Social Bookmarking for Free Traffic

16 Mar

Posted by admin as Marketing, Traffic Stats, Tutotorial

Building traffic is more than just a small part of web success; it needs to be a constant obsession to make an impact. I am obsessed with new ways to get traffic, especially free traffic. So when I first experienced the power of social bookmarking it was like finding a magic ticket to traffic. Social bookmarking is an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others. Essentially it is a personal knowledge management tool and it is a very power viral tool for marketers.

The popular social bookmarking websites are Digg, Technorati, Furl and del.icio.us. There are other smaller or niche websites like Marktd that is just for marketing bookmarks. They all function similar in that they allow you to post an article, thus exposing it to their users. If people find your article useful they bookmark it or give it a vote. The bookmark enters their personal list and gives the article more weight in search. Getting placed on the first page of these websites is the key to getting huge amounts of targeted, quality traffic.

To take part in the social bookmarking craze you need to have a few tools at your disposal and some knowledge of how it all works. The following is a guide to utilizing this powerful tool:

Set Up Your Blog
It all starts with one very useful tool, a blog. Your blog will be your doorway for traffic and you will use it similar to how journalists use newspapers. Most blog software is free including Blogger and WordPress, but there are others that are more feature-rich that require a small investment. All will function similar in this scenario to allow you to post articles, resources and opinions then refer back to them with a url that you post to the bookmarking websites.

Find Breaking News or Create News
Go out and find news or set up an RSS news reader to search the web looking for breaking news. Post in your blog your opinion of the article or development and then link people to the full story. Otherwise you can make news by announcing something important on your blog.

Be the First to Break It
In your area of expertise it is very much a race to post about hot topics, breaking news or articles that really reach your target effectively. The early bird definitely gets the worm. For example last week I was literally 1 hour behind a person posting about the expansion of Craigslist to 100 more cities, that person ended up with well over 1,000 bookmarks, which translated into many thousands of unique visitors, while I got just 5 for my post. It was essentially the same story; he just beat me to it.

Become a Resource
Post often and find a regular audience. Essentially as people visit your blog they will see you have frequent and interesting news about the industry. They will revisit if you continue to post good stuff. Sometimes this just means posting other peoples articles that have been broken, but you will still be the ultimate resource, which is a powerful thing.

Promote Bookmarking
Each bookmarking website has a tag that can be placed on your blog to promote bookmarking. The tag makes it easy for people to bookmark and helps increase your count, which is essential to good story placement. Creating and placing the tag can be done using plug-ins for your blog software. Most often you will need to modify the template, which requires a little but not a lot of technical expertise. I personally use a plug-in called Sociable for WordPress. For an example of these tags visit:

http://www.craigslist-book.com/the_unofficial_craigslist_book_launches.html

After you complete these important steps watch as traffic comes to you daily as you post articles and as other people reference your posts on their blogs. It is viral and all it takes is one or two very hot stories to establish your blog as a great resource and reach thousand of new visitors

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