Social Bookmarking 101 – Building Your Social Network

While everyone is caught up in the excitement of social media, one aspect that is often overlooked by beginners is social bookmarking. So what is social bookmarking and why should you be using it? Social bookmarking is essentially just like saving your "favorites" to your computer. When you find a site or article you like and want to come back to it later, you add it to your "favorites" file so you can easily locate it. So, when you social bookmark a website, you are doing the same thing but rather than saving the link on your computer, you are saving it to the internet for others to see and share as well. Social bookmarking lets you share, store and organize bookmarks of web pages you love.

How Does it Work?
These stored bookmarks can be public, private or shared with only a specific group of users. You can view those bookmarks in different ways: chronologically, by specific criteria, or you can do a search by keyword. Another helpful aspect is the popularity of the bookmark, which is shown by how many others have bookmarked it as well. You can import or export your bookmarks, comment on them, rate them, leave notes, and email them to other people.
Many social bookmarking services have web feeds you can subscribe to and be notified whenever any new bookmarks are saved, shared, or tagged by other users.
A few of the sites I currently use and like are

• Delicious
• Stumble Upon
• Digg
• Reddit

But there are so many more. For a more complete list of available bookmarking sites just "Google" the term and take your pick. I recommend you pick 3-5 sites to focus on. Then remember to start bookmarking articles of interest to yourself and your target market. Don't forget to encourage your readers to bookmark your articles as well to drive additional traffic to your site.

Why Should I Use It?
   The very basic understanding behind social bookmarking is about people submitting a link, a small description, a few tags, and then other people getting to see those things.  The benefit, as a social media user and blog or website owner that wants to share information is that it drives lots and lots of traffic to your site if done correctly.
  Additionally, social bookmarking is also excellent for search engine optimization, because if your web site is on a particular bookmarking site's front page, this will automatically increase your traffic. This, in turn, increases the amount of inbound links to your site, which automatically makes you popular and thus increases your page rank as well.

Using this easy technique will help you increase your ranking, build followers and drive traffic to your site.