stumbleupon.com, having a strong friends and fan base can help to boost the number of links and 'likes' that you get thereby increasing the traffic you receive.