Social bookmarking, just like blog commenting is a quantity vs quality thing, in my opinion. There are millions of places to bookmark your posts and your site, but before we get to that let’s try and get clear about what social bookmarking is, why you might do it and how it can help you.

What is social bookmarking?

Back in the olden days ~ you know a few years ago ~ when you wanted to keep track of sites you liked you clicked the “bookmarks” tab at the top of your page and then clicked “bookmark this page”. Now if you are a organized OCD person, like myself, you created tons of folders in there to help you keep track and organize the sites you bookmarked.  When you wanted to go back to a site you simply opened the bookmarks tab in your browser and clicked the site you wanted to go to.

While that method still works ~ it has a few drawbacks.

1. You can’t get to any of your bookmarks unless you are on your computer. (which is terrible when you get snowed in for a few days in another city and don’t have access to your computer)

2. You can’t share your bookmarks with anyone else ~ well unless they’re sitting at your computer.

3. Your bookmarks don’t give you any benefit as far as getting links back to your site.

Then things began to change. The internet began to grow and more people were on it, and it started to get social. People wanted to share that great site they just found with their friends ~ and anyone else who had an interest in that topic.

Thus began social bookmarking.

It’s the same thing as your bookmarks tab it’s just online. Now when you want to save your favorite site so you can find it later, or share it with a friend you usually click a little icon in your favorites bar which will save a link to that site on your favorite bookmarking website.

This is a perfect way to save and share websites.

You have access to them from anywhere you have an internet connection ~ all you have to do is log in to your account at your favorite bookmarking site and there are all the sites you’ve bookmarked.

While you may have bookmarked the sites your bookmarks are published online, which gives everyone the ability to see them.

Because you’ve bookmarked them online and now there’s a link back to the site you bookmarked on this other website you’ve created a backlink to that site.

While bookmarking websites were created for personal and social use it didn’t take long for internet marketers to figure out just how exciting and useful these new sites could be. They starte bookmarking their own sites, their own posts, their own pages and low and behold the links they created by doing this had some benefits.

1. People found their bookmarks when searching for something related on the bookmarking site and went to their website (they got traffic)

2. The links that were created by bookmarking their site created backlinks and helped them improve their search engine rankings.I mean the entire idea of bookmarking is that it’s a site someone likes enough to bookmark ~ those are the kind of sites Google’s looking to rank in their search engine and offer up for people when they come looking for some information.

Here’s the problem.

As with most things internet marketing people seemed to think, well hell, if Delicious works well for this ~ let’s make MORE bookmarking sites ~ in fact, let’s make a  MILLION bookmarking sites.

Now let’s bookmark all our pages on ALL the million new bookmarking sites and just rise meteorically to the top of google for whatever keyword we want.

Well… that worked for a while.

But Google didn’t get where they are at by being stupid. It doesn’t take long for them to catch on to people trying to game the system, and now mass bookmarking really doesn’t have the effect it used to have.

So to bookmark or not to bookmark?

Absolutely, you want to boomark. But here’s the deal, you want to find a FEW (3 or 4) bookmarking sites that work well for the topic you are writing about.

There are basically 2 types of bookmarking sites available now.

1. Regular post a link bookmarking

2. Voting bookmarking.

Regular bookmarking ~ this is just your basic here’s a link to a site I like bookmarking. This is sites like Delicious.

Voting bookmarking ~ this is where you submit a link and people can vote on whether they like it or dislike it.The more votes your site gets the higher on the site it goes. The holy grail of these sites is to get to the front page. These are sites like Digg and  Sphinn. A front page link on Digg can mean enough traffic to kill your server ~ that’s good, and before you get all excited it’s super hard to do ~ and works best with certain kinds of content.

That’s what I was talking about finding a few site that work with your content. Not all content/niches will be suited to all bookmarking sites ~ especially the voting type sites. Now you can submit any site to delicious, but you might want to be a little more careful when you submit to Digg. Their readers enjoy a certain type of content, and if your content is completely dissimilar to the content people generally like there, or doesn’t fit any of the categories they offer you can possibly do yourself more harm than good by bookmarking there.

The best way to tell if your site is a good match for any given bookmarking site is to go over and take a look around. Look at the links on the front page. Look at the links in other categories ~ is your content on the same track? If not, you might want to refrain from submitting it there.

Some helpful tips for bookmarking:

1. Whenever you can let other people submit your stuff. Which means provide people with a way to submit your content. That may be a plugin you add to your site offering a way to submit your content to a range of sites ~ which allows your reader to pick their favorite site.

2. Remember this is a social thing ~ it was not intended for internet marketers to just bookmark all their own content. Make sure you’re bookmarking other sites you like throughout the day ~ it only takes a second and it makes it easy to find them again when you need them later.

Great bookmarking sites:

Delicious.com

The big daddy of all the bookmarking sites. You can easily add a bookmarking widget (links to a video showing you how) to your favorites bar and click it whenever you want to add something to your account.

Spurl.net

Another basic links site. This one has dofollow links so it is worth considering.

Digg.com

Digg is the biggest of the “voting” type bookmarking sites. Be careful digging your own stuff too much, and make sure your content is a good match to what readers are looking for.

Mixx.com

This is another voting site. It seems to have a wider range of acceptable content though.

Tagfoot.com

My personal favorite bookmarking site ~ and the one I am able to actually keep organized and use is Tagfoot. It’s still in beta and requires an invite. I love tagfoot because not only is there space for “bookmarks” there is also space to add things to your “wishlist”, you can add pictures, videos, news. It really allows me to keep everything really organized and accessable.

If you want to use tagfoot ~ and you’re going to use it to really bookmark stuff ~ not just your own stuff let me know and I’ll send you an invite.

So this is a traffic series ~ where’s the traffic coming from?

At this point, unless you land on the front page of Digg or Mixx direct traffic from social bookmarks is probably not all that likely. The point of adding your site to bookmarking sites is to get some good backlinks that will help you rank better in the search engines, which will drive more organice, highly targeted traffic to your site.

Now we’re back to the quality vs quantity debate.

If all I’m getting is links then why shouldn’t I submit to every single bookmarking site I can find?  It’s a question I hear frequently and here’s my answer.

How does that make you stand out from any other Tom Dick or Harry who can also submit all their content to every bookmarking site out there. Do you think Google doesn’t know internet marketers play the game ~ do you really think they are going to count 674 links from bookmarking sites and consider it a bonus to your site? Personally, I don’t.

Do you think that if you have some links from the best/favorite bookmarking sites that might look to google like people really liked what you wrote and saved it to a bookmarking site? I do.

It’s also about TIME. How much time do you have to do this internet marketing thing? Do you have a couple hours to spend bookmarking for little results? OR would it be better to spend your 2 hours working on something that is going to give you bigger and better results?

I personally can’t find the time to do a bunch of bookmarking. I’m much happier to have a few accounts ~ tagfoot, delicious, stumbleupon ~ that I actually USE as social bookmarking sites. Yes, I submit my own content once in a while, but mostly I use them to save things I want to find later. When I do save something of my own it slides in without notice and looks completely natural ~ to the people who look at my bookmarks ~ as well as to Google.

My Bookmarking tips:
1. Choose 3 or 4 bookmarking sites you like.
2. Create accounts and use them to bookmark sites you like.
3. Add your own content once in a while when it’s really good.
4. If you use twitter have your bookmarks go to your twitter account (a few less tweets you have to make every day)
5. Don’t spend more than 5 or 10 minutes a day worrying about bookmarks.

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