Social Bookmarking Tools – Why You Need Them
Lately, I’ve been messing around with a lot of social bookmarking tools. My team and I have hit niche markets hard, both as affiliates and as product creators and it’s absolutely necessary to rank for key terms quickly. We’ve built probably 60 sites or so, each in different markets with different monetization methods…You and I know that in order to succeed in Internet marketing, you’ve got to have traffic. Without traffic, any startup or project is a catastrophic fail.So what I thought I’d do is talk a bit about why the idea of bookmarking is awesome and then leave you with some bookmarking tools you can test out.Social Bookmarking Tools – Why They’re ImportantAs you probably know by now, bookmarking is a very quick way to get tons and tons of backlinks to your site. High quality backlinks at that. Gone are the days that you need to send ‘reciprocal link requests’ to potential linking partners.With social bookmarking, all you have to do is create an account on a bookmarking site, enter in your URL, add some keywords and hit enter… 1 linkback.The idea behind web 2.0 bookmarking services was to make it easy for people to share their favorite stuff with their friends and to keep track of lots of bookmarks easily. And that’s a very noble cause.What marketers quickly figured out was that those links, most of the time, got spidered by Google and a fair share of them are ‘dofollow’ so they give you some ‘linkjuice’ in the process. Meaning, Google awards you when it finds the link going to your site.With the proper bookmarking tools, you can automate the process of linkbuilding on these social sites, saving you both time and money!The Problem With Manual Social BookmarksAs with anything, there are drawbacks to bookmarking. Especially when you’re doing it manually.First of all, social bookmarking takes a ton of time. You have to create 50 or 100 social bookmarking accounts, then you have to verify all those emails, keep all those passwords straight and so on.To submit a bookmark (aka. get a linkback) you’ve got to log in, fill in the form and hit submit..Do that 100 times and you’ve shot the better part of a workday. Not cool.The Darkside Of Social Bookmarking ToolsSo great, social bookmarking tools is the way to go, right? Well, there are a couple things to consider first.One darkside of social bookmarking tools is that you may think that it’s too spammy – creating hundreds of links to your site for the benefit of Google. And I’ll give you that. But we’re not really creating these bookmarks for anyone. Very few people, if anyone will ever see them… But they will see your ‘money site’ in the search engines BECAUSE of all the social bookmarks!One other negative side to social bookmarking tools is that fact that my two favorites charge monthly for access.. They do that to keep the software updated… The social, web 2.0 scene is growing so fast and has so many updates to their sites that in order for the social bookmarking tools to consistently work – they have to be updated… In fact, the one piece of software that doesn’t have a monthly fee has terrible success rates.