Social bookmarking may be flying under your radar — it was mine. However, this Web 2.0 phenomenon involves millions of Internet users, especially those under 50 and with higher income levels.
To learn about social bookmarking, there’s nothing like trying it for yourself. Set up a free account with Digg (www.digg.com) or del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) — the big two — and see how it works. I find myself using del.icio.us just because it’s so handy to save and categorize websites I want to be able to find again. These systems typically allow you to designate your own “tags” or keywords for each URL you save, making it easy to find all the sites in various categories. You can also comment on them and share your comments and list of bookmarks with others — the social aspect. Because of this ease-of-use and ability to learn from others, social bookmarking websites are quite popular.
In brief, social bookmarking can impact your Internet marketing in three ways:
1. Getting featured on the front page of a bookmarking site
2. Being found by fellow bookmarkers
3. Increasing links to your site from public bookmark pages
While deliberate viral or link-baiting campaigns and websites may succeed in getting featured on a bookmarking site resulting in lots of short-term traffic, the second and third impacts are much more achievable for small businesses. Since bookmarkers (also called “taggers”) can share their bookmarks publicly, other users of that bookmarking service are alerted to popular sites that they might not have been aware of, bringing direct traffic through those links.
Perhaps the biggest potential source of traffic is through higher search engine rankings resulting from links to your site that are spidered on the public bookmark pages of the various social bookmarking sites. What if you just put links to your webpages on two dozen or more social bookmarking sites in order to increase your PageRank? Frankly, that may get you into serious trouble, since both the bookmarking site administrators and the search engines have ways to spot those trying to manipulate the system. In addition, not all sites are good candidates for social bookmarking and not all social bookmarking sites pass PageRank to your site.
The best way to get your site bookmarked is to encourage site visitors and e-mail newsletter subscribers to bookmark the site by making it easy. There are several relatively easy ways to display linked bookmarking icons on your webpages, such as the free service I’m using, AddThis.com.
For certain kinds of businesses, I believe that social bookmarking can, over time, provide a significant boost to website traffic. It’s certainly worth looking into further.
by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, Editor-in-Chief, Web Marketing Today
Source: Web Marketing Today
