What is social bookmarking and what is it for?

Social bookmarking is the practice of posting links to articles and web pages on various “link aggregators” or social bookmarking sites, such as Digg, Stumbleupon, etc. Social bookmarking sites rise and fall in popularity fairly quickly, but they generally have a few common features:

1. Users can submit links that other users can explore, providing a good way to expose your content.

2. Links go to large listing pages, which are usually very easy to navigate, and are also often divided into a “main page” of the best links of the day, and various subsections that help you get exposure in more relevant circles .

3. Links can usually be “voted” to determine which links get the most airtime on the front page of various sections. The more votes your links get, the more traffic they get.

4. Some sites, like Digg, assign a weight to certain shares and users, so a user who submits more popular links will get a vote that carries more weight.

5. Most users of social bookmarking sites are pretty jaded when it comes to the internet and will ignore things that are not interesting, funny or very entertaining. This is not a place for your boring press releases.

6. Most bookmarking sites usually have some sort of “social” element, allowing users to create profiles, have a list of other users’ friends, etc., in the hope that users will share content with each other. they.

Those are the basics, so let’s take a look at the best way to approach social bookmarking. I’m going to use Reddit and Digg as my main examples, but keep in mind that Reddit itself requires a great deal of familiarity with its culture before you can post links that anyone will click.

choose your niche

Submitting an article about growing bonsai trees to the front page of Reddit will get you nowhere: maybe you’ll get 30 visitors, none of whom will buy your products. But posting it to /r/bonsai, even though it only has about 1100 readers, will probably get more attention from interested people.

Ironically, submitting to /r/trees will have much less of an effect, because /r/trees is dedicated to marijuana culture. The lesson here is: know your subreddits.

Write a catchy title and use an image.

Standard newspaper headline/advertisement formats don’t work too well on the Internet, because everyone has become immune to them. Instead, you need to think of a clever headline that will interest people enough to learn more about what you’re writing about, or at least promise images of cats.

Most bookmarking sites include a thumbnail of the page you’re linking to or one you provide. Take the trouble to do this – it generates much higher clicks.

Keep it up and make your links easy to share

Social bookmarking is all about persistence, so if no one clicks your first link, create another article, come up with a cleverer title, and try again. Put a social bookmarking widget on your website or blog and encourage people to share your articles. If you’ve already submitted them and they have accounts, it only takes a second to click the “upvote” or “like” button.

At the very least, having links to all your articles on half a dozen social bookmarking sites is great for SEO.