Top Social Bookmarking Sites For Your Content Promotion Strategy

If you expect your content to go viral or at least get the traffic you want without doing anything apart from pressing the ‘Publish’ button, you’re wrong. There are many ways to help people find your content – social media is the preferred method, but bookmarking is still useful, if used correctly.

When it comes to content promotion, not only must you use a variety of channels, you need to have a strategy. As part of your strategy, as well as your promotional arsenal, social bookmarking sites should not be overlooked. For sure, you still need to engage on social media, as well as have a rigorous outreach strategy, but social bookmarking sites are still an effective way of putting your content in front of the people who are interested in your industry, products and services. Therefore, these should be implemented into your SEO and content promotion strategy.

Key Benefits of Social Bookmarking and Content Curation Sites

Whilst times have changed and social bookmarking is no longer considered a link building practice on a massive scale, there are still a lot of benefits this can generate for your website. These can include:

• More traffic –  Many of the top social bookmarking sites can be a great referral source; for example Coolbacklinks often appears as one of the top three referral sources

• Qualified visitors – If you operate in a specific industry, the use of highly targeted/niche bookmarking sites can help you gain qualified visitors

• More social signals – The more social signals your content receives across multiples sites the better, as it is believed this can have a positive effect on your rankings

• Faster indexing – Social bookmarking platforms are crawled almost constantly by search engines which can often result in your content being indexed much faster

However, given Google’s recent algorithm updates I believe you need to have a strategy when it comes to social bookmarking to avoid any pitfalls, or even worse, receiving a penalty from Google.

Bookmarking the Right Way

According to Google’s latest quality guidelines, links coming from low-quality directories and Social bookmarking sites can be seen us unnatural and therefore could have a negative effect on your rankings.

Years ago, social bookmarking was pretty much about getting your content bookmarked on every site, no matter the quality, out there in order to generate as many links as possible. Well, these days are gone so if you’re still doing it, STOP now!

The correct way to use social bookmarking site and content curation sites is to use them on a regular basis. You need to be active, grow your followers (if possible) and most importantly engage with the audience, otherwise you won’t get the results you want and you can actually put your website at greater risk.

I would highly recommend applying the Pareto 80/20 rule where 80% of the content you bookmark/curate/submit is not from your website, but still relevant to your industry. The rest (20%) of submitted or shared articles should be from your website or blog.

6 Rules for Social Bookmarking In the Post-Penguin World

• Find quality bookmaking sites that are relevant to your industry, products and target audience

• Create complete profiles when setting up your profile/account as you would with Facebook, Twitter or Google+

• Quality over quantity – avoid bookmarking your content on as many sites as possible, relevancy is the key. Stop using automated Social Bookmarking tools

• Use the 80/20 rule – don’t just promote your own content

• Build a portfolio of good bookmarks that will help other users. This can help you build trust; in other words people will be more likely to share, like or vote up your bookmarked content

• Be active – re-share other’s content, engage with people, ask questions and post comments

 Top Social Bookmarking and Content Curation Sites

1. Pearltrees

Pearltrees is one of my favourite bookmarking sites as it’s very powerful and an easy-to-use platform. I use it as my number one personal bookmarking site and have already seen good results in terms of traffic, as well as likes within the platform itself. Below you can see how I structure the content I share.

2. Coolbacklinks

Cool Back links is a social bookmarking site which allows you to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages. Users save links to web pages that they like or want to share, using coolbacklinks

3. Digg

Digg together with Delicious are top bookmarking sites with a high authority. If your website/content is shared and voted up and makes the Digg Home page you can expect a lot of traffic.

4. Flipboard

Flipboard claims to be social magazine which collects news and other content and presents it in magazine-style format. With Flipboard you can create your own magazine on any topic you like. This way you can create visually appealing magazines on topics relevant to your industry and audience.

How about you?

What experience do you have with social bookmarking site? What other social bookmarking and content curation sites do you find useful and effective in the post-penguin era? I would love to hear your suggestions and thoughts.

For more details you can visit our website: http://www.coolbacklinks.com/