Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking can be a huge tool in driving traffic. Many people are confused by it, so let’s start at the basics.
What is Social Bookmarking?
Social bookmarking is very similar to saving something in your favorites on your computer. The difference is you save your favorites to a service online, and not only can you see your favorites, but so can everyone else. (thus the social part) These services or sites online also have search functions. Instead of being like google where they look through the whole internet for your search, they look through everyone’s favorites on the site to give you answers to your search.
How does this get me traffic?
It gets you traffic a couple of ways. First, by bookmarking your site or blog post or webpage on a bookmarking site you immediately have a backlink from a very highly pageranked source. This is good for your page rank and makes the search engines like you!!
Second, when people do searches on the bookmarking site, if you have those keywords on things you’ve saved it will come up in the search and people may come by to see what content you have that may help them with what they are doing.
How do I bookmark a site?
Bookmarking works best when you not only bookmark all your sites, but all the sites you enjoy as you go along as well. There are so many bookmarking sites out there now, I suggest choosing a couple that you like best. Then you go to their site and grab the widget or bookmark. (That’s an icon that sits in your toolbar, just look around the page or put it in the search box to find it) When you find something you like then click on the button in your toolbar and it will pop up a box with the url already in place and ask you for some tags (keywords) and a description. You will also have the option to share it with others or not.
When you are putting in the tags (keywords) think about what you would put in the search box if you were looking for this page. So for instance if I saved this blog post I would tag it with blog, socialbookmarking, addthis (which we are getting to in a minute). I don’t go overboard with my tags, and I’ll let you know if I find out I should be using more tags in the future.
Then all you do is click enter and it goes into your favorites page online.
***Side note***
Another great thing about social bookmarking is this: hard drive crashes and reformatting accidents. All of your favorites are stored online so you never lose them. They are also available to you from any computer, so if you are at the library or a friend’s house, out of town meeting you can access all your favorites by going to the website.
***
As a content publisher you want not only YOU bookmarking your pages, but your readers as well. You want your pages to make your reader’s favorites list. That of course means good content, but it also means easy access to a variety of bookmarking sites. Your favorite sites might not be your readers, so you want a wide variety for your readers to choose from. You want to have a way to link to bookmarking sites either in each blog post or you can have them on the main page or side bar of your blog. Seeing as how there are at least 20 bookmarking sites and the number is climbing daily that could seriously clutter up your page.
In walks a great widget. There are a number of places you can get a social bookmarking widget to put on your page.
What is a Social Bookmarking Button?
If you look at the top right hand side of this page you will see a social bookmarking widget. It is a little rectangular box that when you click on it will allow you to bookmark this page in a plethora of locations.
I use Add This, but it is not the only one by any means. There is also Social Marker. This one offers 32 bookmarking sites, which is more than add this, but it only works in Firefox. I’m sure there are more out there, and as I see them I will update so you can choose which one you like best.
How do I add the button?
It’s really easy to add the button. Just go to the website and you will either see the code right there or at Add This! they give you some options to choose from and then get a more specific code.
If you are working on a wordpress.com blog you have to go into your dashboard and go to presentation, and then choose widgets. (You have to be working on a template that allows widgets.) Choose the text widget and then add the code. I try to keep that widget at the top of the column so it is easy to find and people always see it. If you put it toward the bottom of your page people might miss it.
Other blogging platforms are very similar, and you can usually find instructions or even instructional video on each particular website, depending which one you choose to use.
Good Luck, now go get yourself a bookmarking button for your page.
If you have any questions I haven’t addressed please feel free to leave them in the comments section and I will do my best to answer them. 
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