Social bookmarking sites allow people to easily share their favorite articles and blog posts with others. Needless to say, these sites can be a source of great free advertising for those who know how to use them correctly.
Below is an overview of some of the best known social bookmarking sites that you will want to take advantage of to get a ton of traffic for your business:
1. Twitter - Twitter is perhaps the most famous social bookmarking site. It allows a person to use up to 140 characters for a post. A person can link to a video, audio, article, blog post, or any other URL.
2. Pinterest - Pinterest is becoming one of the world’s most popular photo sharing sites. The site has just recently allowed business entities to set up a corporate account instead of just allowing personal users. It is a good way to share photos and graphics related to one’s blog topic and gets millions of unique users a month.
3. Reddit - Reddit gets two million unique visits a day. It allows users to save bookmark links and explore related links; thus permitting users to easily see information that would not necessarily appear on Google’s first page of search engine results.
4. StumbleUpon - StumbleUpon gets ten million visits a month. It allows a user to display his or her bookmarks and easily search for related content.
5. Buzzfeed - Buzzfeed lets a person not only share links to posts, but also photos and videos. It gets over three million visits a month and can be a very good source of traffic.
6. Delicious - Delicious gets approximately 600,000 visits a month. While it is smaller than the sites mentioned above, it is good nonetheless, because a large audience uses it and it doesn’t have all the competition you see on the other large sites.
7. Digg - Digg gets about five million unique visitors a month. It allows users to save their bookmarks and then search for other bookmarks that offer related information.
8. Tweetmeme - Tweetmeme is a relatively new application. It sorts through popular, relevant tweets and retweets them. The site gets anywhere from 700,000 to 2.4 million visits a month and is ideal for those who want traffic from Twitter’s web site.
9. Slashdot - Slashdot gets over 200,000 users a month. It allows a user to easily save bookmarks and publish good content.
10. Fark - Fark gets over 400,000 users a month. It is an easy to use social bookmarking service that enables a person to submit links quickly and easily.
If you want to get massive free traffic from social bookmarking services, then below are seven steps you can follow for your business. While each bookmarking service is different, these tips apply no matter which service or services a person intends to use.
Step 1 – Provide Fresh, Relevant, Good Quality Content
Your content should be interesting, helpful to users, and be written using proper grammar and spelling. The ideas and concepts presented in the article must also be current. Things that would be considered old news do not tend to perform as well on social bookmarking sites.
Step 2 – Write Great Headlines
Most people are busy and do not have the time to read articles that look “just a little bit interesting.” The headline has to grab a person and make them want to find out what the article says. Headlines related to curiosity, that ask a question, or cover “how to…” or “Three/Ten/Five best…” are often good attention grabbers.
Step 3 – Write a Catchy Article Description
Bookmarking sites require a person to write a short description. This description should be catchy and make a person want to find out more. It should also contain the main keyword that a person is trying to get traffic for.
Step 4 – Make the Opening Paragraph Interesting
Getting a person to start reading an article is good, but the end goal is to entice a person to read the entire article. Creating a good opening paragraph does this. The paragraph should tell what the article is about without providing all the information given in the article itself.
Step 5 – Assign the Right Tags and Categories to Your Article
Bookmarking services such as Pinterest, Reddit, and StumbleUpon require a person to tag and categorize the article, photo, or blog post. It is important to add relevant categories and tags, based upon what the article is actually about.
Content is like hot chocolate – it is best piping hot. Most people want to read content when it is brand new. For this reason, it is best to post the content at the time of day when people are online.
Step 7 – Get Help from Friends and Other Social Bookmarkers
Try to get positive votes on the article, photo, or post as soon as possible. Ask friends, relatives, or even other social bookmarkers for a positive vote in the first few hours after posting the content. Quick favorable votes help to boost the article’s status, making it easier to find and more likely to generate traffic.
Getting traffic from social bookmarking sites takes effort and lots of hard work. However, these sites can be an excellent source of traffic generation for your business. Using any one of these sites is free and allows a person to reach tens of millions of people in a targeted way. Those who are serious about making money online will want to start using at least a few of these sites to generate quality traffic to your web site or blog.
If you really enjoy social media and want to learn how you can get paid to play around on social media sites for other businesses, then check this out.
*Originally published as Issue # 163 on February 8, 2013
