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Putting the Social Back into Social Bookmarking, Let’s Do it Together

by Kalen Smith

This is a guest post by Kalen Smith, If you are interested in submitting a guest post, you can submit your guest post.

We’ve probably all heard about the value of social bookmarking to promote their content online. You may have heard some of the buzz and been a little confused by all the glamour that it has received. Some of the opportunities you hear of are so true. If you are able to get your content to the front page of Digg or Stumbleupon, you can generate thousands or even tens of thousands of visitors to your website in a single day. The problem is that too many people seem to think of social bookmarking as a road to Internet riches that’s paved in gold.

Simply submitting your content to a social bookmarking site is not going to generate you any traffic at all for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, the social bookmarking community looks down on anyone who is only interested in promoting their own material. In order to use these correctly, you must make a gesture of good faith by first submitting worthy news from other sources to the community. As you build your name as a credible user, you can begin to promote your own content without getting backlash from the rest of the community.

Secondly, in order to make the most of a social bookmarking site, you must have a network of friends who you can work with to promote each other’s content. I recently started using social bookmarking and developed what I still think was a good strategy. I found new ways to identify news stories online that were not submitted to Digg yet, and I was glad to be the first to be able to submit them. This seemed like a great way to establish myself in the social bookmarking community the easy way. Unfortunately, even though I was submitting some already very popular content, I was not getting anywhere. Why?

Simply put, I was making a very bone-headed mistake. Social bookmarking is a form of social media (hence why the word “social” appears at the front of it). Would you set up a Twitter account and try to start promoting your content by tweeting it to your followers even though those followers did not yet exist? I can’t testify that this strategy doesn’t work since I never tried it personally, but logic would suggest that this would be the biggest waste of time you could think of. What about the concept of guest blogging? Would you try to increase traffic to your own blog by writing to an imaginary friend’s imaginary blog? At least my Twitter example was outside the realm of science fiction.

Social bookmarking should not be looked at any differently. Do you really expect that in communities that may have ten million users that they will all read and bookmark your content when you made no effort to reach out to them first? In reality, social bookmarking is just like using Facebook or Twitter. Relationships with real people are the most important thing. They are really even more important than the content you are providing.

The problem is that social bookmarking sites themselves are not very interactive. It is difficult to exchange messages and communicate with people and even harder to get someone to accept a friend request when you haven’t really had the opportunity to tell them who you are. You could try to just bookmark a lot of their content and write nice comments for them in the hope that at some point they will throw you a bone, but this strategy has proven to be ineffective.

The truth is that with social bookmarking, your very best strategy is to find friends outside the community who will help you make your content popular. Of course, you will return the favor back to them.

This is an idea that I have that I think we can all work together on. We have a great community of bloggers here. I have read the posts not only here but on other blogs such as C.J.’s and Ben-Lang’s (I’m new here and I know there are many other’s who have some really great content). I am trying to create a list of bloggers who are interested in promoting their content. I can’t guarantee anything at first, but after we get enough people working together I am sure that we could drastically increase traffic to all.

Kalen Smith is the founder of Engineer-a-Business, a website that provides niche resources for entrepreneurs attempting to start technology-related businesses and gives consultants from many disciplines the opportunity to network and sell their services to promising entrepreneurs. If you would like to learn more, follow him on Twitter at Engineerbiz or visit his website (http://www.engineer-a-business.com). Kalen’s current project is putting together statistics of top entrepreneurs and technology trenders on Twitter, which anyone can apply to at his website.