This article is the first of a series of articles which will help you boost your social media marketing.You can benefit by posting your bookmarks to a social bookmarking service.
Do you need to; Create new targeted traffic to your website, blog or optin page?; Create more chances for your site to appear in the search results of major search engines?; Create the chances of viral traffic?
Of course you do. These can be the benefits to you of social bookmarking. Importantly the submission process can be automated so saving you lots of time.
A social bookmarking service is a centralised online service which enables users to add, edit and share bookmarks of the website pages which they like. You can use your bookmarks easily from any location using any computer which is connected to the internet.
Being listed on sites like Digg and Delicious can drive new traffic to your website. Incidentally Delicious popularised the terms “social bookmarking” and “tagging.” These sites offer the best type of visitor. People who reach your site from such a social bookmarking site are generally there because your website appeared in a search for topics they were interested in.
Search engines will often list results from bookmarking sites. So if your site is bookmarked, this is an extra opportunity to show up in search results.
Being featured on one bookmarking site can often lead to people tagging your site on other bookmarking sites so you have the possibility of viral traffic.
The top 5 bookmarking sites in terms of unique monthly visitors are Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg and Slashdot. But there are many more. Search Engine Journal has put together a list of 125 social bookmarking sites, some of which are very popular and others which are newer or somewhat unheard of.
Besides targeting the major social bookmarking sites, you will find some diamonds in the rough which are niche oriented or treated well by Google and other search engines.
To get your share of the wealth which social bookmarking offers, you should leave your bookmarks in multiple sites. This might seem a daunting task but it can be automated with appropriate software such as IMAutomator.
This social bookmarking software allows you to build links in just moments. IMAutomator operates using Submission Credits. Every site in the system has a credit cost equal to its PageRank so a PR1 site costs 1 credit to submit to, a PR4 site costs 4 credits and so on. When you submit a job you choose exactly which sites you want to submit to and thus control exactly how many credits you are spending on each one. If you’re just starting out the best option is the free trial then you buy credits as you need them.
You’ll be surprised how easy the submission process really is. Once you’ve completed your details and submitted the job, you’ll have access to a submission schedule, for each job.
The default rate for link submission is one per day, in order to avoid search engine penalties. My job comprised of 63 scheduled submissions and the cost of credits was about $6. The bookmarking site with the highest PageRank was Delicious. The remaining 62 sites had a PageRank ranging from 1-7.
So there you are then. Automated social bookmarking. The automation cost of $6 saved hours and hours of my time. Of the top 5 sites however, only Delicious was included in the submission schedule. So I’ll have to do Reddit, StumbleUpon, Digg and Slashdot manually. Not such a daunting task considering the many long term benefits.
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