Social Bookmarking Strategies

Social bookmarking can be a productive thing for internet marketers. By social bookmarking, you can do a lot of good things for your online business. There are dozens of social booking sites out there, but which ones are the best to use and how do you use them effectively?

What does bookmarking do for an internet marketer? It can help drive traffic to your sites; it can help you with your search engine rankings. It can also help you with relationship building and branding. If people are listening to you on social bookmarking sites, chances are that they could become customers. And, due to the viral nature of they may bookmark your bookmarks and this could help you to recruit additional customers as well.

Using the right social bookmarking strategies and using the best sites could provide you with winning results.

Social Bookmarking Strategies

Because there are so many different sites for social conversations, the most popular ones and the ones with the most weight in search engines are a good idea. After that, the sites that give you the most volume for your efforts are another good idea. Here’s some  social bookmarking strategies to consider:

1. Join five of the top bookmarking sites and use them daily. Be sure to spend time on more than just bookmarking. Interact with other users as well by commenting on their bookmarks and finding potentially useful users to follow. Many sites allow you to search based on words and phrases that could help you find relevant people to follow and interact with. And, finding a good ratio of self-serving vs. socialising actions is a good idea.

Tip the scales to the less self-promotional side. For some Web 2.0 sites, less self-promotion often equals better results for when you do send out something self-serving on the sites with a high reputation for being social. Being a helpful and supportive community member could bring better results on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, for instance. Sites such as StumbleUpon and Delicious aren’t sites that generally penalize you for being self-promotional, so long as the links you give thumbs up too are truly intriguing to others. By investigating the sites you join, you can figure out how best to utilise them.

2. Join sites that bookmark for you on multiple sites. This way, one bookmark will get sent to other sites and you won’t have to visit half a dozen sites per day in order to get results. Ping.fm and Friendfeed are good examples of this. While it can take time to set up your account initially, because you need to set up and feed in multiple accounts, one link update could go out to many different sites and one bookmark could get seen by many users and get more attention through search engines.

3. Analyse your website traffic reports to see where your traffic is coming from. This way, you can see which sites are paying off and then you can strategise to spend more time on those sites.

4. Bookmark a variety of links. Bookmark your landing page and links within your site and bookmark your blog posts. But you can also bookmark other online activities, such as HubPages, Squidoo Lenses, Ezine articles, press releases, YouTube videos, and other links. Don’t forget to utilise the tools that go along with individual sites, such as profiles, avatar photos, categories, tags, etc. so that each bookmark has a chance to get seen and develops the potential to go viral.

Some people really like StumbleUpon. Some people get great results from Mixx. For some, Twitter works really well. For others, they use a multi-bookmarking site such as Ping.fm or FriendFeed. In order to determine the best social bookmarking sites for you, you’ll want to try a few and see how it pans out.

Look for your competitors and mentors on sites as well and their level and method(s) of participation could be very telling. You may want to schedule in specific time frames each day to do some online socialising as well as some analysing to see what results you’re getting from your social bookmarking strategies. Consistency, being interesting and helpful, and analysing results will help you get the best social bookmarking results possible.