Don’t WAIT Any Longer Promote Your Favorites with Social Bookmarking

If you haven’t tried it yet, now is the time. Almost every internet surfer uses bookmarks or favorites to keep tract of the websites they find most useful and would like to revisit. It’s easy, fast and works relatively effectively, but not without limitations

Limitations of conventional bookmaking.

1. Difficult to browse bookmarks on different computer systems
3. No quick way to share or compare your bookmarks with other users

Have you ever wondered what websites other users are actually bookmarking? You can browse the search engines, but they’ll give you a list of the most “relevant” sites according to whatever keywords you typed in, but that won’t necessarily be the greatest or most “popular” destination.

Social Bookmaking allows you to

1. Easily access your bookmarks from any internet connected computer
3. See how many other people have bookmarked the same sites as you
5. Look at popular sites for any chosen keyword tag
7. Browse categories of bookmarked sites
9. Democratically promote the sites you think are the best (the sites with the most bookmarks receive a lot of traffic.)

Q. All that sounds nice but is it catching on?

Absolutely. http://del.icio.us/ the largest social networking site is currently estimated by Alexa to be the 497 most visited website on the Internet and I would definitely expect that number to rise.

The idea of people choosing their favorite sites and everyone having access to that information is very powerful. Don’t expect it to go away. As people become more comfortable and the user base grows, I would expect the social bookmarking sites to start becoming an initial search destination, in some ways more valuable then the search engines, because it’s by definition human edited, although with every new technology there is always a way to artificially manipulate it.

I haven’t run into any spam, but when the traffic levels get higher and the “pay off’ for spammers increases, I would expect spam and artificial manipulation strategies to start showing up.

What do I have to do?

It’s very simply, infact it’s too simply. It should have a few more steps.. I’m kidding of course. If you following the following 4 steps you’ll be using social bookmarking in 3 minutes.

Now, there are A LOT of social bookmarking sites out there, but only one extremely popular one and that is http://del.icio.us/ I’m going to test out some of the other services and I’ll be reporting back my findings in this blog, but for now and if it’s your first time start with the biggest and most popular.

Who wants to have multiple bookmaking sites? For SEO reasons it would be a good idea, but I’ll get into that later on.

How to join del.icio.us/ and start using social bookmarking:

1. Open up a new browser window and go to: http://del.icio.us/
3. Click register in the upper right hand corner
5. Fill out info (note username is used in your bookmarking page so pick something that will work well for promotion, I personally always use solomonrothman, because I purposely don’t want to be anonymous, keywords might be a good idea if your primary goal is SEO)
7. Click register and install browser buttons (very fast and simple)

Optional things to do next

1. Log in to your account and click on profile. You can add a link with a title of your choice to your bookmarks page. This option is turned off by default, make sure you add this.

1. BOOKMARK your own website. It will help other people find out about them and direct traffic to them. Have you friends bookmark them too. The more bookmarks you get the higher your sites will appear in the searches from del.icio.us/

Getting the most out of Tags

1. Every time you book mark a site you’re brought to a page with a title and an area where you type in tags to describe what the page is about. USE LOTS OF TAGS, The more the better, but please don’t spam them. Each tag is a keyword that will help other users find that site.

SEO / Internet Marketing Hint

Add a bookmark this on Del.icio.us button on your website and if you’re running a blog, look for a del.icio.us bookmark plugin. The more bookmarks, the more traffic you’ll recieve.