Social bookmarking is the practice of posting links to articles and web pages on various “link aggregators” or social bookmarking sites, such as Digg, Stumbleupon, and so on. Social bookmarking sites rise and fall in popularity fairly quickly, but they generally have a few common characteristics:
1. Users can post links that other users can navigate, providing a good way to expose their content.
2. Links go to large listing pages, which are usually very easy to navigate and are usually also divided into a “home page” with the best links of the day and several subsections that help you get exposed in more circles. relevant.
3. Links can generally be “voted on” to determine which links get the longest airtime on the home page of various sections. The more votes your links get, the more traffic they will get.
4. Some sites, like Digg, assign a weight to certain actions and users, so a user who submits more popular links will have a vote that will carry more weight.
5. Most of the users of social bookmarking sites are quite tired when it comes to the Internet and will ignore things that are not interesting, funny or very entertaining. This is not a place for your boring press releases.
6. Most bookmarking sites usually have some kind of “social” element, which allows users to create profiles, have a list of other users’ friends, etc., in the hope that users will share content with each other .
Those are the basics, so let’s take a look at the best way to tackle social bookmarking. I’m going to use Reddit and Digg as my main examples, but keep in mind that Reddit itself requires a great deal of familiarity with your culture before you can submit links that anyone will click on.
Choose your niche
Submitting an article about growing bonsai trees to the main Reddit page will get you nowhere; Maybe you’ll get 30 visitors, none of whom will buy your products. But submitting it to / r / bonsai, even though it only has around 1,100 readers, will probably attract more attention from interested people.
Ironically, submitting to / r / trees will have much less of an effect, because / r / trees is dedicated to growing marijuana. The lesson here is: know your subreddits.
Write an attractive title and use an image.
Standard newspaper headline / ad formats don’t work too well on the internet, because everyone has become immune to them. Instead, you should come up with a clever headline that will interest people enough to know more about what you’re writing about, or at least promise cat images.
Most bookmarking sites include a thumbnail of the page you are linking to or one that you provide. Take the trouble to do this – it generates much higher clicks.
Go ahead and make your links easy to share
Social bookmarking is all about persistence, so if no one clicks on your first link, create another article, create a smarter title, and try again. Put a social bookmarking widget on your website or blog and encourage people to share your articles. If you’ve already submitted them and have accounts, it only takes a second to click a “upvote” or “like” button.
At the very least, having links to all of your articles on half a dozen social bookmarking sites is great for SEO.