If you read our previous post, you now know how to submit your site to hundreds of social bookmarking networks. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?
The truth is, you can be easily burned if you do social bookmarking the wrong way. What do I mean by “getting burned”? Your site could be banned by the social network, and this means nobody will be able to bookmark your site for that network again. Ever.
You’re lucky to read this post and learn from my mistakes. Banning happens quickly, and usually there is no way back. I know this for sure, because one of my sites was banned from Digg a couple years ago.
I was learning about social bookmarking and tagging back then, and made a few mistakes that I wouldn’t make today.
So what exactly am I talking about?
When I was bookmarking my posts for Digg, I didn’t bookmark the url of the post, I always bookmarked the main domain of the site. It was an honest mistake, I didn’t know better, but Digg didn’t care.
It didn’t take long before I was “shut down”. I think I submitted 7-10 posts, and that was it. Emails to Digg’s support didn’t bring any results either.
Another mistake that is typical for newbie social marketers is bookmarking only their own sites and posts. Many social networks frown on this activity, and consider it a spam.
You would do much better if you bookmark other blogs with unique and quality content relevant to your niche, and throw your own urls in the mix only once in a while.
Very important rule that applies to any social network: don’t jump into promoting your stuff right away. First, participate in conversations, get a feel of the community and its unwritten rules. Answer people’s questions, be helpful.
Many communities provide a way to vote for posts – so spend some time “thumbing up” or “liking” the posts of other users (only those of course that you truly like yourself).
Then you can start gradually introducing your blogs and posts. Don’t forget to bookmark the urls to all your social networks as well, this cross-bookmarking really helps.
Of course, it’s useful to create multiple accounts, so at any given time you bookmark your posts/social network urls to only a few of them.
The more people bookmark your posts, the higher will be your position on social bookmarking searches, and hence you’ll have more traffic, higher weight with search engines, etc.
One way to achieve it is to use automatic software to create multiple accounts (such as Bookmarking Demon , I talked about it in details in the previous post).
I personally like less automotive/more human way to achieve the same result.
I’m talking about social bookmarking exchange. I would use Bookmarking Software to create multiple accounts, but use bookmark exchanges for actual bookmarks.
Here is how bookmark exchanges work. You’re a member of the community of bloggers, and you bookmark posts of its members. In exchange they bookmark your posts.
It’s much cleaner, each bookmark goes from different ip (since it’s coming from different people), the variety of tags and descriptions is better, those people usually have established accounts with social networks, so bookmarking authority is much higher. Overall, it’s a win-win situation for all parties involved.
Interested to join such community? Here is one for you: Blog Success.
This is a closed door members-only community of bloggers specializing in building authority blogs in various niches.
Aside from being great bookmarking exchange community, it has one of the best blog-related educational centers on the web. They cover everything related to blogs and blog promotion.
The monthly membership is not cheap by internet marketing standards, but it’s well worth the price.
So if you want to bring your bookmarking skills to the next level, you might want to join it.
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