Social Bookmarking - Promoting your Content
by Warren
(NY)
Your bookmarks are saved online and tagged/categorized with keywords. Once created, bookmarks can be sorted and/or viewed by keyword/category.
Any bookmarks that are designated “public” are available for everyone to see. This is extremely useful for those of us with lists that have become unwieldy.
Another plus to online bookmarking is that it can be accessed from any computer that has an internet connection.
How does bookmarking help your website?
One of the measures utilized by the search engines to ascertain a site’s relevance and quality is the number of user bookmarks to it. Sites containing multiple bookmarks across multiple sites and multiple users are considered much more of an authority site than those with only several bookmarks by the same user.
On Digg and Reddit, the more votes a page has received, the more useful its information is considered.
Here are just a few of the top social bookmarking websites:
Digg - http://digg.com
Reddit - http://www.reddit.com
StumbleUpon - http://www.stumbleupon.com
Delicious - http://www.delicious.com
Mixx - http://www.mixx.com
Folkd - http://www.folkd.com
Promoting your website
One way of promoting your website involves setting up RSS feeds for the tags or categories that you have subscribed to.
You begin by creating your account, then bookmarking things that are useful, things that you find interesting in your area of expertise. A selection of relevant only information helps create a useful feed. Once done, begin adding information from your own website. Consider sharing your blogs, links to resources, other site info, etc. Remember, the key is useful information.
The beauty of this strategy is that your links/bookmarks (including those to your own sites) become available to others. Your bookmarks can now be copied and saved by others. By promoting and submitting your bookmark collection/RSS feeds to feed directories and the search engines, you are able to reach a wider audience.
Always be careful not to spruce up your feed with too much marketing, sales and or related self promotional information. You don’t want people dropping the subscription to your feed due to an aggressive marketing campaign. Such a move could ruin your reputation and get you labeled as a spammer. This would not be good. Your credibility would be seriously damaged.
Being aggressive with your feeds is acceptable but you want to make sure that the interests of your subscribers are taken into consideration first.
By providing a useful feed and or service to others while promoting your content, you are afforded a little leeway in becoming more aggressive with your promotional campaigns. Just remember, others will be making a decision on whether your information is useful or just simply spam. Be mindful of this and your credibility. You always want to provide information that is both useful and relevant. Your subscribers will love you and so will the search engines.
Let’s start on your social bookmarking strategy today.
