Social bookmarking is similar to social networking except the emphasis is on sharing sites of interest rather than networking. The boundaries between social bookmarking and social networking is starting to blur as bookmarking sites introduce networking features, and vice versa.
Some of the big social bookmarking sites are:
- StumbleUpon.com
- Digg.com
- Del.icio.us
- And so on
These are all sites where you share sites of interest and other people will vote on them and visit them.
The emphasis is on “sites of interest” with these sites. If you bookmark a sales letter then it’s not going to do very well as most people will not find this very interesting. Instead, what you need to do is bookmark a site of interest which then leads to the sales letter, e.g. a Squidoo lens, a Hubpage, your own website, etc.
Typically anything that does well on the big social bookmarking sites tends to be slightly (or very) controversial (but not offensive to the majority) and topical in some way, i.e. related to the news of the day.
This means that if you want your sites to do well within social bookmarking sites then you need to give your information a spin that makes it topical and challenge the status quo or provide information where people say, “Well, I didn’t know that!”.
Social bookmarking works by people voting / Digg’ing or whatever your article which means it appears more often towards the top of the social bookmarking list and will get you much more traffic. You can get thousands of visitors a day from a well written article on somewhere like Digg or Stumbleupon.
However, you don’t need to worry massively about this because no matter where your site sits in the social bookmarking site it will still be bookmarked by the search engines and help your rankings.
Though please be aware that some of the social bookmarking sites allows people to bury news / sites they don’t like, which will mean they don’t appear in the listings and the search engines may not find them.
I would strongly recommend outsourcing social bookmarking to a third party. If you visit forums.digitalpoint.com then you can find someone who will do social bookmarking for you for just a few dollars.
Social bookmarking is a very effective way to help give you a boost in the search engines, and if done properly, can bring you thousands of people to your website in a day.