Social Bookmarking

Digg, Technorati, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Fark, Furl, even Netscape. Web 2.0’s largest trend has created over 1,000 of this new breed of “Tagged News sites.” On them we mere

humans share our online bookmarks with each other, and on the latest incarnations, we vote them up and down against each others to point out which ones are the most interesting or useful.

These tools are great, and their power is staggering at times… But all they do is essentially just use humans to duplicate Google’s work to the same end!

Why would we go through such trouble? Because computer algorithms still just don’t “know” their resources the way humans do. Having another person select a website and “tag” it as relevant to your keyword is much more intuitive for us to find resources with. It has its problems too, mainly when combining keywords, but overall it’s becoming an extremely popular way for people to find other websites.

This of course means that you, too, need to be Tagging your website in many Social Bookmarking tools for others to find.

Essentially the way these things work is that you set up an account with each of the ones you want to use and “Tag” any website or blog entry instead of bookmarking it the traditional way. Those tags could be kept just for personal use (Who in their right mind would want to do that…?) but as a default they are shared on that bookmarking website for others who search for the term you tagged it with.

With most Social Bookmarking tools, such as Del.icio.us, (we call this group the “Taggers”) the websites that have been tagged the most for a certain keyword come up the highest on the list when that keyword is searched. It’s actually a very simple & elegant system.

The newer breed of SB tools, such as Digg.com, uses an additional Voting capacity for people simply viewing the index page to vote up or down any news items they want to. (Naturally, these are referred to as the “Voters.”)

From a marketing standpoint, however, this can all be chaotic! First of all there are simply too many of these sites… Submitting to Google and Yahoo! is one thing, but could you imagine opening an account in all 1000 of these things and hitting the “tag” button for all of them? How about providing a review in each of them?

Second, people still go to google.com to search unless you make it easier for them to search a Tag elsewhere. It’s still not quite worth our time.

Finally, the problem it has with multiple keywords (Search engines handle keyword phrases as a single query… Bookmarking sites handle each word as a query and add them together) leaves a lot up to interpretation. The end result is that you need to be supplying even MORE keywords to a bookmarking site than you would to a search engine.

One thing you’ve got working for you is that you really don’t need to submit to them all. (Whew!) Once you choose some good keywords for your article (Remember, we use bookmarking tools per article or blog posting, not per whole website) you simply need to post it in the best bookmarking tool sites for your niche topic.

For example, in the Internet Marketing world, the best one is PlugIM (www.plugim.com) which will only accept internet marketing-related posts. That isn’t to say that I should be submitting my articles to Digg.com too, because Digg has a marketing subsection… But I’d never submit it to a social bookmarking site like Newsvine, for instance, because they are only interested in the most newsworthy news stories, like what President Bush is doing to make a fool of himself this week.

So, once you start exploring the SB tools for your niche market, you’ll quickly learn the best ones for you and use the same ones over and over again forever.

Surely, you ask, someone has tried to automate the process… Perhaps another submission software?

But of course! You didn’t think I’d forget to tell you the shortcut on this one, did you?

Well you’re in luck, because there are THREE shortcuts for Social Bookmark Marketing, and two of them are free!

The first is not a submitter at all, but it helps webmasters (and of course blog owners) get their content submitted by others much easier. It’s called the Socializer, and it’s basically just a page that is updated for you with all of the most well-known SB tools on it. It even passes the title and URL information through for you… But it’s not something you can use to do mass submissions with yourself.

The second tool is quite frankly awesome for a free product. I can think of no reason everyone shouldn’t be using this tool daily. (Even those who pay for the third tool!) It is a service called OnlyWire that keeps your account information and passes your submission to NINETEEN different SB tools with one single submission. That’s 19 links to your site or blog for every time you use it, all for free. (Quite possibly the best free marketing tool online!)

OnlyWire’s only downfall is that it doesn’t appear to work with Voter sites, discluding Digg, Reddit, and many of my favorites… But it does have a few big names on it such as Del.icio.us. Perhaps in the future they’ll find a way to add a lot more sites and then shoehorn the Voters in too.

Also, keep an eye on OnlyWire in the future; I expect great things from it. Think of the power it would have if it manages to talk all social bookmarking tools into cooperating… I guess only time will tell.

So how about for the really aggressive Social Bookmark submitters out there? You didn’t think I’d leave you out, did you? Web2Submitter was designed just for you. In very much the same fashion that you use Article Submitter and Directory submitter, Web2Submitter lets you submit your posting to all of the Social Bookmark tools out there as automated as can be. For the small price you have to pay for it, this is easily one of the few tools out there that has a cost to performance ratio in the top 1% of anything you can do online!

There is a great film walking you through the whole usage of Web2Submitter on that page, so go check it out if for no other reason than just to learn what a well-executed Social Bookmarking Marketing campaign looks like.

Quite seriously, just using this tool for an hour on one blog posting can result in many dozens or even a hundred new quality incoming links to your blog and a 3-5 day increase of traffic that you couldn’t afford to pay for otherwise… Even if you took out a new mortgage on your house!

So in summation, Social Bookmarking is quite possibly the very best thing you can be doing to market your website online. Certainly there will be exceptions, and it works much better for Blogs that have frequent postings than it could for a static website. Even still, it’s a free source of traffic that has been known on many occasions to send blog & website owners even more traffic than Google ever could on its’ best day… So the bottom line is that Social Bookmarking should be one of the top sources, if not the primary source of traffic you use for your free advertising campaign.