Social Bookmarking

Online Social Bookmarking

Introduction to Social Bookmarking
Smart webmasters know the value of driving targeted traffic to their websites. The average site owner spends 80% of the time building their site and 20% promoting it. The successful webmaster is the reverse. He spend 20% of his time building the site and 80% promoting it.

And with much of that traffic, they convert into sales. If there is a new way of directing traffic to your site, it has to be social bookmarking. If you know what bookmarking is, then explaining social bookmarking to you is a piece of cake.

Back in the early days, we bookmark our favorite sites and pages on good old internet explorer. But these days, with the advent of web 2.0, social bookmarking has come into play. What essentially happens is that your bookmarks are made public and others can also find out what you like. If they share your point of view, they will also bookmark the webpage. By doing so, the most popular sites and pages will be heavily social-bookmarked.

Social bookmarking is simply the new wave of driving targeted traffic by storing, organizing, searching and managing bookmarks online. These bookmarks are generally public but can also be saved privately (if the user so chooses to), shared with a group or only shared within certain networks. In essense, the most popular bookmarks are those that have mass appeal because they are useful, interesting, funny and has value. The 20 largest and most popular social bookmarking sites are listed below.

Tips and Tricks For Social Bookmarking:

1) Make sure you bookmark the webpages that you want to drive traffic to. This can only help your cause in getting more targeted traffic.

2) Share with others valuable webpages and websites you have found by bookmarking them. If these websites happen to have links back to your website, even better!

3) Update your site frequent enough and bookmark. These will bring in new streams of traffic. Use social bookmarking services and tools to help ya.

4) Not many people know this but you can also bookmark files like mp3, videos and reports.

5) If you believe in karma, then be sure to not be greedy and selfish. Share with others great content besides your very own. No one likes leechers. By sharing with others your external bookmarks, you're also allowing yourself to have others bookmark your content too.

6) If you like an indirect approach, you can also bookmark sites that link to your primary website.

7) Social Bookmarking works because it is viral and is the way to go because people do share interesting and valuable sites.

8) Different social bookmarking sites have different sets of crowds. Understanding what they like is a key to your success. Some communities like tech related sites. Others like video and humor. I mention this in my Digg guide. Feel free to grab a copy from the digg page.

9) Many Social Bookmarking services and tools exist to make it easier for the public. You can try those if you like.

Mass Bookmarking Portals:

1) SocialPoster

2) OnlyWire

3) SocialMarker

Top 20 Social Bookmarking Sites (Correct as of March 12th 2008 / Source: QuantCast):

Ranked #1-#10	Ranked #11-#20
1) Digg (Actual Site) : 8 / : 161	11) Bloglines : 8 / : 1204
2) Technorati : 8 / : 463	12) Newsvine : 7 / : 6706
3) Del.icio.us : 8 / : 475	13) BlinkList : 7 / : 6104
4) Propeller : 7 / : 1834	14) Netvouz : 6 / : 19357
5) StumbleUpon (Actual Site) : 8 / : 343	15) ClipMarks : 6 / : 9740
6) Reddit : 8 / : 1160	16) Furl.net : 8 / : 6275
7) Fark : 4 / : 2788	17) Mister Wong : 7 / : 3385
8) MyBlogLog : 7 / : 961	18) Dzone : 6 / : 7469
9) SlashDot : 9 / : 1366	19) Ma.gnolia : 4 / : 12241
10) Kaboodle : 6 / : 5505	20) TailRank : 6 / : 48276