Recommended by David

I must confess to being something of a social bookmarking novice. Let me be completely honest here - I thought social bookmarking sites and social networking sites were one and the same thing. Now I could see the social advantages of Facebook, Myspace etc. for people wanting to meet up with, and make new friends online, but I could never see me joining them (too much to do, preferring “proper” socialising and umpteen other reasons). So until recently, I paid no attention to social bookmarking sites because of my wrongly thinking that they were the same as Facebook etc.

Now, outstanding on my “To Do” list for quite sometime, has been to finish reading ALL of the free e-books that I’ve been giving to my subscribers. (If you’ve not got them yourself yet, just claim them by completing the “floating” opt-in box on the right). Anyway, for the reasons given above, it will not surprise you that one of the unread e-books was: “How to Bookmark for FREE TRAFFIC”. Eventually, the significance of those last two words sank in and I finally read the book.

EUREKA! Now I know the difference - and I wish I’d read it sooner. For those of you already in the know, you’ll already have identified that I’ve started using social bookmarking on my blog. For the rest of you (and I trust that I wasn’t the very last one to cotton on here) I’ll give you a brief introduction in the rest of this article.

Firstly, think of how you bookmark your favourite websites now via your internet browser. Are you like me and have that many favourites that you have to organise them and still can’t always find what you’re looking for straightaway? Perhaps, you use more than one pc so you have more than one list of favourites to maintain. What if you stored your favourites list on a website and you could allocate your own keywords (”tags” in bookmarking jargon) to each site so that you could easily find them again? Now you have just one favourites list and it’s easily searchable.

You might have searched through many sites before you found those favourites. Maybe other people could benefit from your favourite sites and maybe you could benefit from others’ favourites. By searching by “tags” you can find similar sites that those with similar interests have found beneficial. Most social bookmarking sites incorporate a “ranking” system so that the “favourites of the favourites” are easily found.

I trust you’re still with me! Now let’s look at this from a marketing perspective.

Some of these social bookmarking sites are tremendously popular. For example, StumbleUpon has 7,438,039 members at the time of writing; and that is just one social bookmarking site.

What if you were to bookmark your own blog, or website, on one (or even more) of these sites?

What if you were to give visitors to your own site the easy ability to register your own site as being one of their favourites?

Can you see how these tactics could lead to increased traffic for your website with links coming back from the social bookmarking sites?

SO, WHICH BOOKMARKING SITES SHOULD YOU USE?

When you’ve checked out a few, you’ll see that they all have their own identities and for your own personal use, one might stand out. That is likely to be the case for anyone wanting to register for their own personal benefit. And, of course, everyone’s different and will have their own preference. So, from a marketing point of view, you need to register with as many as possible and bookmark your site / blog articles with all of them. That, of course, is a tall order.

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO

1) Re-visit the e-book I gave you and which I’ve just read. It lists the 30 most popular bookmarking sites.

2) Start by registering with just one bookmarking site and mark your own website as a favourite.

3) Over time, gradually register with more sites and bookmark your own website / blog.

4) Make it easy for visitors to your own site to bookmark it as a favourite of theirs.

HOW TO KEEP IT SIMPLE

You may be wondering how you’re going to cope with all these social bookmarking sites, especially if you’re going to add to your favourites regularly, say when you post a new blog article. Don’t worry, you can automate the process.

Do you see the “Bookmark and Share” icon immediately at the end of this article? This is provided by Onlywire. They offer both a free and a paid service by which you can:

• register for any or all of 28 social bookmarking sites
• log in once to your Onlywire account and post a favourite to all of the bookmarking sites you are registered with
• obtain your own “Bookmark and Share” icon to display on your own site; this allows your visitors to bookmark your site or even send an e-mail recommending it to a friend. 

So go to the “Bookmark and Share” icon and click on the “Create Your Account” button. Everything follows logically from there. FREE TRAFFIC is there for the taking!

David

PS If you’ve found this article useful, why not bookmark it or e-mail a friend, using the “Bookmark and Share” icon.