What is Social Bookmarking?

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Social Bookmarking Sites

You’ve heard that term time and again – “social bookmarking” and wondered what it is. Well, social bookmarking is a brand new concept, it’s a web 2.0 prodigy, where internet users collectively gather resources on the web in the form of bookmarks and share, categorize, arrange them benefitting each other. Well, technically bookmarking is as same as the old windows “browser bookmarking”, just that in social bookmarking many people share their favorite bookmarks and use ways to tag and categorize them. There are particular websites on the internet that will help you do the social bookmarking, where you can arrange and share your favorite bookmarks with others of similar taste, and these are called social bookmarking site.

If you would rather watch a video click on this link:  What is Social Bookmarking?

Popular Bookmarking Sites

As in any category there are hundreds of websites out there that does the job fairly good. But there are only a few that are popular. Some of them are Digg.com, Delicious.com, Mister Wong, Reddit, Newsvine etc.

Why people use them?

So why do people use social bookmarking sites? Of course the primary objective is to save interesting website information for later use and share it with others.But in the new web 2.0 times people put social bookmarking sites to more uses such as traffic generation and link building.

Traffic Generation

Since the popular social bookmarking websites like Digg.com has a very large userbase, if a bookmark is favored by many (if it get’s popular that is), then the chances of that website getting traffic from all of those users are very high. Because logically, as more and more people keep bookmarking a website, more and more people are likely to visit the site.

Link building

Some webmasters use social bookmarking for link building purposes as well. But this is only possible with those social bookmarking sites that has the "do follow" link tags. What happens here is that, when a webmaster submits a site link as bookmark to one of the dofollow social bookmarking sites, they are in turn getting a link back to their websites. Most often the social bookmarking sites are on a higher reputation with google, and carries higher page rank and link juice. Therefore the webmaster gets the benefit of each back link from the social bookmarking sites.

How can internet business owner benefit from social bookmarking sites?

Internet business owners can benefit from social bookmarking sites more than anyone else. The reason is that a majority of the internet business owners potential audience forms the social bookmarking community. And if an internet business owner can tap the heavy traffic from the social bookmarking community, the benefits are double fold.

What is Social Bookmarking (in Internet Marketing Terms?)

Social bookmarking is an excellent tool that has huge potential for traffic generation and boosting your website to stardom in no time. Internet marketers are in the constant pursuit of getting the maximum mileage for their websites and businesses using the social bookmarking sites and their community. To them, the social bookmarking community is a gold mine of traffic and potential clients. However, reaping the benefits of the social bookmarking community is not easy. And not everyone can actually get popular on the social bookmarking sites that quickly. The social bookmarking community is very sensitive and biased most of the times that they have a similar taste and opinion. Like for instance the community on Digg is very favorable to topics on technology, while reddit or delicious are social bookmarking sites that has a crowd inclined to news items. Based on the content of each bookmarking sites, internet marketers try and leverage on their businesses.

What are those little buttons on every website?

I’m sure you would’ve seen those little buttons on every site, that has digg, stumbleupon and delicious links in it. What are they?

Well, it’s a common practice these days that webmasters place the shortcuts to the social bookmarking sites from their each story. The buttons you see on websites help you to submit the story to any of those social bookmarking site just in a click. So if you find an interesting story on the internet, all you got to do is bookmark it clicking one of those buttons.

Digg.com basics?

Digg.com is probably the one social bookmarking website out there that is extremely popular. Why? Because almost the entire webmaster community is out there digging. Yes, Digg has a huge participation quotient and if you can get front page digg (the most popular bookmarks end up at the front page getting the maximum traffic and diggs), you’ll take home around one million hits in a matter of few hours.

How to Get a Front Page Story on Digg?

a. One submission for one URL
Digg has a strict policy that one story/article can be submitted only once to Digg. It does not accept duplicate entries. Because of this top diggers are in the fight to submit interesting stories first and get the credits for it.

b. First 24 hours is key
After you submitted an article to Digg, you have 24 hours to “popularize” your story. If the story is interesting, and get more diggs, your submission will climb up to the first page of Digg, giving you even more visibility. But if the story is not worth it, then the story will get buried or not make it to the front page at all. However the key is to get maximum number of diggs in 24 hours.

c. Importance of Hitting the first page.
So why is everyone trying hard to get on to the front page of Digg? As I told you earlier, Digg has a very large community and lot many people track the digg submissions front page to get alerts on breaking news and technology updates. If a story makes it to the front page, then it means that your story is exclusive and is accepted by the community as “worth sharing”, which is the reason why you made it to the front page in the first place.

And getting on the front page can give you loads of traffic. It’s called the “Digg Effect” where you get hundreds of thousands of unique hits within a short span of time. This Digg Effect is also notorious of crashing servers as some hosts (mostly shared ones) are not capable of handling this immediate burst of traffic and can even ruin your website for some time.

How TO & How NOT to do Social Bookmarking

• Never submit articles just for the sake of promoting your own articles.
• Participate in the community first to gain some respect.
• Actively communicate with the community and it’s members.
• Don’t do self promotion first, try helping others instead.

 
Social bookmarking is a big popularity contest.  It is like when you are back in high school and the parties that are cool are the ones the cool kids talk about.  It does not matter if that party is cool...as long as the cool kid says it is it is. 

Digg is controlled by about 100 main diggers.  The spend their life digging articles, videos, and web pages building up their reputation & friends.  These people are the "cool kids."  If you can get in contact with these people you could have a chance of hitting the first page.

WebBizIdeas.com tested our theory out about a month ago. We did get in contact with one of the top contributors to digg and had him write this blog article:  http://blog.webbizideas.com/12-reasons-to-fire-your-web-designer/24/. You can see the screen shot we took when we hit here:   front page of digg.

Now if you read this article it is nothing special.  In fact it has no value to an internet business owner what so ever. We more consider it a "dick & fart joke" that hit with the general population. Anyway, it hit because we had a top contributor on digg to submit the article under his account at Digg.  If we submitted it we have gotten zero diggs.

So the lesson here is you have one chance to submit an article to a social bookmarking site (technically, there are way around this).  You need to find a "cool kid" to digg the article first for you.    Many times you can find "semi cool" people who write blogs or run highly influential websites do to this.

You can try to go on DIgg and make friends with people and ....blah blah blah blah.  It is not worth your time. Either find someone that is established or just forget about it.  Focus on writing good articles, have the social bookmarking icons on your web pages, and just hope for the best.

Remember, eventually everyone graduates high school and the cool kid and his cool parties are don't mean anything anymore.  If you focus on building a good business, writing good articles that help people, eventually people & companies will notice and you will have your glory day in the sun :)

So essentially, social bookmarking is an effective way to increase traffic to your websites , if you do it the right way. All social bookmarking community has its rules of play and most of the times, one should be an active player in the community to enjoy the benefits of it. So forget about traffic and get seriously involved in it, and at one point when you’ve gained some respect, you can look at promoting your articles.