Which Social Bookmarking Tools Are Right For You?

SEO (search engine optimization) is the big talk of Internet marketers, the art of getting organic, free, traffic, which converts to sales and you have no marketing overhead costs. I was on an SEO webinar last week on which the presenter talked about social bookmarking tools as part of an SEO strategy. That it is important to not only bookmark your homepage, pages and posts but even article sites that have published your article or content sites that you have posted to.

When I do start to get the confirmation emails that my article has been accepted I should also bookmark all those article URLs. So you can literally get hundreds of article sites posting your content and the best practice is to bookmark every article URL. That is a lot of work if you have ever tried to do all the social bookmarking manually.

Of course there are some free social bookmarking services on the Internet that allow you to post your URL to social bookmark sites. The best service out there will post to about 79 sites for you, almost automatically and for FREE. Of course you do need to set up each individual account, which can take hours. If you want to create more than one account per website it will involve a large amount of time.

If you are good with your SEO then you are also creating pages on Wikis and other content sites. Those of course need to be bookmarked as well. Pretty soon it becomes quite evident that if you can automate any part of this process it will save you hours of time that you could be writing content or something you enjoy more than the repetitious work of account creation and URL submissions. To tell you the truth, this is not the most enjoyable part of SEO for me.

The good news is that there are programs that will automate your bookmarking for you. I have recently been looking for the right program to purchase. Currently I use the free online versions but with all of those links to bookmark I will install a program, set it up and let my PC sit and work while I create on the Mac.

Choosing the right software is real important and so I will list the features that you need to look for in a bookmarking program.

Cost – Some of the posts I read in forums were people complaining about the cost of the better programs but they are obviously not social bookmarking they way they should be. If they were they would realize the thousands of dollars saved in time by automating the bookmarking process.

Generate Automatic User Accounts – You may know this but when I created all the accounts on Ping dot fm it took me hours and you may know how much time is involved. There are programs that will automatically create the accounts for you. You may need to check email to confirm the account creations but you don’t have to navigate from site to site.

Random Usernames on Accounts – In conjunction with the feature above that saves time there are programs that will also generate random user names so it appears more real.

Social Bookmark Scheduler – You want the creation of bookmarks to look natural and human including the timing of the bookmark creation. My research concluded that there is only one program that allows you to schedule your social bookmarking. That way it appears natural.

Numerous accounts at each Social Bookmarking Website – The program you want will allow you to manage a number of accounts at each bookmarking site. That way you can have more than one link per social bookmarking site to the same article page.

Add social bookmarking sites – Most programs will load only the main social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking sites number well over a hundred and new sites pop up regularly. A good program will allow you to add additional social bookmarking sites. You want to have your links on as many sites as you can, remembering that links, whether they are follow or nofollow, they all can bring traffic to your site.

Social Bookmark Automatically – Of course you are buying this software so that more of your tasks are automated so besides automatic account creation you want to have the program post your webpage bookmarks automatically as well.

Spin the Title, Description and Tags – You want to make sure the program will not only post these three elements to your social bookmark but it will also spin the information so it is more natural.

Automatic Email Verification – When you submit your social bookmarks some of the sites will send you a confirmation email and there are some programs that will check the email account and activate the link automatically. The number of hours that you will save will be unreal when you use the automation.

Domain Crawler – If you have been blogging for a long time you may be thinking that to bookmark all those pages and posts is an unreal amount of work? There are programs that will send a bot to crawl your website and list the pages. You can then load these into the program and set up the Title, Description and Tags, schedule the bookmarking and go eat a pizza.

RSS Crawler – Some programs will even crawl RSS Feeds so you can load those into the program and bookmark the RSS feeds as well.

Automatic Pinging – Some programs offer a pinging service. Enter your websites and use the program to ping them. Be cautious with over pinging since there are WordPress plugins for pinging and other services. If it appears you are pinging excessively it could appear as spamming.

Project Creation and Management – Did you ever use a program that would not allow you to backup all your work? Make sure your software saves projects so you can go back to it and even export it so you can keep it safe.

Randomization Settings – To ensure that all your social bookmarking accounts are not identical (example: having the same number of outgoing links and tags), you can randomize it by specifying how many percent of your sites and tags are used for bookmarking.
Human Simulation and Anti-Bot – There is only one program that I found in my research that offers this human simulation with submission throttling and even slows down to imitate human submission. You have heard it over and over that it is best to make things look natural. The game is not to “get it done” but to “do it right”.

MultiThreading – This is consistent with most software meaning they are able to perform a multitude of tasks at the same time.

Proxy Servers – If you want to use proxy servers make sure the software you buy is programmed for this.

Captcha – There is software that will integrate third-party services that will decaptcher captcha pages and does it automatically.

To conclude, you should see that choosing the right social bookmarking tools with regards to price alone would be a great mistake. I have reviewed a number of the social bookmarking tools in my usual Excel spreadsheet way and I made my decision and am so happy I did and have already saved hours and hours of time. I was so excited I wanted to share this good news with other people that are in the process of making a decision.

Wishing you success in your social bookmarking. Remember, “Don’t save a d

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Using Social Bookmarking Effectively To Get More Targeted Prospects

Social bookmarking is part of a well planned network marketing strategy. It is one easy method you can use to grow your web of content and grow social credibility among the network marketing industry.

Social bookmarking strategy is great; however, if misused, it can really hurt you instead of help you in your network marketing business. We’ll talk about this in a moment.

Social Bookmarking for Network Marketing

It is very important to have your website rank in the first pages of Google for your targeted keywords so that you are found by targeted prospects looking for your service or product.

If you don’t come up on the first pages of Google or other search engines, it will be really difficult to get traffic to your site. The higher your ranking, the easier it will be to get free targeted traffic to your website.

To rank higher on the search engines, you need to have a lot of links pointing to your website and this is where social bookmarking sites can help you a lot if you know how to use them correctly. So what things are right and, what are wrong when using social bookmarking sites?

Using Social Bookmarking Effectively

The first important thing to consider here is to be social and to be a person who brings quality content to the community. Quality content can be content you create, but it can also be content other network marketers create that gives value to the community.

If you start bookmarking only your content you will be classified as a spammer and someone only interested in selling or pitching his business. Even if your content holds value, it’s not a good move to bookmark only your stuff.

In attraction marketing, it is very important to give and provide something good before can have what you want. Remember that helping others, and promoting their work, will get you the same treatment back from them. So, it’s very important to bookmark content from other network marketers that are in your niche market too.

Now let’s consider why it’s a good idea to use social bookmarking in network marketing. There are a lot of bookmarking sites on the net, but you can work only on the most important ones, like Digg, Delicious, Stumble it, Reddit, Furl, Sphinn, or others that you like.

All your bookmarks can be seen by others, and they can benefit from them. When they find something useful that you’ve bookmarked, they can bookmark it too, and create more incoming links to your website.

Creating more incoming links to your website, makes it rank high on the search engines, and therefore, will get you free targeted traffic. And we’re just considering the traffic you’re getting only from being on the first page of Google. Now think about the traffic you can get from the social bookmarking sites as well if you’re bookmarking interesting stuff with value that the community can see and share.

Social bookmarking is a smart strategy for any network marketing business, and if you’re consistent and take the time to bookmark interesting sites and articles, you will see great results and your business will grow more.

There is another important thing to consider when bookmarking. You have to consider what regular people do on bookmarking sites, and act as one of them. And by regular people, I mean people that are not there for business purposes.

Regular people bookmark stuff they are interested in. It can be something related to health, sports, music, entertainment, or science. They don’t stick to just one category and bookmark stuff from that category only.

They act in a “normal” way, which means, everything they do is natural and not forced or directed to a certain goal. Sometimes as network marketers, we forget about our other interests. This is something you don’t want to forget on social bookmarking sites.

Act as a normal person would; act naturally. And don’t only bookmark stuff related to business. Certainly there are a lot of interests you have, so share them with the community too!

This is what makes social bookmarking effective. Just act naturally, bookmark stuff not related to business. Just be you! And every now and then, bookmark stuff related to business. I suggest bookmarking one business related site or content for every 4-6 sites that have nothing to do with business.

Taking the time to find interesting stuff on the net to bookmark takes time, so maybe you can pay someone to do this work for you. It’s also very important to delegate the easy but time consuming tasks to others, while you concentrate on the things that need more focus and hard work.

Since there are a lot of social bookmarking sites, there are also some social bookmarking services. They make it easy to bookmark a website to a lot of bookmarking sites at the same time. But this comes with a problem. It leaves trails.

When you use social bookmarking services, your website will be bookmarked on a lot of important bookmarking sites, and after you do this a bunch of times, Google and the bookmarking sites, notice the strange behavior, and you’ll be considered a spammer, which can lead to your account being banned from the social bookmarking sites.

Google also notices and punishes you by giving you a low rank on your website. A lot of people don’t know this and they get damaged for using social bookmarking services. So be sure to keep this in mind. If you act in a natural way, you can gain more, than if you try to use shortcuts to get your content bookmarked faster and easily.

If you follow these strategies, and you are consistent, you can grow your web of content in a solid and strong way.

Social Bookmarking is a powerful strategy to use for growing your network marketing business. Just keep in mind what you can do, and what you can’t.

Here are some bookmarking tips:

Don’t spam
Bookmark websites that are not related to business
Bookmark websites in a natural way
Bookmark other’s stuff as much as yours
Focus on 5-10 important bookmarking sites
Be social and add friends so that they benefit from your bookmarks too
Bookmark quality content
When bookmarking the same website or article to a lot of bookmarking sites, be careful not to leave trails
Change the title and description of the link on every bookmarking site
Dedicate a few minutes each day to bookmark interesting content on different social bookmarking sites
If you can, pay someone to do this work for you
Leave comments to the stuff you bookmark, let others know what you think about it
If you’re using Mozilla Firefox as your web browser, you can download Shareaholic, a plugin that will help you bookmark websites to some bookmarking sites. Just be sure to change the routine of your bookmarking and don’t do it the same way always. Don’t leave trails, these are just tools, use them correctly.

Melissa Dominguez is a professional network marketing coach that teaches other network marketers how to grow their business using attraction marketing, social marketing, SEO, list building strategies, bloggi

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