Bookmarking of a different kind

Welcome to the third Marketing Monday post for August. This week’s post is about using social media bookmarking. Social media bookmarking and networking using social media go hand in hand – it enables people to find your website and then share it with others, gaining backlinks in the process.

To get started, the first step it register with the social bookmarking website of your choice. Here, you can store your bookmarks, create tags for them, and decide whether your list will be public or private.

Once you’ve started using social bookmarking, it’s important to notify it of any updates to your site or blog. If you’re using Wordpress, the easiest way to do this is with a ‘ping’. This notifies the search engine or site that you’ve made a change, and it will come and look for your update.

So, which site to chose? Listed below are some of the more popular sites.

Digg.com

A very popular social news site. Getting onto the front page of digg.com can potentially drive up to 100,000 visitors to your site, plus give you hundreds of backlinks.

Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us (yes, that is the domain name – or just use delicious.com), is not just a social bookmarking site, but also gives you access to links others have tagged as favourites. This can help show you the type of content people are searching for, and how well your site matches this. When adding your site,  use multiple tags to give your site the best chance of being viewed.

StumbleUpon.com

StumpleUpon.com uses a toolbar to view pages that are voted into categories you subscribe to. Unlike the other sites, popularity matters less here. StumbleUpon uses a recommendation system based on your category preferences.

Combined with good social networking, chosing and maintaining a social bookmarking account or two can greatly increase the traffic and benefits your business recieves from social media.