Using Social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, Digg and Technorati is an excellent way to build links to your website because it allows others to grab those links and add them to their own lists, making your URLs go viral.
These sites can also be great for getting more traffic to your own domains as well. You can even bookmark your sites yourself hoping others will share the links, sometimes they may even put in an extra vote for your entries which is something Digg users do a lot.
In fact if enough people vote for a story it could make it to the front page of the bookmarking site and a front page listing could mean thousands of visitors a day.
But be careful, getting traffic from bookmarking sites won't happen if you're promoting a sales pitch, your links have to be of interest to the readers. For example, you could use news pieces to bookmark your site for more links, here's how…
Lets say you are in the aromatherapy niche and you have a site on how to benefit from aromatherapy. An aromatherapy how-to site might not get shared too much, but let's say your came across an article that said people who use aromatherapy on a daily basis are 70% less likely to develop skin cancer. Now you've got a pretty good chance of having users in both the aromatherapy and health demographic sharing your links.
If your site offers less newsworthy items and has more general information then don't worry about how many people vote for a story or share your links. Just focus on using the social bookmarking sites to gain backlinks to your sites.
Concentrate on bookmarking the index page of each of your sites first. Be careful not to bookmark too many of your own pages when starting out – that can appear spammy – remember to also bookmark other interesting sites that you don’t necessarily own yourself.
The basic idea behind social bookmarking is to be an active member of the community as someone who shares useful information. So start by creating a comprehensive profile that gives others a good idea about who you are, then add a picture to make it personal and if the site offers it, start building a “friends”.
Don't go crazy and start adding bunches of links a day. Keep it to about ten or less per day and you should be fine. After you’ve been a user for several weeks, you might be able to get away with adding 50 links a day, just make sure to keep bookmarking stories on other websites as well.
Vote for a few of the stories that made it onto the first page. Bookmark a story at FoxNews.com every once in a while, or a funny YouTube video. The social bookmarking community will regard you as much more of a legitimate participant.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Twitter: me
January 26, 2010 at 6:25 pm
I just start using Face Book to build links. I am part of the network of the company I retired from. I keep them up to date on what I am doing which includes my new web site pages. It is really import for me to keep in Touch with these people, and comment on what they are doing. Thank you for this article it gave me even more Ideas.
I couldn’t thank you enough for posting article about social bookmarking sites, I seriously love it. I just started with bookmarking and I just realized how important bookmarking other sites that you don’t know so it won’t be spammy in nature. Thanks so much.
Thank you for the tips.
great post,
keep up great writing.
Twitter: Mia Nguyen
April 13, 2010 at 3:58 pm
I totally forgot about that also when I first started social bookmarking. When bookmarking you must include other interesting urls as well to be in the clear of spamming.
{ 1 trackback }