Social bookmarking has become a common term within the internet surfers. What exactly means? Why social bookmarking is important for marketers? What’s the benefit of social bookmarking sites? Let’s quickly answer these questions…
What is Social Bookmarking
Definition from Wiki:
On a Social Bookmarking system or network, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists can be accessible to the public by users of a specific network or website. Other users with similar interests can view the links by topic, category, tags, or even randomly.
Other than web page bookmarks, services specialized to a specific subject or format – feeds, books, videos, music, shopping items, map locations, wineries,etc. – can be found.
In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists are both accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis. They also categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags. Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given “tags”, and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them.
Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.
Its increasing popularity and competition have extended the services to offer more than just sharing bookmarks, such as rating, commenting, the ability to import and export, add notes, reviews, email links, automatic notification, feed subscription, web annotation, create groups and social networks.
Why Social Bookmarking is important for marketers?
Suppose you just created your Website or Blog. Now What? Your site needs to be spidered and indexed in the search engines. One of the fast ways to accomplish this is via Social Bookmarks. By bookmarking your own sites, your site will be indexed and have an initial backlinks to jump up in the Search Engine Rankings.
Also in order to have a successful and profitable Blog or Website you need traffic. There are many sources of information regarding ways to bring traffic to your site, but Social Bookmarking is one of the easiest ways with multiple benefits.
These methods are perfectly ethical and you shouldn’t have any concerns doing them.
Benefits of Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking can bring immediate traffic to your website, as web 2.0 community websites such as Technorati, Digg, Reddit and Tailrank provide almost immediate information on various topics. These type of Bookmarking sites index and categorize content usually faster than the major search engines. People looking for the latest information on certain topics usually refer to these types of services.
The benefit is two fold. They provide immediate traffic from like-minded targeted viewers but also powerful backlinks to your sites that bring positive SEO and Search Engine results.
In summary, social bookmarking has been created to bring upfront the relevant information created and uploaded to the internet. The beauty of the system is that users are the ones who “vote” for the good content. In this way it’s a sure way to find the best stories and the best content in the front pages of these sites. Therefore, the traffic bookmarking sites generate has exponentially increased during the last years. Savvy marketers are finding its way to get a share of this traffic.
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The success of the “social” web applications is undeniable. Social networking sites like Facebook, Bebo or YouTube have reached success and fame in the past & present. Now followed by social bookmarking websites as they are becoming more and more praised by internet users.
Why create such a buzz around these websites? Let us give you a brief overview and the reasons why you should be in it to win it!
What is Social Bookmarking?
Social bookmarking is an online tool which allows people to organize, rate and share their favorite sites on the Internet. Categorize favorite sites using tags, which describe the content of the website. Other people who are interested in the same subject can browse through this selection, based on the recommendation and choose to bookmark the page themselves. The web application often allows users to store links (bookmarks- hence the name ), share and search a web page location (URL), web page address or a file name. All of these lists of online resources can be made accessible to the public. That is why it is called ” social ” bookmarking site. These bookmarks can be private or shared. To get your own social bookmarking storage – simply register to one of the website below.
List of Social Bookmarking websites
* Blue Dot
* del.icio.us
* Digg
* Diigo
* Furl
* GiveALink.org
* Ma.gnolia
* My Web
* Netscape
* Netvouz (Allows both tags and folders for organizing bookmarks.)
* Newsvine
* Reddit
* Shoutwire
* Simpy
* SiteBar (SiteBar bookmark server is open source software)
* StumbleUpon
* Thoof
A bit of Social Bookmarking History
The idea of sharing internet bookmarks was born in April 1996 with the launch of the first social bookmarking website itList.com. The market flourished in three years and websites like Backflip, Blink, Clip2, hotlinks and quiver enter in the competition. But this first generation of social bookmarking software didn’t have a viable money making model behind it. Many failed especially with the dotcom bubble gone burst in 2001. In 2005 and 2006, a second generation of social bookmarking site like Del.ici.ous, Simpy and furl rushed into the social software market, followed by Diigo, Ma.gnolia, Netvouz and Stumbleupon. Latest members to the family are websites like Reddit, Digg, Newsvine, the Uncut Times and Netscape. Recently IBM have revealed plans to enter this market and even the traditional BBC has added social bookmarking links for its news and sports articles.
Social Bookmarking: a small web revolution!
This a new way to discover the web. It is a big innovation in the area of searching for information online. Compared to the traditional system using a search engine, social bookmarking sites have a great advantage: The categorization of the bookmarks is made by humans who understand the content of the pages they have listed (or so we hope), unlike to the search engines which are using algorithms to rate & store the content of web sites. The result pages are ranked by the number of users or the times the keyword searched has appeared on the resource.
The importance of Social Bookmarking sites for Search Engine optimisation!
These Social Bookmarks are a nice “Add-On” for every companies Internet Marketing Strategy. It is all about traffic -and your online bookmarks again generate links which can potentially bring traffic to the website. Furthermore social bookmarking sites are highly considered by search engines because they are seen as reliable and recommended websites – human edited.
Create your account and start digging!
Anja Glauch is the co-founder and managing director of Tetridia Ltd. She began her career in Information Technology more than 11 years ago. She is leading the companies Online Marketing, Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation activities.
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Copyright (c) 2007 Titus Hoskins
Recently, a page on one of my websites was bookmarked or listed on Digg, a popular social bookmark site. It gave me the perfect opportunity to study and analyze the traffic coming from these social media sites. Read to discover the advantages and disadvantages of social bookmark traffic and how it can be applied to your own online marketing or site.
Is Social BookMark Traffic Useless?
First, we must make the distinction that no traffic is useless. Any visitor to your site is a good thing and should be welcomed. However, all traffic is not created equally, there are great differences in the sources of your traffic. This article takes a close analytical look at social bookmark traffic from an internet marketing perspective.
In case you haven’t noticed, right now social bookmark and media sites are all the rage on the web. Social bookmark traffic comes from such popular sites as Slashdot, Digg, Stumbleupon… basically these sites are driven by their users – that is, users or members pick and bookmark the content they want to view and discuss.
These social bookmark sites are extremely popular; they command the high traffic numbers most ordinary sites can only dream about obtaining.
But is this social bookmark traffic useful?
Is it worth your time? Should you be actively promoting to these social media sites? Should you concentrate your online marketing efforts on these types of sites? More importantly, what are the benefits and disadvantages of getting a front page listing on a sites like Digg or Stumbleupon?
As a full-time online marketer I wanted to know the answers to those questions. Moreover, I wanted to discover how or if I could use these sites from an online marketer’s advantage; i.e. how can they help me create more online income.
Recently, the Digg listing gave me a first-hand opportunity to really study these sites.
Of course, nothing happens without a reason… I did actually court these social bookmark sites by placing the free Addthis.com bookmark on all my pages. You can do the same. Just use this simple bookmark to attract these sites.
But be careful; getting your site featured on the front page of these sites can drive 100,000’s of visitors to your site immediately, so much traffic that it may overtax your server and crash it.
So be warned; if you’re actively promoting to these social bookmark sites just make sure your servers or web hosting is up to the demanding task of handling all these sudden visitors.
In my case, it didn’t crash my servers but unfortunately, the page/link in question featured an old poorly written article I did on the history of the Internet. Why it was even featured on Digg is a puzzle and beyond me.
But still I am not one to waste an opportunity, so I put my Google Analytics into overdrive and starting analyzing these visitors and social bookmark traffic.
It pointed out some very interesting factors about this bookmark traffic.
Most of this traffic will:
* simply bounce back
* very few visitors will spend much time on your site
* very few visitors will even venture into your site
* very few will sign-up to your newsletter
* very few will enter your marketing follow-ups/funnels
(The unknown variable here being the content on your site, how good it is? How well does it perform?)
Regardless, one common problem with traffic from these sites, it’s very temporary traffic. The high volume will only last a few days… until your item is moved back from the front page.
These visitors will not stay on your site long and most are gone within seconds, never to be seen again. A few may sign up to your newsletter or venture to other areas of your site but not many.
Social bookmark traffic is very fleeting, like customers in the drive-thru section in a fast food restaurant, they grab the content and surf back to the major linking site very quickly and surf on to the next item.
This traffic will behave very differently than organic traffic from the search engines, or from your newsletter traffic or from traffic in your marketing funnels. Much different.
It was unlike getting one of my articles featured in Addme or SiteProNews, where I can easily get 200 or 300 new subscribers in a day. Plus, these visitors are interested in my information and have been exposed to my content (article) before coming to my site.
So there was no comparison; I would take the traffic from these sites any day over traffic from the social bookmark sites. And I would take free organic traffic from the search engines over any other source of traffic.
So the question remains – is social bookmark traffic useless?
First, as I mentioned before, you must realize no traffic is useless; any visitors to your site is a good thing. Without traffic your site is worthless, just a few files sitting on a server in the middle of nowhere.
Obtaining visitors is one of your first objectives as a webmaster. You must get visitors to your site or it’s game over.
The best kind of traffic is traffic coming from organic search, visitors who come from the search engines seeking exactly what you’re offering on your site. These are targeted visitors who will consider your offer, real your information, maybe buy a product or sign-up to your newsletter or follow-up system. They often become repeat visitors to your site. These are your ideal visitors. This is the kind of traffic you want.
Social bookmark/media traffic is different but it does have some saving graces.
Mainly it can help expose your site to millions and help brand your site or business. It can get the word out about your site. Start a buzz.
If you have a site that appeals to the mass market, then these social sites could be an excellent recruiting ground for visitors and traffic.
These social sites are good for another reason; getting your links on all these high traffic, high PR7 and PR8 sites can’t hurt your search engine rankings. Once featured on a site like Digg, your link will appear on many secondary sites around the web, so far 500+ and counting. Monkey see, monkey do. Although it has never been my main ambition to get featured on Fark.com, all these sites do have high PR ranks so from a SEO standpoint it is not necessarily a bad thing.
Since many of these visitors will be using the Firefox browser which has the Alexa toolbar embedded – your site’s traffic rank will increase. Over 50% of the bookmark traffic coming to my site were using the Firefox browser. Alexa’s traffic rankings are not a true picture of the web’s traffic but it’s a good measuring stick, nonetheless.
Google might even consider it when ranking your site. Google basically considers their whole indexing system as a democratic voting structure… sites give a vote by linking to your content; wouldn’t it also be reasonable to assume more traffic means more votes. So wouldn’t getting a lot of traffic or being featured on a site like Digg where the users vote to propel the best content to the front be the ultimate vote.
One strange thing I did notice, for some reason the traffic from Stumbleupon was different. These visitors stayed longer on my site and reacted more like organic traffic. Maybe the Stumbleupon site is of a higher quality and this may have been reflected in the quality of the visitors coming from there. It also reminded me, all traffic from these social media sites can’t be judged with the one brush.
This whole experience also pointed out another important factor; it made me realize how unsuited my content is for the general web surfer or the mainstream web. All my sites and content were planned and organized to first draw in targeted (warmed up) visitors from free organic search and from my online articles.
If I or anyone wanted to take advantage of this social media traffic, you would have to create your site/content to appeal to these surfers and then somehow draw them into your marketing funnels. I don’t know if the majority of the users of these bookmark sites would make good prospects, but my guess is not very likely, the nature of the beast. But it would largely depend on what you’re offering on your site and how well it is suited to these users.
So I am not drawing any conclusions yet.
Hopefully, I will have further chances to study traffic from these social sites and get the long-term effects, especially in regards to my keyword rankings in the search engines before making any final judgments.
For now I will keep an open mind but the jury is still way out whether or not social bookmark traffic is worth the interruption to the daily marketing tasks of your site. Just seems like much ado about nothing.
The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous websites, including two sites on Internet marketing. For the latest web marketing tools try:www.bizwaremagic.com For the latest Internet Marketing Strategies Go here: www.marketingtoolguide.com 2007 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.
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Article Submissions to Social Bookmarking Websites can Book you some Backlinks
Social bookmarking is a significant part of any social media strategy. Its methodology requires submitting an article with strikingly fresh content in a short span of time, a wide network of friends and associates, and immediate follow-up. Investing the time to submit articles to social bookmarking websites can give you a sharp spike in website traffic and some backlinks in the process.
Social bookmarking is one part of a social media strategy that can build your website traffic and optimise your website for search engines by providing a rich resource for backlinks. Submitting articles to social bookmarking websites as well as article submission websites provides your website with backlinks. A strategic goal of article submissions to article directories and social bookmarking websites is to not only gain a backlink from the website you submitted the article to, but to also gain backlinks from other websites that refer back to your original article. Reprints of your articles that lead back to your original post are not the duplicate content that search engines discourage. If you submit duplicate articles with a link to your website on multiple websites simultaneously in a short period of time without a logical linking chain, then the search engines may penalize the articles as duplicate content.
To submit articles to social bookmarking websites and article submission websites to gain backlinks, you must be the original source of the article, and your articles should have content that is within the scope of your website. The search engines will attempt to map out the original source of reprinted articles and give credit to the originating source. The article reprints will not be penalized, but the originating source of the article will carry the heaviest weight when the search engines evaluate websites for the search engine result pages.
Backlinks, however, are not the only reward of submitting articles to social bookmarking websites and article directories. Direct traffic from interested visitors that become lifetime customers is the ultimate reward. Investing time in social bookmarking can widen your audience, provide you with backlinks, and give you the opportunity to gain a strong readership following.
Networking is a crucial element to successful social bookmarking strategies. Before you begin networking, build up a credible profile for yourself. Your social bookmarking profile can be your actual self or a persona for your website. You or your persona can then bookmark articles on your website, create tags, and join groups.
You can begin networking with friends and business relationships you may have already forged. Once you have a profile and a network of contacts, you can begin building new social bookmarking relationships that offer the opportunity for reciprocal voting. Your networked relationship can also promote the article you bookmarked by contributing comments. Social bookmarking websites are fast-paced, and articles that aren”t followed up or don’t garner votes or comments will quickly become obsolete. Articles that don’t have intriguing headlines won’t be read.
Follow-up is necessary for successful social bookmarking. Asking your network for votes and comments in response to your bookmarked article, and taking the time to expand on reader comments, can give a push to your article’s popularity and increase your chances of gathering backlinks and website traffic. Readers are more inclined to click on an article that has already been proven to show interest.
Social bookmarking requires an almost instantaneous follow-up that submission to article submission directories don’t – however the time invested in that follow-up can provide an almost instantaneous increase in web traffic and backlinks. Social bookmarking strategies for website optimisation require a persona, networking, captivating content, and follow-up. With those four requirements in place, your social bookmarking strategies can captivate readers to visit your website, then you can follow-up on building your customer relationships.
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Social bookmarks are a way for internet users to store, organize, search, share and manage web pages on the internet that they find of interest. They replace the traditional method of browser-based system of folders by encouraging users to organize their bookmarks with tags. Social bookmarking means storing your bookmarks online, tagging them and sharing them online with other users.
Users from all over the world bookmark sites or specific pages using their favorite social bookmarks. They can search through their bookmarks by keywords or by tags, and can access their bookmarks from any internet connection. Almost all social bookmark sites have the same basic features like browser bookmarklets for one-click link saving, RSS feeds, tags and sharing capabilities.
In a bookmarking system, users save links to web pages they want to remember or share by the use of RSS feeds. These bookmarks can then be organized into a list of tags that describe what the site is about. People are always searching for information, and search is probably the most important application on the web for surfers to find what they are looking for. Search engines give more relevancy to sites that have been recently modified or have added new content.
This is where social bookmarks are one step ahead, notifying users when a site has been updated through the use of the RSS feeds. Instead of going into a search engine, typing something in, you can quickly narrow down the items to what you are looking for by searching the tags. You can even search through what other people have bookmarked as long as they remain public. So, what started out as a way to send bookmarks to friends has really grown into social search engines.
Social bookmark sites allow others to see your bookmarks and comment about them, creating interactivity among bookmark users. Social bookmarking is all about the collective voice and the power of the people. As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features. A social bookmarking system can rank a resource, or website, based on how many times it has been bookmarked by users, whereas conventional search engines rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it.
Social technologies are here to stay, and are already growing in popularity. Social bookmarks continue to be one of the driving forces of this evolving web. It is all about labeling the web, making it easier to find the content that you’re looking for by passing on what you’ve found. For users, social bookmark sites can be useful as a way to access a consolidated set of bookmarks from various computers, organize large numbers of bookmarks, and share bookmarks with contacts. Social bookmarking can allow you to share the sites that you own to others with relevant tastes, driving traffic to your site, and creating valuable backlinks.
Alan Mater is an online business owner and member of the best making money system designed for newbies and experienced marketers alike. You can also make money online with these work from home opportunities that Alan provides on his website. He also provides free online training for those that are serious about earning an online income.
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You’ve probably heard the buzz about social media marketing (SMM). One of the components of SMM is social bookmarking. With the right advice and the right strategy, you can use social bookmarking to boost links to your company site and increase your site’s relevance for the keywords that pertain to your business.
The Opportunities in Social Bookmarking
Inbound links to your website are tremendously important to your search engine ranking. In fact, most search engine marketing experts believe that Google’s ranking algorithm is weighted far more heavily towards links than it is to keywords.
SMM offers many ways to generate these links for little or no cost – articles, social media sites and blogs are just a few examples. Social bookmarking is another.
With bookmarking, you save bookmarks to blog posts, articles and web pages (including your own). You tag them with a “keyword” of your own choosing (preferably related to your business). You can then add a “tag cloud” to your website. The tag cloud contains the tags you have created and directs users to the bookmarks you have saved for that tag.
What is the benefit for your business? Each bookmark links to your website or blog. With tag clouds, each keyword appears on your site, increasing the site’s relevance. Between the bookmarking site and the tag cloud on your website, you have a really great cross-promotional tool that opens up myriad opportunities for people to find you.
Consider the website of a Toronto marketing firm. They have a tag cloud with words like Toronto, search marketing, social media, blogging and so on. Each time someone visits their site, that person can click a tag and find the company’s bookmarks. They can then share those bookmarks with other users, which will point those users back to the marketing firm’s site.
Going in the other direction, people searching a bookmarking site may find the marketing firm’s bookmarks. Seeing that the company has posted some interesting and valuable articles on online marketing, they decide to visit the company’s site and add it to their social bookmarking network.
The Challenges of Social Bookmarking for Businesses
Like any kind of social media marketing, social bookmarking is low-cost, at least in terms of money. Where the “costs” escalate is in time. To do social bookmarking right, you need time to evaluate the various sites, add your bookmarks, comment on them, and interact with other users who share your interests. It is a big job.
Let’s look at the first step – deciding which sites to use. If you do a search for the top social bookmarking sites, you’ll get a huge list, like the one published on ebizMBA. So which ones do you choose? Delicious is one of the biggest, but would it be better to go for a smaller site, like furl or faves.com? Is it better to use all three, plus some social news sites, like Digg or Reddit?
Once you have made that decision, you need to decide how and when you will create the content you want to bookmark. Blogs, articles – what is the right amount of content and how often do you need to create it? You can really only answer that question by looking at social bookmarking as part of your overall social media marketing plan.
Answers to Your Social Media Marketing Questions
Social bookmarking and social media marketing are powerful marketing tools. To make the most of them you need to devote a lot of attention to the sites and create content regularly. You also need a comprehensive social media marketing plan that incorporates all of your content initiatives and your efforts to create bookmarks that direct people to that content.
A marketing agency that specializes in SMM can get you started. They can help you navigate the sites, schedule your content and get involved in the social media sphere. Even if you just sign on for a short-term contract to get started, you will find the SMM firm an invaluable partner in your “new media” marketing plans.
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