I’ve been getting really excited lately about the whole social bookmarking trend in internet marketing. This is because I’m on a traffic kick, testing out new things to bring my website more traffic – something all webmasters want to do.

Social bookmarking is one of the top techniques that you can use to promote your website and build more traffic. If you’re not involved, it’s time to get with the program!

Social bookmarking started for me when I joined a few of the top social bookmarking sites. You may think this is all you need to do to get involved, but trust me – there is more to social bookmarking than simply joining the social bookmarking circles!

The first thing to do is visit a few of the top social bookmarking sites: Digg, del.ici.ous, Furl, and Yahoo, just for example. You can do a Google search for these to find them if you’ve never been there before.

Then, sign up for a free account with each of these. When signing up for an account, you will have the opportunity to select buttons that you can add to the end of each of your blog posts. This will allow readers of your blog to “Digg” your post over at the Digg social bookmarking site.

When someone clicks on your Digg button, it will bring them to the Digg site, where they would login with their account username and password. The blog post or article would then appear as a URL, and the person who clicked “Digg” will have the opportunity to post a comment about your post.

This can do nothing but good things for your website. If everyone gives your post a Digg, think of all the links in Digg you will have pointing back to your site. This will certainly increase your traffic when someone goes onto Digg looking for a post on a topic that interests them.

This is where I initially went wrong in my social bookmarking efforts. You don’t want to stop after just joining these social bookmarking sites and leaving a button on your blog posts for everyone else to find and click. You want to get actively involved in the social bookmarking process by becoming an active member of these sites.

What I mean by being “active” is that you want to visit these sites, and find topics of interest to you, or topics that relate to your online business. Once you find other posts on your topic of interest, then you have the opportunity to bookmark, or “favourite” those posts, and add a comment.

Doing this can really increase your traffic, as evidenced by my own increasing website stats just by doing this one thing alone. If you “favourite” other people’s sites and they “favourite” your site and you each comment on other’s posts, then you will soon have a network of links pointing back to your site.

This important piece of the social bookmarking puzzle is something I didn’t even realize myself until I got involved with my latest social bookmarking site called “Squidoo”. Apparently, Google just loves Squidoo at the moment, so I jumped on the bandwagon along with others I know joining the site.

The great thing about Squidoo and sites like MySpace is that you can create a “lens” which is just like a mini web page, or landing page that gives visitors to that lens a quick overview of what you have to offer. This will hopefully entice them to click your links and bring you more traffic.

I’ve made darn sure this time that after creating my lens I did not just leave it at that. I have visited other lenses on my topic of interest, added those lenses to my “favourites” list, and sent comments to others in hopes that others will visit my links as well. So far, this has increased my traffic very quickly and I may even reach a personal goal thanks to this technique alone!

Next, I am going to try creating more than one lens and link one to the other, which will hopefully entice visitors to read one of my lenses, and then click on to the other, increasing my traffic even more!

The thing to watch out for when using social bookmarking sites is that you don’t want to be a spammer who is out there just to get your links seen and clicked. As with anything in internet marketing, like forum posts, no one likes someone who is just there to advertise themselves. You want to offer valuable information, and make a valuable contribution by offering good advice, and great content.



By: Liane Bate

One of the best ways to succeed in your internet marketing business is to use social bookmarking. I have accounts on Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Classmates,Tagged and ZenZuu. This strategy will be of great help in terms of getting targeted audience, generating more traffic to your website and achieving higher ranking in search engines. When you achieve these, you can be sure to earn more profits.

Social bookmarking is free to use and enables web users to save links to their favorite web pages that they want to visit again and share with other people. Additionally, they can vote, comment and discuss about the sites or blogs and then submit the site and get feed backs from other users. If the users like your site, there’s a chance they will visit it again to obtain information and other updates.

New features have actually been added to these types of sites. These include ratings, comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing bookmarks, web annotation as well as groups or other social network features. Although these bookmarks are public, they can be saved privately and shared only with specific groups of people or networks. People with access to these bookmarks can view them in various ways – by category or tags, chronologically or through a search engine.

Social bookmarking provides several benefits to promote your business. Firstly, web users can easily upload and save their preferred websites for other users to view. This alone is an effective way to improve your site’s traffic. Users are always clicking on banners out of curiosity. I wouldn’t be into Internet Marketing today if I hadn’t clicked on an add promoting MLM.

Users can also organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of using the traditional system of folders. Tag refers to a keyword that describes a particular site and category. By using the appropriate bookmarking tags, search engines will be able to look for your content especially when a user searches for information within your category.

What you can do then is to bookmark your own site and get a suitable tag. Once you obtain the right tag on the social bookmarking site, other people will know about your site and will visit it eventually. So this only means that when you have the proper tag, you drive more traffic to your site.

Another big advantage is for your site to be visited by search engines and indexed. A new website has a chance of being visited by search engine robots within a day of submission to social bookmarking sites. Learning the basics of SEO Optimization is important in driving traffic to your site.

Personal branding is a great benefit as well. In other words, by using social bookmarking sites, you are given the ability to develop your own page on their site. With this page, you can list all your web pages, post links to your websites and publish content on any field of interest. This then allows you to establish yourself as an authority in your own niche.

Many people have been spending money just to ensure a high page rank in search engine results but with social bookmarking, there’s no need for that as it provides a one-way link to promote your site to other web users at no cost at all. This should, however, be coupled with credibility and a good reputation so that people will learn to trust you and your business. People ultimately do not buy into your product because it solely benefits them. They largely buy into it because of you.



By: Hervin Balfour