Social bookmarking is a very powerful strategy to help drive free traffic to your website, particularly when your Internet business is brand new or has been laying dormant for quite sometime. Combine this strategy with other traffic generation tactic discussed about at Spreading The Word: Turbocharge Your Traffic and this will definitely boost your website on search engines.

What Is Social Bookmarking?
Rather than redefine this term, here is a definition taken directly from Wikipedia:

“Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share.

These bookmarks are usually public, but depending on the service’s features, may be saved privately, shared only with specific people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, via a search engine, or even randomly.”

How You Can Use Social Bookmarking To Get More Free Traffic?
For your website to rank top positions on search engines you need a high amount of incoming links with the combination of keywords. Social bookmarking can help you achieve more incoming links very easily. When you submit to multiple social bookmarking sites it will automatically create incoming links to your website. This give you more results of your website on search engines.

Let’s take for example, I submit the following post Farming Your Crop Of Clients to 20 social bookmarking sites. This post can show up as 20 “unique” results on the search engines. Therefore, instead ranking only once on a search engine, it can be ranked 20 times. As you can see, it is 20 times more effective and gives you a higher chance for your website to be found.

I previously mentioned for social bookmarking to work properly, the combination of incoming links and keywords are needed. It boils down to selecting the proper keywords that are targeted to your article or product. The more targeted your keyword phrases are the higher chances that your website will be ranked higher. For example, if you have a highly competitive product like the “Apple iPod”, then you will need choose more specific keywords including model numbers and specifications like the “iPod Nano 4GB Black”. This way it will help you capture those keywords and help you rank higher.

Use SocialMarker.com To Leverage Your Social Bookmarking Promotions
So how do submit to 20+ social bookmarking sites as I mentioned above? It’s easier than you think, and you won’t have to sit there clicking through hundreds of social bookmarking sites as well. There is a website called SocialMarker.com which will help you submit to over 20 social bookmarking sites. When you visit this site, you will see a list of the top Social Bookmarking sites available such as propeller.com, technorati.com, twitter.com, and so forth.

The idea is to submit an article or blog post you wish to rank high in the search engines to as many of the social bookmarking sites as possible. If you want your whole website to rank well then you will need to submit as many articles or posts to the social bookmarking sites.

Social Bookmarking “How To Tips”
Search engines are very intelligent to pick up on automated promotions and we need to make our social bookmarking promotions seem natural. Here are some handy tips to help you:

1. Run your social bookmarking promotions slowly over time. Send a few today, a few next week and a few next month.
2. Register multiple accounts for each of the social bookmarking sites. Start out with at least 10 unique accounts
   • use different usernames within one social bookmarking site
   • use free email accounts from Yahoo, Gmail, MSN to open up your accounts
   • repeat the process with the 20+ social bookmarking sites (should take no more than 15 minutes for each registration)
   • use roboform.com to remember all your passwords.
3. Rotate the accounts you use with social bookmarking sites for each post you submit.
4. Add new social bookmarking accounts to your promotions on a regular basis.
5. Include other people’s articles and post within your social bookmarking promotion. This shows randomness within your promotions.
6. Do not social bookmark every single post you write as it will be considered spam, so please social bookmark wisely.

Just like any type of traffic generation strategy, you will need to allocate time to work the process. Focus on a few strategies, test them and monitor the process. Give it at least a month to see the results and continue the process if it works for you. Remember don’t spend all day on this one process as social bookmarking should only be used to help “jumpstart” your traffic from search engines.

Tyrone Shum
Social Bookmarker