What is Social Bookmarking?

If you haven't yet added social bookmarking to your arsenal of marketing tools, you've been willfully giving away money to your competitors. Why? It's simple: using social bookmarking is one of the easiest and fastest ways to drive traffic to your site.

However, in order to use social bookmarking successfully, you must have a good handle on the basics; and you must be willing to put in a sufficient amount of time to make it work. Even though it is relatively, it will take some patience to make it work. I'll explain why later.

Before you do anything else, you will want to create a blog. If you don't already have a blog, you can create one through Blogger; or, if your site's control panel has Fantastico, you can create a WordPress blog by installing the plugin.

Once you've setup your blog, you will want to start looking for some good categories for your blog entries. When you add a blog entry to a category on your blog, you will "tag" it with that a keyword that matches the blog entry. You can find a good list of categories by going to social bookmarking sites, such as Technorati, and jotting down keywords that are relevant to your site and that fall on the top 100 list for your given category.

Once you have created your list of categories and have added it to your blog, it's time to start creating some high-quality content. This is where you will have to be patient - or at least moreso than you generally are when you create content.

Why do you have to be patient? Because you cannot use social bookmarking effectively without creating high-quality, viral content. When you submit your blog entry to social bookmarking sites, it will immediately be ranked #1 for that particular tag; however, from there, it's positioning will depend on the amount of votes it receives from visitors. In order to get more traffic, people have to see your entry as noteworthy.

How can you ensure that your entry is noteworthy? You can use screencaptures and videos; and include relevant, high-quality content. Additionally, if you can write something that is funny, absurd, or unusually insightful, you will have a far greater chance of getting your entry seen and bumped.

Now, once you finish creating and tagging your content, you will want to submit it to various social bookmarking sites. Luckily, this nowhere near as annoying as submitting articles to directories. All you have to do is "ping" your entries by submitting your blog's URL to a single site. You can do this at a place like PingGoat or Ping-O-Matic. All you have to do is select the sites you want to ping (by checking off boxes) and submit your URL. The script will handle the rest.

And there you have it: a brief summary of how to use social bookmarking to your advantage. All you have to do is come up with great content, tag it (i.e. place it in categories), and then submit it to social bookmarking sites by pinging.