More on Social Bookmarking

Posted by writer

In my last post I spoke about the basic concept of social bookmarking. Today, I’ll go a step deeper to see how social bookmarking sites can be used. Later, we’ll discuss the different sites in detail along with their value and benefits.


To start off, heres a good video explanation of the concept of social bookmarking in plain English.

Social bookmarking sites can get your traffic to spike up significantly - but that does not mean that you can go online and try to randomly instigate that traffic. It has to happen naturally, or else you can risk losing your credibility online.

The voting concept in bookmarking sites allows the popular stories to get to the first page. So, its important to understand what makes content popular by carefully studying the trends in those sites. If you can manage to drive your content there, be prepared for a lot of traffic. However, this does not mean that you can copy or mock your way into the first page of these sites.

If you use these sites to genuinely share things that interest you, chances are that you can create a following where people watch the sites that you bookmark. A thing to note is that the online community is ever-so-watchful of manipulated or self-interest driven content. If you want to use social bookmarking strategies for your business, you’ll have to adapt it as a regular use tool for things that interest you.

There are a number of social bookmarking sites - a few of the popular ones are Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Furl, Stumbleupon. Today, I’m just briefly going to talk about Digg.

Digg:
Digg is a community-driven news source. The community decides the popularity of stories - the most digged stories make it to the front page and result in huge traffic spikes to the source of the stories.

Most online businesses thrive on traffic - if that is your case as well, then you should spend time to carefully study what kind of content makes it to the top.

Good content gets dugg. Sales pitchy content doesn’t. Content with lots of lists and guidelines gets dugg. Content that is lame doesn’t. Focus on creating valuable content instead of wasting time playing tricks with the social bookmarking tools. If your site content is good and you have an active following, your chances of rising to the top are higher. Micah has some nice guidelines for social bookmarking that you can put to use.