This article is the first in a series of articles that will help you boost your social media marketing.
Do you need to do it? Create new targeted traffic to your website, blog or subscription page? Create more opportunities for your site to appear in the search results of the major search engines? Create the chances of viral traffic?
Of course yes. These can be the benefits for you of social bookmarking. Importantly, the shipping process can be automated to save you a lot of time.
A social bookmarking service is a centralized online service that allows users to add, edit, and share bookmarks of website pages they like. You can easily use your bookmarks from anywhere using any computer that is connected to the Internet.
Being listed on sites like Digg and Delicious can drive new traffic to your website. Incidentally, Delicious popularized the terms “social bookmarking” and “tagging.” These sites offer the best type of visitor. People who come to your site from a social bookmarking site are usually there because your website came up in a search for topics that interested them.
Search engines will often list results from bookmark sites. So if your site is bookmarked, this is an additional opportunity to appear in search results.
Getting featured on a bookmarking site can often lead to people tagging your site on other bookmarking sites, so you have a chance for 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 compiled a list of 125 social bookmarking sites, some of which are very popular and others that are newer or somewhat unknown.
In addition to targeting the major social bookmarking sites, you will find some diamonds in the rough that are either niche-oriented or well-treated by Google and other search engines.
To get your share of the wealth that social bookmarking has to offer, you need to leave your bookmarks on multiple sites. This may seem like a daunting task, but it can be automated with the right software like IMAutomator.
This social bookmarking software allows you to create links in just a few moments. IMAutomator operates using Shipping Credits. Each site in the system has a credit cost equal to its PageRank, so a PR1 site costs 1 credit to submit, a PR4 site costs 4 credits, and so on. When you submit a job, you choose exactly which sites you want to submit it to, and therefore control exactly how many credits you’re spending on each one. If you’re just starting out, the best option is the free trial, then buy credits as you need them.
You’ll be surprised how easy the submission process really is. Once you have completed your details and submitted the job, you will have access to a submission schedule for each job.
The default rate for submitting links is one per day, to avoid search engine penalties. My job consisted of 63 scheduled submissions and the cost of the credits was approximately $6. The bookmarking site with the highest PageRank was Delicious. The remaining 62 sites had a PageRank ranging from 1 to 7.
So there you are then. Automated social bookmarking. The $6 automation cost saved me hours and hours of my time. However, of the top 5 sites, 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.