Using Bookmarking Sites to Promote Your Business!

by Problemo

Social bookmarking is a way to store, manage, and publicly share your favorite Web site links (bookmarks), much like using Favorites or Bookmarks features in an Internet browser. Benefits of using a social bookmarking site include tagging (adding descriptive words to links), voting on links (which ranks them by popularity), and search other people's bookmarks for sites that match your interests.  


To use a social bookmarking site, you must register. Popular social bookmarking sites include Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, FuzzFizz, Netvouz, Newnooze, Jumptags, and Wikio.

By having quality, relevant, useful, and unique content on your Web site or blog, you can gain votes, which will move your links up in the social bookmarking rankings. Just like with search engine results, higher rankings can translate into additional traffic to your site or blog and, hopefully, more conversions (e.g., sales, subscriptions, etc.). Another strategy to improve your site ranking is to have your friends vote for your site links. 

In addition to promoting your site and increasing Web traffic, you can use social bookmarking rankings and tags to spot who is online and what they are interested in. Identifying niche markets with unmet needs and organizing your marketing mix to reach those niche markets and satisfy their unmet needs is not only a smart business strategy, but essential to surviving in this economy.  

The following resources provide a variety of ideas and suggestions for using social bookmarking sites to promote and increase your business:

• 3 Benefits Social Bookmarking Offers to Online Businesses
• Drive Massive Traffic to Your Site Using the Power of Social Bookmarking
• How to Use Social Bookmarking to Promote Your Small Business
• How to use Social Bookmarking to Promote your Business
• Top 20 Most Popular Social Bookmarking Websites
• Benefits of Using Social Bookmarking Sites

Creating Compelling Social Media Content

Image by Martin Kingsley

Write it and they will come. Well, not really. Before attempting to create compelling content, you must think about how people will find it. Most Web site traffic comes through search engines, though, recommendations on social portals are playing an increasing role in attracting attention. Clearly identifying the nature of your content with a relevant title and using the right keywords in the piece are a good start at search engine optimization (i.e., getting ranked well in search engine results). 

Once Internet denizens find your blog post, article, Facebook page, etc., you need to work at getting them to invest the time to read the content. The easiest way to draw people in is to give away something for free within the post, such as product discounts, MP3s (songs), and so on. Okay, you are buying readership, but in this case the ends do justify the means!

Another approach is to provide useful tips, such as the "Best of...", Worst of...", "Top 10...", or "Five Questions People Forget to Ask..." Or offer a collection of valuable resources (like this blog? ;-) and perhaps the biggest hook, tell a story that stirs emotions (e.g., the small business that beat the odds, the product that deliveries amazing value, etc.).  

The following resources explore lots of other valuable tips and suggestions for generating compelling content:

• The five factors of compelling content
• How to Get in Tune with Your Readers [and Produce Compelling Content]
• The Content Marketers - List of "How To" Blog Posts
• Five Secrets to Writing Great Blog Content
• How Twitter Content Can Be Simple and Compelling
• Are you creating compelling online video content? Why not?
• Creating Content for Social Media Session - IM Spring Break
• How To Create Compelling Social Media Profiles