Need Traffic (money) - Social Bookmarking

Is this you?

You have a web page, blog, or Squidoo lens with which you are trying to sell a product through affiliate marketing or perhaps you want some advertising revenue i.e. Adsense?

The problem, age old as the Internet, is how to get traffic to your site.

There is PPC (Pay per Click), directories, forum marketing, article marketing, and email marketing. All can generate traffic, some more than others.

There is also social bookmarking. Most of you are familiar with at least one social bookmarking site. The more famous examples include StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, and Furl.

How does social bookmarking work?

Let's go back a decade or so. When the internet took off commercially in the early 90's, it was easy to keep track of different websites; there wasn't that many!

There were websites at the time which had "link directories" of sites the webmaster had discovered and kept track of. It was fun.. for about six months, when the glut of new sites became too much for anyone to list and describe.

About this same time, the first social networks were gaining popularity, but not in the form we know today. Many were started in newsgroups (Usenet), where fans of certain subjects would post messages to each other and share websites and information.

As Usenet became to ungainly to manage (Google it sometime and see what was required), the development of web based networking and social groups were well underway.

First, the need to track and save websites was always a need all of us on the internet. And storing these sites in our "Favorites" was not always practical (one hard drive crash and buh-bye Favorites).

Next, keywords became a way to sort stored websites. These became known as "tags" from the idea of tagging a site based upon keywords like "diet", "exercise", "financial tips" and sorting them out from each other.

Finally, sharing our favorite websites became part of our activities on the internet along with everything else we were interested in.

Social bookmarking was the natural evolution of all of this - finding, tagging and sharing websites we visit and like.

Internet marketers like social bookmarking because each page or blot entry on their site can be tagged with keywords and listed on hundreds of social bookmarking sites which drives traffic. Also, each bookmark is a backlink to the main website or blog which drives up the page rank of the site.

How to use social bookmarking sites

First, with any traffic generators, the right niche or market is key. For instance, if your website was about "making money online", you would face some stiff competition and be another face in a crowded room as they say. So social bookmarking may or may not make any difference in your traffic.

But say your niche is about "low carb dieting tips", then social bookmarking may be a big help. Social bookmarking will allow you to use long tail and multiple keywords, in the form of tags, to drive more traffic to your site.

With each social bookmarking site, follow the rules and guidelines carefully for optimizing bookmarks, backlinks and traffic. For instance, while most sites allow tags, the format of submitted tags may be comma separated, dash, semi-colon or single word only. Some social bookmarking sites consider any type of marketing spam, so multiple submissions may result in account deactivation. While other social bookmarks sites are by invitation only.

Most social bookmarking sites also require a username and password to submit sites.

There are hundreds of social booking sites. As fast as they debut, some go under or disappear along with all of their stored tags, but don't worry, another will take its place.

Is there a way to submit to several bookmarking sites?

Yes, there are several tools available.

First, in the paid for category there is Bookmarking Demon which most swear by. BD allows you to submit multiple tags and sites to up to 100 of the most popular (and longest lasting) social bookmark sites. Also, a neat feature of Bookmarking Demon is a way to create multiple logins to several social bookmark sites and create more backlinks and tags to your website. This would take hours to do by hand.

There is also OnlyWire. OnlyWire is a web based application which submits links to bookmarking sites, but to far fewer sites than Bookmarking Demon . However, OnlyWire is a free way to quickly build links and it has a neat logging feature which shows users when bookmarking fails.

Then there is Social Marker another web based bookmarking submission tool. Social Market submits to about 50 top bookmark sites and features a web interface which saves some time when submitting URL's, tags and descriptions of your site.

Remember this; social bookmarking takes time. Despite the marketing hype, bookmarking generally will not result in a "flood of overnight traffic". On the contrary, social bookmarking is one way, of several, to build traffic to your website or blog over time.

Further, backlinks from social bookmarks take months to accumulate in a measureable form. Be willing to wait for the bookmark effect.

In closing, I will give you an example: One site I maintain receives about 125 - 150 visits a day. Of those visits, about 5 a day are from bookmarking sites such as Propeller, Del.icio.us and Stumbler. Those numbers vary, but it gives you an idea of what sort of scope you are looking at.

Good luck, check out those bookmark sites, start setting up accounts and consider the need for tools like Bookmarking Demon and OnlyWire to save time.