RoselleChancellor18
Social Bookmark - Social bookmarking is the practice of posting links to articles and webpages to various "link aggregator" or social bookmark sites, such as Digg, Stumbleupon and so on. Social bookmarking sites rise and fall in popularity rapidly, but they generally have several common features:
1. Users can submit links which other users can browse, providing a great way to expose your content.
2. Links go into large pages of lists, which are normally very easy to navigate, and tend to be usually divided up in to a "main page" of the best links during the day, and various sub-sections which help one to get exposure in more relevant circles.
3. Links normally can be "voted on" to determine which links have more airtime on the front page of numerous sections. The more votes your links get, the more traffic they get.
4. Some sites, like Digg, fasten a weighting to certain actions and users, so a user who submits very popular links will have a vote that carries more weight.
5. Most social bookmark submitting site users are fairly jaded with regards to the internet, and will ignore items that aren't interesting, funny, or very entertaining. This is simply not a place for your boring press announcements.
6. Most bookmarking sites usually have some kind of "social" element in their mind, allowing users to create profiles, have a friends listing of other users, etc., with the hope of getting users to talk about content between themselves.
Social Bookmark - These are the basics, so let's take a look at how best to approach social bookmarking. I'm going to use Reddit and Digg as my main examples, however that Reddit itself takes a great deal of familiarity with its culture prior to being able to submit links that anybody even selects.
Choose your niche
Submitting a write-up 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 may 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 photo
Standard newspaper/advert headline formats don't work too well on the web, because everyone has become immune to them. Instead you need to think of a clever title that interests people enough to find out more about what you're writing, or otherwise promise pictures of cats.
Most bookmarking sites include a thumbnail from the page you're linking to, a treadmill you provide. Take the trouble to do this - it generates higher click throughs.
Keep at it, making your links easy to share
Social Bookmark - Social bookmarking is about persistence, so if nobody selects your first link, make another article, make a more clever title and check out again. Put a social bookmark submitting widget on your website or blog, and encourage people to share with you your articles. If you've submitted them already, and the've accounts, it only takes another to click an "upvote" or "like" button.
If nothing else, having links to all of your articles on six social bookmarking sites is great for SEO.
