why so many people say to use social bookmarks

21 Dec 10 4:05 pm

So my question is why do so many people say to use social bookmarking to get quick back links if you don't get back links from them.

I don´t Know, a lot of people says a lot :). In the end it comes down to strategies, my opinion about social bookmarking is that it is good for indexing new content but not much more. The thing is that social bookmarking was quite power full a few years ago but they got so much spammed and those links got devaluated by the search engine... and they are quite good also at detecting spammy stuff and remove it.

And with all these voting systems and stuff that is in place on the best social bookmarking sites, has forced user to actually post content of "social value" and I do think that most people don´t find articles like "7 ways to get rich with a click of a button" having too much social value :). Sure if you get 50 digs in digg you are probably going to get some really good traffic but I think its going to be tough in almost any Clickbank niche. Maybe if you had some cool dog doing some cool things in a cool youtube video :).

All in all its good for indexing stuff fast. Links does not carry much value unless your stuff gets liked a lot. So you have to put in some social effort and provide cool stuff.... Mostly i find social bookmarking a waste of time... but good for indexing...

22 Dec 10 11:59 pm

Grady is right, and No offense to Matt, but the reasonso many other people fail at social bookmarking is because they don't take the time to do it right, they write bad content, and they spam their own links without providing any real value to the community on those sites.

I have sites that have gotten good traffic through social bookmarking, but I rarely actually boomark my own sites. I bookmark other people's sites, and good content that I find. I build relationships with the people I meet on the social bookmarking sites.

Also, bookmarking by itself isn't always the best, but if you combine it with other social marketing tactics, and networking with other marketers in relevant niches, you can get a lot of benefit. As a blogger, a lot of my friends and followers on my bookmarking accounts are other bloggers. We help each other out by bookmarking each others content. We also do a lot of other things to share information.

I also find that bookmarking helps other bloggers find my latest content, and if they like the posts, they will link to my siite, sharing it with my members, so although I didn't get direct traffic through that bookmark, I got exposure that led to me getting traffic.

One last thing, through my testing, I find that I get better results with bookmarking on my blogs than on my static sites. I think a large part of that is that my blogs have about 1/10 of the advertising as my static sites, (yet make more money).

Bookmarking can be a powerful marketing tool, when you take the time to do it properly. Spamming them (which is what 90% of the marketers do) is just a waste of time, and as Matt says, if that is what you are doing, you are wasting time.

However, if you really engage the community, make friends, share interesting things that you find online (funny you tube vids. cool blog posts, etc...) you can get a lot of great results from bookmarking. Also it varies depending on your niche, and which bookmarking site you are using. For example, Delicious Has been the best results for me with the IM niche as far as traffic, but with my relationships sites, I get more traffic through stumbleupon. Self help niche, I am fairly new into, but so far I am getting best results from Digg and Mixx, (about the same with both) and a close 3rd being stumbleupon. So, yyou have to do some testing, and see which bookmarking sites work best for you.

24 Dec 10 9:11 pm

Everything with most marketing you do is about the relationship that you build with people. It doesn't really matter where you do the relationship building.

Some people focus on seo and funnel people into an email list, or into their blog, some people go directly to the source, and build the relationship up front. The important thing to remember is that the relationships you build today will affect your sales (either positively or negatively) tomorrow.

Personally, I find that the best way is to build relationships up front, send them to my blog, build it further, and get them on my list and buiild it even more. the next level (which I am working on for the first of the year) is to focus towards the buyers by starting up a membership site, where you can build even stronger relationships with proven buyers.

A great way to start this part of the process is by joining membership sites within your niche, and connecting with other people's buyers (hmmmm, anyone figure out why I spend so much time in the AJP and AB forums yet?), but eventually, you may want to start your own.