Using Social Bookmarking to Help Spread the Word About Your New Site

June 18th, 2008 | Posted in Social Marketing | No Comments

So you’ve just launched a website and you think the hard part is behind you. But you’ve already got a few strikes against you right from the start.

For one thing – nobody knows you exist. And the search engines already don’t take you seriously. What do you do? How can you build a business if no one seems to know or care about your new site?

The answer lies in social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking is just like when you add a site to your favorites or bookmark it using your browser – only with social bookmarking, your favorites and bookmarks can be stored on the web for other people to see.

It’s a lot like sharing a great recipe with your friends. You get the word out by sharing it, they try it and then tell their friends and associates too.

Social bookmarking is simply leveraging the power of people to help you spread the word.

So how do you get the news out about your new website this way? The fastest way to harness the power of social bookmarking for your site is to join the most popular bookmarking sites online. Currently these are:

• Digg.com
• Propeller.com
• StumbleUpon.com

Once you sign up and create an account, you then let others know about it by putting special links on your web pages that allow them to “vote” for your article to appear on the social bookmarking site.

You may have seen links for “Digg it” or “Stumble It” – that’s just another way of giving your vote to articles you find worthy of front page news.

The idea behind social bookmarking is not to bookmark your own sites – rather to give other people a way to do this for you if they like your site and the information on it.

To create content that is bookmark-worthy, you must have an edge over your competitors – or at least appear to. For more information on writing quality articles that get bookmarked and voted for, check out my related entry – Social Bookmarking: Creating Content Worth Stumbling Upon and Digging

You’ll also want to make sure that your web hosting account has plenty of bandwidth to accommodate all of the visitors that come your way. Nothing kills a social bookmarking campaign faster than a slow-loading site – or a site that doesn’t load at all!

Once people from the social bookmarking sites visit your page and read your article – their next thought will be, “Now what?”

Make it easy and rewarding for them to stay on your site. For example, offer a free newsletter or a download in exchange for their name and email address (aWeber makes this very easy to do), or provide related articles on the same topic that got bookmarked.

This helps you leverage everything you can out of everyone who comes to your site – giving you the most exposure-per-visitor that you can get.

Don’t forget to write bookmark-worthy content as well, or else all your efforts will be wasted. Click here to read Social Bookmarking: Creating Content Worth Stumbling Upon and Digging for more details.