Introduction
In
this article I am going to be telling you what I have learnt about the use of social bookmarking on blogs.
If you ever read anything about getting traffic to blogs you will be told
thousands of times that you need to get your blog in as many Social
bookmarking Site as
possible. So when I started blogging I put as many Free Social Bookmarking Site. Some of these social networks I never
heard of, my logic was if someone is on these networks I want to make it as easy as possible to add my post
on their network. But is this the right thing to do?
Social
Bookmarking On Blogs
Social
bookmark buttons on blog are very important for the growth of the blog; a blog is
there to tell the visitors some useful information. If 1 visitor finds the
information useful then other people will find it useful, why not make it easy
for them to share this with people they know. Blogs get updated regularly
should provide content which the user can use in real time, meaning they need
this information now...so will others
Importance
Of Social Bookmarking
Social
bookmarking sites
has some important benefits for any blog or any website. For new blogs it can
get your blog indexed quicker by the
search engines. In the old days you used to have to go to each search engine
and submit a sitemap or a page so they know about you. Not anymore just submit your site to Coolbacklinks or Digg and it will be crawled and indexed that day it
works that quickly. It builds an audience of visitors which find your content
useful in your niche.
Getting
traffic to your website is easy just submit your website to as many directories
and article directories sites as possible. But they will not be targeted
traffic which is what social bookmarking
sites helps with. For example on Twitter if I have 1000 followers and
submit a link about web development maybe 10% will be interested in it and
click on it. But if I have 1000 followers who I know are all web developers and
submit a link about web development the click through rate should be a lot
higher maybe 80% will click on it. This is what social bookmarking sites can do, provide your site with target traffic
to your website. Targeted traffic will lead to returning visitors, RSS
subscribers and more followers on social networking sites.
Using
Social Bookmarking On Your Blog
So
how easy is it to get started with social
bookmarking sites on your site? If you have a wordpress blog like many of
us it’s very easy. There are thousands of plugins which can provide you with
hundreds of social bookmark buttons.
These
are all useful as they provide you with a nice looking easy to use social bookmark for any social network
in just a few seconds. From the plugin admin screen you can place them at the
top or bottom of your posts. Perfect! So why wouldn’t you want to use this? I
used to use Coolbacklinks site bookmarks
on this site, it was perfect for what I wanted it for, giving an easy way to
share my content. Until I went to another blog seen they are using sexy
bookmarks as well.
I
tried tweeting the blog post and normally it should bring up the Twitter intent
box to post to Twitter, Not as quick and easy as I thought. So thought I’ll go
to some of the big blogs to see how they deal with social bookmarking sites, almost all of them used the actual
website development buttons. For Twitter they all went to Twitter Buttons and
created a button. Trying these buttons was easy to share on Twitter, it brings
up the intent box and 1 click it’s on Twitter...much better.
Social
Bookmarking Changes To My Blog
I
started to make changes to my blog to make it quicker and easy to share my
content I decided to go with Twitter button, Google +1 button and StumbleUpon
Button. I went to these websites and got my own button which is just a bit of
JavaScript I can put onto the page. I liked the styling of the coolbacklinks bookmarks and liked the
tagline Share the Wealth so thought instead of just putting these buttons at
the bottom of the post I'll style them and make is obvious for people to share
after reading if they liked it.
How
Have The Changes Performed
I
didn’t expect that what I changed will make any difference to my social bookmarking sites, I just wanted
to make it quicker and easier for my visitors. But the results were quite surprising...I
have seen a massive increase of my content being shared on Twitter and getting
more and more Google +1 each day. There is no 100% way to tell why this is the
case, I hope this increase has been because of the change I made to the social bookmarks. But from these
results I see now this is a much better way of dealing with social bookmarks than using a plugin
and will continue to take this approach in the future.
