Internet Marketing “The Way I See It”

Day FOUR on Traffic Generation . . .

Social bookmarking can best be described as a bookmarking system whereby you save your “favorites” to the web as opposed to saving them to your computer.  These bookmarks are usually visable to the public (although they can be saved for private viewing only) and people can view them via the search engines or going to the social bookmarking sites and finding them via categories or tags.

Tags are really nothing more than keywords that would help a visitor to the site find your “bookmark” and the search engines categorize your bookmark.  Social bookmarking sites are very popular and attract a lot of visitors and traffic.  If you take a look below this post (and any other post I have made on this blog) you will see a little button for “Social Bookmarking”.  If you like what you’re seeing you can bookmark the post to any of your favorite social bookmarking sites.

Social bookmarking is an easy way to build links and generate traffic to your blogs and websites and you should be using it frequently.

What Can You Bookmark?

You can bookmark anything at all that provides content and value to the public.  You can bookmark your websites, your Hub Pages, your Squidoo Lenses, your blog posts, your adsense websites, your articles and your other social marketing sites like Facebook and My Space.

And yes, despite untrue rumors and bad information you may read elsewhere on the internet, IT IS PERFECTLY OKAY to bookmark your own websites.  It’s garbage to think that you have to hide under a different e-mail address and name or have other people bookmark your websites for you.  To put it bluntly…that’s crap!  Thousands and thousands of marketers are bookmarking their own sites every single day or paying someone else to bookmark for them.

When it comes to your blog posts every single post you make is a new page so it’s perfectly fine (as a matter of fact highly recommended) that you use social bookmarking for every single post that you make.  Again, the key is if you’re adding value and content then bookmark it!

So How Does Social Bookmarking Generate Traffic?

When you bookmark your sites and make them available to the public, that means others are able to read the information.  If the reader likes what they see they will click on your bookmark which will lead them to your websites and blog posts.  You’re building traffic and building relationships when you use social bookmarking.

I have used social bookmarking for every one of these posts on traffic generation and just yesterday I had 2 people sign up to receive the free Hub Page video tutorials offered here.  That’s how it works.

In addition you’re creating backlinks to your websites and blogs when you create your social bookmarks.  Remember…the more backlinks to your site the more traffic and the better your search engine rankings.  Google picks up these bookmarks very very very regularly and will continue indexing and ranking your site from these bookmarks.

What To Do And What Not To Do When Using Social Bookmarks

As we’ve already discussed, make sure you’re adding value and content when you use social bookmarking.  Make the description section of your bookmarks interesting.  I like to bookmark from the 3rd party view.  For instance…when I bookmarked the traffic generation post on Hub Pages my description started off something like “I just came across this free Hub Pages Video Tutorial………….”.  Make it natural and DON’T MAKE IT SALESY!  If you’re salesy people will ignore your bookmarks and they can even “bury” your bookmarks on certain sites like Digg.

Do encourage others to also bookmark your sites.  You can even form a group of three or four people in your niche (a team) that bookmarks each other’s sites.  DO NOT get crazy and have hundreds of people bookmarking your sites.  If Google catches onto this (and believe me they eventually will) they will throw your sites into the sandbox!!  You may never get back out of that sandbox if they determine that the bookmarking was not natural and organic.

There have been cases of some real dumb marketers (particularly on Facebook and other social marketing sites) that have had their entire group of followers bookmark their links and Google caught on right away!  They can easily backtrack where these links and bookmarks are coming from and even though these people may have gained immediate financial reward their sites have been thrown into the sandbox to possibly never be seen again.

Where Do You Bookmark?

There are hundreds and hundreds of social bookmarking sites on the internet.  You may have heard of some of them like Digg, Delicious, Furl, Netscape and on and on.

It could take you forever to individually bookmark on each site or you could use a service like Social Marker.  Social Marker has compiled a list of some of the most popular social bookmarking sites.  Once you create an account with Social Marker you can add your bookmark with your titles (keywords),  tags (keywords) and descriptions (keywords) to their software and they can submit to any number of sites that you chose.

The first time through you will need to register at each of the different bookmarking sites and confirm your registration so it does take some time the first go-through.  From there on out it will save you hours of time since you don’t have to individually go to each site and rewrite your bookmark each time.

I like to mix my social bookmarking submissions up a little.  One time I may post to only the “Best” social bookmarking sites (you can find these on Social Marker) and the next time I may post to only the “Do Follow” social bookmarking sites (again…social marker will mark these for you and post to only them).

Here’s a short little video by Ed Dale that shows you how to use Social Marker:

There are other tools out there that do the same job as Social Marker (such as Social Poster and OnlyWire).  Whichever tool you use it will be invaluable to your website for generating traffic.

Reciprocate In The Social Bookmarking Communities

Just like everything else in life, you can’t always be “taking” from the social bookmarking communities by only posting your own sites.  You should also do your part and reciprocate by “giving” to the community.  How can you do this?  You should take an hour or so each week away from your own business to give back!  Go to Stumbleupon (we’ll discuss this one later) or Digg or any of the other sites and go through the posts and give them your own thumbs own by bookmarking for other people or Digging their posts, etc.  If you never give and only take then it’s reasonable to assume that eventually your bookmarks will be ignored.

So go ahead…give a little today!  Please bookmark this post and leave a comment with your URL and I’ll reciprocate with you.  (PS…still not sure what’s going on with my comment box. It’s been on again..off again lately.  If it’s not displaying in full then just click on where it says  _ Comments and that will take you right to the comment box).

Day Five post will go into Twitter.  Many people are using Twitter but they’re not using it correctly!  There are tons of ways you can be using Twitter to generate traffic without having it look like a big sales fest!  Stay tuned….