It's the next to last day in our 31 Days to Growing Your List challenge, and our topic today is driving traffic by using social bookmarking sites.
For Day 30, refer to pages 70-71 in the free
31 Day Guide to Growing Your List
"Bookmarking bland web pages isn't going to help you out. You need to bookmark your viral content - your crazy videos and your shocking reports and articles..." -page 70
Social Bookmarking Defined
Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.
In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains.
The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking
Can You Use Social Bookmarking To Build Your List?
Indirectly perhaps, but it's not what I would consider a list-building strategy. I say indirectly because it's a means of driving traffic, and you can convert those new visitors to subscribers.
This is not a method I personally use. I would be interested to see the click-through stats from a Social Bookmarking site. I know some of you use them so do leave a comment below if you care to share your stats. My understanding is that most people use Social Bookmarking as a means of getting inbound links, so that your content ranks higher in the search engines.
Tip: If you use Social Bookmarking sites, make sure that you bookmark more than just your own content. For every piece of content you bookmark from one of your own properties, bookmark at least three others from domains you do not own. So if you bookmark your blog post, also bookmark someone else's blog post and another person's video, etc - all on the same topic.
Bookmarking all of your own content just for the sake of traffic and/or links is called "social bookmarking spam". 😉 If you're going to use it at all, create a great resource with your bookmarks!
Best,
About Lynn Terry
Interesting post Lynn and thanks for sharing the bookmarking point i wasn't aware of that - thanks for sharing
Hi
Thank you for sharing this information with us.
Ii have a question, what is the meaning of "Bookmarking" inline with this content.
Hope to hear from you again.
Thank you,
Roy!
Hi Roy,
It's defined above, and you can also click on the Wikipedia link for more on that...
You definitely don't want to bookmark only your own site. If you buy software to automate bookmarking, be sure it bookmarks several sites while bookmarking your site.
The two best bookmarkting traffic sources for me are Reddit and StumbleUpon. But, I only bookmark articles that are interesting and/or informative with decent titles (or at least my better titles; I'm not so hot at writing titles).
Thanks for the great post about Social bookmarking. I have done many bookmarking for my site but none of the bookmarking site has got delivered even single traffic except Stumble up on. I got Lots of traffic from stumble upon.
Sometimes social bookmarking takes so much of my time instead of taking care of my site and optimizing it to make my services better. But I guess I have to lived with it it's how the internet works.
You're totally right, social bookmarking alone can't help much in building a list, it is mainly a technique of getting backlinks (or should I say "credit") for your websites. It is not the most powerful link building technique either but it is still important for link diversity.
So even though SPAM is on the rise with Bookmarking sites, you think it still holds the power for backlinking?
I think StumbleUpon is one of the best bookmarking sites. I have received more traffic from them, than from Facebook.