WylmaBerg140

Social Bookmark - Social bookmarking is the practice of posting links to articles and web pages to various "link aggregator" or social bookmark sites, such as Digg, Stumbleupon and so on. Bookmarking sites rise and fall in popularity fairly quickly, but they generally have a few common features:

1. Users can submit links which other users can browse, providing a great way to expose your content.

2. Links enter into large pages of lists, that are normally very easy to navigate, and tend to be usually divided up in to a "main page" of the best links for the day, and various sub-sections which help one to get exposure in more relevant circles.

3. Links usually can be "voted on" to determine which links get more airtime on the front page of numerous sections. The more votes your links get, the greater traffic they get.

4. Some sites, like Digg, fasten a weighting to certain actions and users, so an individual who submits more popular links will have a vote that carries more importance.

5. Most social bookmark submitting site users are fairly jaded in terms of the internet, and will ignore things that aren't interesting, funny, or very entertaining. This is not a place for your boring press announcements.

6. Most bookmarking sites usually have some kind of "social" element to them, allowing users to generate profiles, have a friends list of other users, etc., with the hope of getting users to share content between themselves.

Social Bookmark - These are basics, so let's check out how best to approach social bookmark creating. I'm going to use Reddit and Digg as my main examples, however that Reddit itself requires a great deal of familiarity with its culture prior to being able to submit links that anybody even clicks on.

Choose your niche

Submitting an article on growing bonsai trees to the front page of Reddit won't get you anywhere - you'll get 30 visitors maybe, none of whom will buy your products. But submitting it to /r/bonsai, although it only has around 1,100 readers, will most likely garner you more attention from interested people.

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

Write a catchy title, and use a photo

Standard newspaper/advert headline formats do not work too well on the internet, because everyone has become resistant to them. Instead you should think of a clever title that interests people enough for more information about what you're writing, or at least promise pictures of cats.

Most bookmarking sites add a thumbnail from the page you're linking to, or one you provide. Go ahead and take trouble to do this - it generates much higher click throughs.

Keep at it, making your links simple to share

Social Bookmark - Social bookmarking is all about persistence, so if nobody selects your first link, make another article, come up with a more clever title and try again. Put a social bookmark creating widget on your blog or website, and encourage people to share your articles. If you've submitted them already, and they've accounts, it only takes a second to click an "upvote" or "like" button.

Regardless of anything else, having links to all or any of your articles on half dozen social bookmarking sites is great for SEO.