Does Social Bookmarking Really Work?
Social bookmarking is a popular tool that webmasters use to drive traffic to their websites. In order for a website to be successful and make money, it needs a lot of visitors. In fact, the more visitors a website gets the more money it should make. It’s no wonder that webmasters are always looking for new ways to get traffic. But does it really work or is it a waste of time?
Social bookmarking is an excellent source of traffic if done right. It can also be a flop if not used correctly. So what is it anyway? When you visit a website and want to save it so you can return again someday, you add it to your bookmarks. There are some websites that exist that do the same thing. Instead of saving your bookmarks to your browser, you save them on a social bookmarking site where they are visible for everyone else who uses the site to see. That’s where the term it comes from, because your bookmarks are public or social. Some well-known social bookmarking sites that get tons of traffic each day are StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious, and Digg.
In order to get traffic from these sites and not look like a spammer you need to follow a few golden rules. First of all, you must become a member of the social community. Comment on other people’s bookmarks and bookmark sites other than your own. Do not bookmark every single page of your website or blog at the same site.
To get the most traffic from your bookmarks you should submit pages that are interesting in some way. They could be funny, informative, controversial, or just a cute photo. If people like what you submitted, they will vote for your site, bookmark it, and pass it around which can bring you a huge jump in traffic.
In order for search engines to find your bookmarks and so human searchers can find them too, be sure to add descriptive tags to all of your submissions. These tags act like keywords that will pull up your bookmark if someone searches for that keyword. It is a good idea to use the maximum number of allowable tags for the most exposure.
There are hundreds of social bookmarking sites, not all of them get a lot of traffic, but most of them will still be useful as a backlink to your website. Submitting your pages to all of these sites can take a long time. Software has been developed to make this job easier. Some software is reasonably priced and others have hefty monthly fees. You may still have to go to each site individually and register before you can use the software.
Another option for getting your link on all these websites is to outsource the job to a virtual assistant. When the submissions are done by a human, you don’t have to worry about getting your account banned if the social bookmarking site doesn’t like automated submissions. Of course, you can do all the work yourself, it depends on how much time you have and how valuable your time is to you.
So the answer to the question of whether social bookmarking really works is that yes it works very well and can bring you a lot of traffic as long as you play by the rules and use the sites in a way that benefits everyone.
Community Bookmarking
