Make The Money Blog

What is social bookmarking? Moreover, how can it help your business?

In the early days of the Internet, when you found a website you enjoyed or needed, you could easily bookmark it in your browser. This easy method allowed one to quickly return to the site, without having to remember the name or web address. Soon, practically every website had a prominent ‘Press CTRL+D’ reminder to alert visitors to bookmark that web site.

That early concept soon opened the floodgates for gaining valuable traffic, sales leads and backlinks with the creation of hundreds of bookmarking sites all over the Internet. Instead of bookmarking a site only on your computer, you can now bookmark any site to be accessed by anyone, anywhere in the world. For example if you were at a friends house and wanted to show them a particular website, no need to remember the web address, you simply go to your account at the bookmarking website and pull up the page.

Today, this cool feature is an effective way to promote any website, because now you can share your public bookmarks with the world. If you are a business online, this serves several key purposes:

1. The bookmarking website acts sort of like a mini-search engine (like Google, Yahoo, or Live!)
2. Your website can gain valuable backlinks (a link back to your site) from respected web properties
3. You have the opportunity to promote your site, without looking like an advertisement
4. The major search engines will also index you faster since bookmarking sites are crawled constantly.

So, how do you go about bookmarking and where do you bookmark your website?
Two ways to do this are manual and automatic bookmarking. The manual process takes a lot of time and effort to accomplish, because you will need to sign up to the site, confirm your email, enter the web details of your site and submit. Each process could take 5 minutes or more, and after an hour, you may find it not so exciting!

The other method is to use an automatic bookmarking service, which can virtually put your website on hundreds of bookmarking sites in no time at all. Although there are a few free bookmarking services that cover 10 or 15 bookmarking sites, using these may cause you to miss out on the thousands of available bookmarking sites on the Internet.

In preparation for this article, I registered a domain name, installed a blog, and put up some content (about 45 posts). I also installed tracking from Google Analytics and some adsense and CPA offers. Next, I contracted with an inexpensive bookmarking service that utilized 300 different bookmarking websites.

Within a few hours, I received an email report from the service showing all the places where they bookmarked my new website. Now the fun began, Since I did not promote the site in any other way, I would be able to check how effective bookmarking is for a new site.

Following the tracking over the next few weeks revealed that my site went from zero hits on day one to an average of 50 hits per day. The total sites bookmarked was over 300, and as a result, my site was also indexed in Google, Yahoo and several smaller search engines that pick up the bookmarking sites.

Bookmarking, along with many other SEO tactics is a real and necessary requirement to gain valuable backlinks and get quick traffic and sales leads. Take a minute and explore the great possibilities this bookmarking service can accomplish for your traffic and backlinks.

Read more testimonials from SocialClippings bookmarking service.

Howard Hughes, the venerable Billionaire once said. “I would rather have 1% of the efforts of 100 men than 100% of the efforts of one man”

Although Howard Hughes would never know such a thing as the Internet would eventually exist, he unwittingly revealed the traffic secrets of getting sales leads to your website. The same prolific business strategy that Hughes used to amass his fortunes could easily be applied in your efforts to generate traffic and sales leads to your online business.

The most powerful traffic secrets for your website are through the efforts of hundreds of other sites. After all, those sites are there for you. For example, if you place a link on twitter and rely only on twitter traffic to bring in your customers, visitors, or sales leads, did you ever consider what you could really be missing? Less than 1% of the total daily Internet users are on Twitter at any one time.

The fact that there are literally hundreds of millions of Internet users, your website is like a tiny pebble that is lost in the midst of the Grand Canyon. In essence, you are merely a grain of sand on the beach of the Internet. So how do you expect that a reasonable amount of people will find you so that you are able to generate sales leads or clicks?

The best traffic secrets method is to follow the advice Howard Hughes gave and start using the efforts of hundreds of sites to bring in your visitors and potential sales leads. Many people make the mistake of concentrating on one source (usually Google) and fail to see the big picture, that literally thousands of sites are available for promoting your products, websites, or information.

Following is a ‘traffic secrets’ plan to get you started, use these techniques to generate traffic from hundreds of other sites. Take an hour each day to sign up to top bookmarking websites, like delicious, technorati, Yahoo buzz (there’s a whole list at the bottom of this post). Then bookmark one of your articles, websites, or blog posts. Commit yourself to bookmarking for one hour each day.

The next step is to write an article related to your product or website and post that into the top article directories. This traffic secrets step may take a little more time, however the rewards from posting to article directories are enormously beneficial, and the traffic is always long term. You should commit to spending two hours a day on this project.

Another hour of your day should be spent on promoting your website through answer websites (my favorite traffic secrets technique). Places like Yahoo Answers, Wikianswers or Mahalo have questions posted by users who need information. Maybe your website or product can offer the solution to their dilemma. Turn your answers into sales leads by looking for related posts to answer the questions, and offer your link where appropriate. (Be careful about trying to Spam, though, these sites do not like it!)

Finally, you should use the services offered by various Pinging websites to alert the Internet world of your latest updates to your blog or website. So take to heart what one of the world’s richest men had to say about business, and use these traffic secrets to force hundreds of sites to help promote your business and give you sales leads.