Passions That Pay

There is constant buzz about Web 2.0 and social marketing and new terms fly thick and fast. It can be hard to keep up. I have been hearing the term social bookmarking over and over but didn’t feel I properly understood it so I have researched it and wanted to share my findings with my blog readers. If this is well known to you then go have a cup of tea instead.

When we come across a site that we think we may want to return to, we bookmark it - favorites in Internet Explorer and bookmarks in Firefox. Social bookmarking is derived from the same idea but instead of keeping that record on our own computer, we can use a web based system. The advantages of this is we can access our bookmarks from any computer, we can share those bookmarks and the web based systems allow us to better organize our links by having a “tags” section. The tags are words that you feel are relevant to your bookmark.

All pretty simple really.

If you own a website, it is very important to take notice of this new phenomenon. Search engines, especially the big daddy of them all, Google want to provide the most relevant results to its searchers. People do not tend to bookmark poor or irrelevant sites so the search engines will give higher ratings to those sites that are frequently bookmarked. It is hard for even cleverly designed algorithms to truly judge the quality of a site so if there is a system where users are designating sites they like by bookmarking them, the search engine companies are going to take note - and they have. Also more and more visitors are using social bookmarking sites to decide which sites to take a look at. As anyone who has ever been listed on the first page of a major bookmarking site will attest, it can bring in server crashing amounts of traffic.

The top 10 social bookmarking sites are :

1. http://www.digg.com/\

2. http://www.technorati.com/

3. http://del.icio.us/

4. http://www.propeller.com/

5. http://www.stumbleupon.com/

6. http://reddit.com/

7. http://www.fark.com/

8. http://www.mybloglog.com/

9. http://slashdot.org/

10. http://www.kaboodle.com/

For the full list of the top 30 see http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social30.html

If you own a website make sure that you visit all these sites and submit the following (yes they all allow you to submit your own site)

1. Your website
2. Any special pages of your website you want attract traffic to such as sales pages
3. Major blog posts
4. Videos
5. Documents
6. Squidoo lens
7. Sites that link to your own site (increasing their ranking makes their link to you matter more)

Lynn Terry commented recently that she is now being sent more traffic by http://www.stumbleupon.com/ than by Google and her experience is by no means unique.

Add links at the bottom of each page or blogpost so that readers can easily bookmark your page - I use the plug in I love Social Bookmarking to put in the drop down menu at the bottom of this post because I like the clutter free look at it but there are many other alternatives.

I would love to hear about anyones experiences with Social Bookmarking.

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