Driving traffic to your blog with social bookmarking
If you are not social bookmarking, you are missing out on an obvious vehicle to promote your blog. This article offers a five-step process to harness the benefits of social bookmarking.
One of the best ways to promote your blog is through social bookmarking. There are two main reasons for this.
First, social bookmarking drives traffic. People on social bookmarking websites are looking for interesting things to read, vote on and comment on. They want to read your blog. And many of them will be loyal repeat visitors for the very reason that they tend to be hungry, drooling blog readers. We assume, of course, that you post riveting content to your blog on a regular basis.
Second, social bookmarking helps you build better search engine rankings in two ways. One, because the links from social bookmarking websites are fairly valuable, especially if your content gets voted to the home page. Two, because other bloggers who frequent social bookmarking websites will often build on your ideas in their own blog posts and link back to your post.
What social bookmarking websites should you use?
Some of the more important platforms include…
- StumbleUpon
- Digg
- Reddit
- Yahoo Buzz
- Delicious
- Mixx
There are also some worthwhile niche social bookmarking websites…
- BizSugar (for business-related posts)
- Tipd (for finance-related posts)
- Tipbo (for any post with tips in it) – Zoomit Canada
- Sphinn (for SEO-related posts)
- PFbuzz (for finance-related posts)
- MMO Network (for money-making posts)
There are many more, but these are all good. Here are 5 tips to promote your blog posts at these sites.
ONE: Make it easy for your readers.
Your readers are your fans. They want to share your posts. Make it so easy that they have no excuse not to social bookmark your content by including a social bookmarking tool at the end of each post.
TWO: Bookmark your own posts.
Bookmark your own posts. It is a great idea to let or even encourage your readers and friends to submit your posts, but when they don’t, go ahead and do it yourself (Then ask them to please vote for it so that it gets some exposure).
THREE: Participate.
Be active on these social bookmarking websites. What do I mean by active? Well, at very least don’t be a hit-and-run submitter. Once you have submitted your own post, make a point of voting for several others that you like and leave a comment. Regulars on the site will recognize the people who vote for and comment on their submissions…and those who do not. If you repeatedly ignore their submissions, why would they pay attention to yours.
FOUR: Don’t spam.
OK, this seems to be a no-brainer, but too many people miss this. Social bookmarking is for sharing pages that will be of interest to people. Generally, these are informational. Submitting a home page is considered spam at any of the significant social bookmarking websites. So is a product page or any page about your company. News, opinion, strange facts, cute or wild photos – these are all good content. And make sure to stay on-topic; don’t submit a hair replacement article to Tipd or Sphinn, for example. Study what has already made it to the home page on a social bookmarking site, and you will know what will fly there.
FIVE: Make the title sing.
Chances are you’ve already come up with a snappy title for your blog post. If so, you might want to just use that title when you submit to social bookmarking websites. On the other hand, it is worth reading carefully what works and what doesn’t at each site. You probably need a longer title at Reddit. You might need a shorter title at Digg. You might need to emphasize the financial aspect at PFbuzz. But make sure the title is optimized to lure people in with curiosity.
There you have it – the top five tips to make social bookmarking drive traffic to your blog.
Resources:
David Leonhardt is founder of Zoomit Canada, Canada’s social bookmarking news platform. Make it easy for your readers to submit your blog content to any platform – add a free social bookmarking tool to your blog.