Social bookmarking is a method for internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them (wikipedia)
For those of you who aren’t familiar with social bookmarking, it’s basically like bookmarking a website in your browser, only it can be viewed by anyone on the net, making it “social.” You can of course specify privacy levels only allowing certain groups or networks to to view your bookmarks.
Why participate in social bookmarking?
Well, if you’re trying to market your ebook or other digital products, you need to start building traffic on your website. You can submit every post and page from your website or blog to social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Reddit, Digg, etc thus creating an all important backlink to your site. These backlinks will help drive targeted traffic to your site, and improve your search engine ranking.
It’s really pretty simple. All you have to do is go to a social bookmarking site, enter the url,title, summary, and tags about a post or page and voila, you have created a new social bookmark and back link to your site. Now repeat for all the social bookmarking sites you can find!
Ok, I know this sounds really time consuming. Truthfully, it is. Luckily there are some online services and software that allow you to enter all the information for a page or post once and blast it to all or most social bookmarking sites, saving you tons of time.
I’ve used the online service Onlywire to promote some blogs. They’ll let you use the service for free if you add the Onlywire button to your blog or webiste (allowing visitors to your site to bookmark your pages or posts). You can also pay for the service if you don’t want to use their button. I honestly found the Onlywire system a bit tedious, but I read some other reviews where people had like it.
I’ve recently started using the offline software, Social Bookmarking Demon, by Edwinsoft. It was about $150, but I think in the long run it’s worth it. Really easy to use, quick, and efficient. It has a lot of other features as well that can pretty much put your social bookmarking campaign on autopilot. Well worth the money in my opinion.
There’s a plethora of other sites and software that offer similar services as the aforementioned. If you have had any good or bad experiences feel free to leave a comment.
