Social bookmarking is the electronic version of leaving a breadcrumb trail. After all, you can have a great product, but without enough traffic, it’s just another nice site. Even if you have a faithful marketing list, you constantly want to reach new online viewers.
The options for connecting with social bookmarkers are exploding. That’s why you need to surf around and see what’s out there, then set up a series of “regular” social bookmarking accounts to use.
StumbleUpon is one of the leading social bookmarking sites that’s both easy to use and powerful. Once you create an account, you can add the toolbar interface. Then all you do is click the Thumbs Up icon to recommend a site. You can do this for your own sites, or ask your friends to submit a Thumbs Up rating for you. Besides the rating, you can add comments about the site.
Can you Digg it? That’s not just a line from a 70s movie – it’s a widely used social bookmarking site. Digg functions much like Stumble Upon with raters given the chance push the ratings of a site to the front page. Making it to the front page of Digg gets your information in front of thousands of viewers and it helps traffic flood in to read your newsworthy submission.
Clipmarks describes itself as “scissors for web pages.” As with other social bookmarking sites, you can submit items that are sent to the web – including to Facebook or to an iPhone. As a one stop service and huge time saver, sign up with OnlyWire.
You begin by installing a plugin for your browers, and then you only need a single click to submit your item to multiple sites. To make this work, you still need to sign up at bookmarking sites that you plan to use. After that, you can use OnlyWire to handle the multiple submissions.
Make sure your site viewers know how to rate your site. You can’t reward or bribe them for bookmarking your site. That’s the social bookmarking version of stuffing the ballot box at voting time.
You can put links to the bookmarking sites on your sites as a gentle reminder. And don’t be shy about submitting your new information to the networks yourself – just make sure you also submit other sites so that you don’t appear spammy. Let people know what you’ve got and where to find your site and they’ll share that information with others.