August 5, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Article Marketing, Basics, Free Training, Guides, Modules by MatthewDC

In our last module, we learned how you can use article marketing to garner some serious traffic. Now we are going to focus on a method that I believe should always go hand in hand with your article marketing efforts. That method is Social Bookmarking. Social Bookmarking revolves around sites like Digg, Reddit, De.lici.ous, and other various sites that allow you to post virtual bookmarks to your website. I am going to try to explain how they work, why they work, and then offer some advice on what you should be doing with them.

How Does Social Bookmarking Work?

We will use Digg as an example since I think they are one of the most often used Social Bookmarking sites. Everyone reading this probably has bookmarks in their firefox or internet explorer that they have saved from all over the internet. These are your favorite sites and ones that you want to go back to constantly for updates and whatever else they might offer. Social Bookmarking sites allow you to do the exact same thing, only the bookmarks are stored on the web where millions of others can find them through a searchable database. Basically what you are doing is adding your website to another search engine that gets TONS of traffic every day. Not only that, but if you are the first one to submit your site, you get to fill out the description box that everyone will see when they visit. Sound nice? Yeah, it is.

Why Do Social Bookmarking Sites Work?

The answer to that is a fairly simple one. They work because the sites are popular with Google. Digg bookmarks get listed in Google very fast and also get ranked fairly high for low competition search terms. The problem is, the listing won’t last long. That is ok however, because the real goal is to use these social bookmarking sites to get your site noticed and indexed in Google faster. Sites like Digg are so successfully not only because they get Google love, but also because of their millions of visitors each day. They are basically offering their own search engine when you get down to it. Your site gets indexed in their system and if someone searches for your key terms, your site might come up. They also have top lists for new sites, popular sites, etc.

So How Should I Use Social Bookmarking with My Sites?

Social Bookmarking is going to become an integral part of your campaigns. Basically every site, every blog, every squidoo lens, and every article you post anywhere on the internet, needs to get bookmarked. It sounds like a lot of work, but once you get the hang of it the time consumption will go down drastically. You can also find services on the internet that will submit your site for you, or you could outsource and hire someone to do it for you. The key thing to remember is that it is free exposure, free traffic, and a great boost to getting indexed in Google and improving your SEO.

So right now, our steps should look something like this when creating a new site :

  1. Make a Squidoo Lens.
  2. Social Bookmark the Squidoo Lens.
  3. Write 1 Article per day and submit to the top Article Directories with a link to your Squidoo Lens.
  4. Once the article gets published, Social Bookmark the Article.

If you are following these steps, you may already be getting some traffic to your lens. The more traffic your lens gets, the higher it will get listed within it’s category in Squidoo. If you can make the top 20 or so, your lens is going to get much more natural exposure from searches within Squidoo and their featured listings. So the goal right now is to drive traffic to your lens with your affiliate link on it, get it bookmarked for a little extra traffic and exposure, then hammer the articles like theres no tomorrow.

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