Using social bookmarking for blog traffic

Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 12:57 pm

This is the continuation of the series on blog traffic. I was using the 5 comment rule here and stopped it because of a lack of comments but comments have picked up considerably so I have decided to continue the series.

First a bit about what social bookmarking is. There are hundreds of sites out there that allow you to bookmark your posts. Digg, Stumble, Propellor are a few of the bigger ones.

Here is a definition from Wikipedia

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.

In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks.

Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.

As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features.[1]

So just like the bookmarks you keep on your browser to be able to return to at your leisure social bookmarks are similar except that others can see your bookmarks and rate them accordingly.

Here is the key though. You need to bookmark regularly and not just your sites. If you find a quality post let others know about it.

If you are sharing lots of posts and your quality is good on what you save others are more likely to pay attention to what you are saving. If all you save are your sites you will soon get branded as a spammer and in some cases may lose your account with that service.

So like most things in the Web 2.0 world the key is to be participating in the community. Trying to game the system may work short term but usually comes back to bite you.

That being said here are a few things you can do that will be helpful both to you and to the community. If you are commenting on other blogs and participating in the conversation make sure that you are bookmarking them.

This helps both the blog owner and you. More traffic for them is likely to see more people follow through to your blog. This is especially true if you are adding to the conversation and not trying to spam them.

So start bookmarking regularly and watch the traffic increase.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold