ViviaRidgeway82
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. Bookmarking sites rise and fall in popularity pretty quickly, but they generally have several common features:
1. Users can submit links which other users can browse, providing a sensible way to expose your content.
2. Links go into large pages of lists, which can be normally very easy to navigate, and are generally usually divided up in to a "main page" of the best links during the day, and various sub-sections which help you to definitely get exposure in more relevant circles.
3. Links normally can be "voted on" to determine which links acquire more airtime on the front page of varied sections. The more votes your links get, the harder traffic they get.
4. Some sites, like Digg, attach a weighting to certain actions and users, so a user who submits popular links will have a vote that carries more importance.
5. Most social bookmarking site users are fairly jaded when it comes to the internet, and will ignore things that aren't interesting, funny, or very entertaining. This is not a place for your boring press releases.
6. Most bookmarking sites will often have some kind of "social" element to them, allowing users to generate profiles, have a friends listing of other users, etc., in the hope of getting users to share with you content between themselves.
Social Bookmark - These are the basics, so let's have a look at how best to approach social bookmark submitting. I'm going to use Reddit and Digg as my main examples, however that Reddit itself needs a great deal of familiarity with its culture prior to being able to submit links that anybody even clicks.
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, though it only has around 1,100 readers, will probably garner you more attention from interested people.
Ironically, submitting to /r/trees could have much less of an effect, because /r/trees is committed to marijuana culture. The lesson the following is: know your subreddits.
Write a catchy title, and use a picture
Standard newspaper/advert headline formats fail to work too well on the net, because everyone has become immune to them. Instead you need to think of a clever title that interests people enough to learn more about what you're writing, or at best promise pictures of cats.
Most bookmarking sites incorporate a thumbnail from the page you're linking to, a treadmill you provide. Go ahead and take trouble to do this - it generates higher click throughs.
Keep at it, and make your links an easy task to share
Social Bookmark - Social bookmarking is focused on persistence, so if nobody selects your first link, make another article, make a more clever title and attempt again. Put a social bookmark creating widget on your website or blog, and encourage people to talk about your articles. If you've submitted them already, and they have accounts, it only takes an additional to click an "upvote" or "like" button.
Basically, having links to any or all of your articles on six social bookmarking sites is great for SEO.
