Today I want to put together a beginner’s guide to social bookmarking, going over the basics you need to know before getting into this aspect of e-commerce. First, a definition: social bookmarking is a way of sharing your own content and that of others with people on a website like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon or delicious. This is done by flagging the content of these websites so that others can read, comment and vote on it.
Social bookmarking is useful for three reasons: because it can improve your business reputation if you have great content, dramatically increase your traffic, and in the few cases where the bookmarking site has a dofollow strategy, you will generate backlinks to your own website that can really help with your search engine rankings. But remember, most of the big social bookmarking sites have a no-tracking policy, which means that Google won’t really count the links from those sites to yours in counting rankings.
Remember that bookmarking sites are not places to dump all of your content. In fact, this is a very bad strategy. First, because not all of your content is newsworthy. You should be able to discern what your best content is and share just that – it will be good for your reputation. Second, because if you only submit your own content and not other people’s, you will rightly be considered a spammer. Visit other sites and also share the great content they have to offer.
And I know this sounds silly, but bookmarking sites are getting tired of ‘bad’ users – spammers and people who don’t understand their rules. Take some time to get to know a site before you start posting, submit news to the correct categories (which is also of interest for your news), and comment and participate like everyone else does. Failure to follow these directions can lead to being excluded from a site, which is easier on social bookmarking websites than any other type of site. Always remember this.
Finally, my advice is that you participate as much as you can in the sites to which you submit your content. Create a community for your niche, engage your users in conversations, and become a giver, not an ad hoarder. In the long run, you will see that this strategy is solid, it does not take a lot of time and it really helps your reputation, which at the same time will help to boost your sales and retain your customers. You just need to keep one thing in mind: don’t be pushy, don’t act like a business owner. Business is for your website and social bookmarking sites are for sharing content and information.
