Why Bother Bookmarking Your Blog?
Post by Robert Campbell on Jan 28, 2009
Have you ever navigated to a bookmarking site with the express desire to browse through the submissions? Probably not. I doubt very many people sit down at their computer to spend time surfing through other people’s bookmarks, although that’s the very scenario Stumble Upon seems to advocate.
Who reads all these bookmarks?
Bookmarking sites came about to help organize and categorize large amounts of very unique information. Highly trained professionals like web surgeons and brain scientists were the first to realize they could use a bookmarking profile / service to save their readings, and at the same time share their discoveries with their students and co-workers. That’s where it started, and it wasn’t long after that the rest of world gave it whirl. Bookmarking services build thought communities around niche subjects, and anybody that’s ever posted a compelling headline in Digg or Reddit knows how it can sometimes yield hundreds of instant readers.
What’s the Big Picture?
While most web users naively believe that bookmarking their blog on Stumble Upon or Delicious will bring more direct traffic to their website, they don’t really know why it works. And because they don’t know why, they don’t know how to do it right – bookmarking builds relevance, first in the title, then subtitles, anchor text and alt text of the subject article or blog. Especially if the content is indexed on more than one service by more than one computer.
Put the keywords you want to capture in the title of your post. Put your secondary targets in the subtitles and the most relevant keywords should be the anchor text of all links back to your content. Bookmark that content and double its significance.
As your website accumulates bookmarks, your domain gains relative importance. Your website’s overall social relevance is measured in its Google page rank number. This variable will rise naturally as you add valuable content, and it will rise faster if you bookmark the media on popular services.
Socialmatic.com
There was a time when I used a nifty little service called Socialmatic.com This is an automated affair that promises to submit your target URL to multiple bookmarking services with the click of a button – it doesn’t work. My studies show that because the categories are all different in every website submission portal, there is no way for one machine to sort the media properly. It would have to decide what goes where and no machine does that very well. The result is that your media ends up being stacked in a general catch-all column of most bookmarking sites where its as good as lost – or it simply doesn’t get bookmarked at all. When the service came back to me and asked for more money I noticed the email used very poor English. Immediately I wondered if this was a bookmarking sweatshop where low paid Far East workers spend hours toiling through the obscure electronic requests of first world social marketers? I still think about that as I manually enter information into my top five sites: Stumble Upon, Digg, Delicious, Reddit and Kirtsy, in that order.
These are the market leaders, in no particular order (their rankings change every month anyway).
Your blog’s ‘quest for relevance’ should use bookmarking sites as legitimating credentials.
A final note,
There’s a strange theory out there called a Tagfarm that I haven’t tried yet. Some thought leaders postulate that if you link your blog post to a series of different bookmarking websites it can build a super charge? So you bookmark the bookmark of the bookmark of the original post. Its an idea…
Furl >links to> Spurl > links to> Blogmarks >links to> Delicious >links to your blog.
or
Blog is bookmarked on Reddit, and that Reddit bookmark is then submitted to Buddymarks, which is then indexed on Kirtsy.com which is Stumbled… It’s something to try. Let me know what happens.
