How to Use Social Bookmarking for Improving the Visibility of Your Website
Recent years have seen an immense boost in the popularity of social networking sites. Nearly everybody has an account on one or more social sites, which gives these sites incredible marketing potential and renders them among the most efficient tools in online marketing campaigns that aim at improving a site’s page ranking.
What is a Social Bookmarking Site and why is it useful for Companies?
The internet facilitates communication and the exchange of information among the users, and this feature has not only made its way into our day to day communication with our peers, but it has recently come to shape the way we store information as well, in the form of social bookmarking websites.
Bookmarking used to mean simply a way to save an URL of a site you found interesting or helpful for later use. Social bookmarking has added the community aspect to saving and storing URLs, transforming social bookmarking sites into something similar to search engines. More and more people turn to these sites for help and information, and their popularity is partly due to the fact that information is available in a pre-organized and pre-categorized form, so you don’t need to browse through long results pages to find what you want – you can use the information that others have already found.
If you create an account for yourself on one of the leading social bookmarking sites, you can now not only store and organize all your favorite links in the storage space provided to you with your account, but you can also share them with other users who have the same interests as you.
Social bookmarking sites are useful and efficient sources of backlinks as well, having obvious implications for online advertising. Social bookmarking activities can increase website traffic, help with branding efforts, and they can create a more direct and more personal relationship between companies and their target groups. If you as a company are able to establish contact with your customers by sharing your bookmarks and helping them solve the niche-related problems they may encounter, you can also make your name known as one denoting a helpful and knowledgeable expert in your industry.
How Social Bookmarking Works
First of all you need to create an account for the company you are promoting on one or more social bookmarking sites. Diversifying your accounts is a good idea, because you should test the different bookmarking sites to see the preferences of your target audience. Just like in the case of other online marketing methods, the choice of the right media is very important for success – if you sell cosmetics for a living, it would be pointless to set up an account on a bookmarking site used mainly by people interested in technology and engineering.
You will also need to create a complete profile and include the URL that links to your company website, and you should also download all the buttons and widgets from the bookmarking site and add them to your site to make relating to your profile easier for your potential customers.
Once you have set up your account, you can start bookmarking. You can organize your contents into lists and categories, then you can continue by sharing your bookmarks and adding comments or reviews relating to products and the links shared by other users.
This is the phase when you can integrate your social bookmarking efforts into your online media campaign: you can bookmark links to all the contents you have published on other websites and share them with the other members of your bookmarking community, driving traffic towards your content and towards your money page, too.
If you have made article marketing part of your online media campaign and you submit articles to directories on a regular basis, you can share the links towards your articles and popularize them, multiplying the efficiency of your article link building efforts. If you use guest blogging and you submit articles to blogs, you can also refer to them and share them with your social bookmarking community.
You can also integrate your press releases into your bookmarking campaign – these articles need to contain interesting and newsworthy information, so they are especially suitable for establishing you as a well-informed member of the community.
Do It Yourself or Hire Professionals
As you see, doing social bookmarking is all about presence. It is not particularly difficult and it does not require any technical knowledge, but it can be a very time and energy-consuming activity. However, the enhanced efficiency of an online media campaign that includes social bookmarking as a tool makes the effort worth considering and there are numerous companies that specialize in bookmarking for site promotion.
Social bookmarking can help you get valuable, organic traffic to your website, it will improve the diversity of your backlinks and it will integrate your other online marketing tools as well, improving your community’s awareness of your products and services, so make sure you include this great device into your online marketing mix.
