30. Social Bookmarking for Small Business Sites

Anyone trying to generate traffic to their small business website needs to take advantage of the incredible opportunities with Web 2 and social bookmarking. It’s incredibly easy to use and a terrific way to increase traffic to your website. It’s possible with social bookmarking to get new customers visiting your website within days, even within hours! Social bookmarkings are websites that list popular websites. Each social booking website compiles lists of people’s favourite websites depending on the interest or the theme of that particular social bookmarking website. These site listings are similar to search engine listings because they are searchable by tags as well as keywords. But the great thing is that these tags are like keywords except they don’t come with any rules and you are able to choose the keywords you want. You use whatever word you want to help you remember where you put stuff. Social bookmarkings are a total popularity contest. They rank sites to be most popular depending on the amounts of votes it gets. And the fact is social bookmarkings attract a ton of traffic. The Alexa ranking for Del.icio.us is 139, its 207 for Technorati and 85 for Digg. These websites are listed in TIME magazine’s top 50 coolest websites. The best way to join in the fun of social bookmarking to get yourself acquainted with what’s out there; A list of some of the most popular social bookmarking websites are: simpy.com, spurl.net, ma_gnolia.com, shadows.com, Technorati, blinklist.com, furl.net, del.icio.us, myweb2 Check these sites out and figure out which of them relates most to your website. Keep an eye out for what people are adding and what is most popular. Some social bookmarking sites, like Technorati give a graph that marks the number of mentions specific keywords or tags have gotten in the last month. This is critical information for any webmaster wanting to improve traffic to their site. If you click on the graph it’ll tell you the number of searches for those keywords up to a year. It’s a terrific way to gather marketing information, and monitor trends. And the best part is it’s free! After you figure out what works best on particular social bookmarking sites you can plan content that would fit into that scheme. Write the stuff and start submitting it. But put some time and thought into your content. If your stuff is good you will attract more attention and repeat customers. Put useful information in your content and format it so that it’s easy to read. Using bullets and quick tips are effective formats for web content.