What is Social Bookmarking?

Although social bookmarking might be something you've only just come across, it has in fact been around for a few years. It's certainly getting more popular every day, and has taken off in a big way very recently.
If you're involved in Internet marketing, it's also a great way to help generate traffic and page rank to your site. So the sooner you learn about it, the quicker your Internet business can benefit.

Put simply, social bookmarking is simply a way of saving your favorite URLs online. You probably already have a "Favorites" folder on your computer.
Well, social bookmarking is just an online version of that.
The main difference is that your social bookmarking favorites are publicly available for anyone to see.
So, the big question is - how can this benefit your business?
The simple answer to that is: exposure, backlinks and quality traffic.
If you do a Google search you'll soon come up with a list of the most popular social bookmarking websites.
All you need to do, once you've joined a social bookmarking site, is to start adding your URLs to your blog posts. With each URL you also add a list of tags, or keywords, so that people know what that URL is all about. So if you've bookmarked an article/post about dogs, for example, then make sure you use the word "dogs" as one of the tags. You can also choose whether to make the listing public or private.
Use a public listing if it's an article, post or page on your blog you want other people to find, such as your latest post/article.
A public listing will also show other information such as who created the bookmark, when, and give an indication of how popular that particular keyword is on the site. But you can use the private setting for other URLs that you know you will want to access while you're traveling around, and don't have access to your home computer.

In some ways, then, a social bookmarking site is like a search engine, except that it only searches entries on its database. But the good part about that is that only sites that other people recommend will be listed.
It's easy to find a list of sites on any topic you might be interested in. Type in dogs, for example, as a search on the social bookmarking site and you'll see sites that other people have recommended.

For Internet marketing purposes, then, you would add your blog posts to your social bookmarking account, pick your main keywords and use them as tags, and potentially generate traffic to your site.
You also get a backlink from the social bookmarking site to your blog, which helps to boost your popularity in the eyes of the search engines.
For optimal results, you should open as many accounts on different social bookmarking sites as you can. The only problem is that posting your blog to these accounts can be come very tedious. Especially if you are adding the bookmark to a large number of accounts.

Social bookmarking is only in its infancy, and will probably develop in ways that nobody has even imagined yet. In the meantime, there's no doubt it's a great way to get traffic to your websites.

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