Welcome back!

You don’t need to be around the internet for long, especially if you’re trying to make money online, before someone uses the term “social bookmarking”.

We recently ran a seminar for a group of people who were setting up websites, and quite a few of them had either not heard the term “social bookmarking”, or didn’t know what it meant.

What Is Social Bookmarking?

Digg screen shot

The idea behind social bookmarking is simple - we all have websites bookmarked in our browsers. Wouldn’t it be neat if we could share those bookmarks with our friends, workmates, or other people who have the same interests? And if we could access them from any computer in the world?

Why not build a website which can store everyone’s bookmarks online?

Once social bookmarking sites were established, it was logical for the search engines to give weight to links from those sites. After all, if someone had bookmarked a site, it meant they thought it was cool, and they wanted to be able to find it again. And if lots of people had bookmarked a site, then the chances were good that the content there was valuable.

Once it became known that search engines value links from social bookmarking sites highly, it was only a matter of time before people began “gaming” the sites - getting machines or minimum-wage workers in third world countries to flood the social bookmarking sites with bookmarks. This resulted in many of the social bookmarking sites setting strict Terms of Service, and if you breach those TOS, you will be banned in an eyeblink!

However, there is good reason to have your web site’s pages social bookmarked.

At the recent seminar, we introduced the attendees to one social bookmarking site - digg.com. They buddied up and bookmarked each other’s sites, and we also asked them to bookmark our Internet Basics page, but only if they felt it was valuable and worthwhile bookmarking. About fourteen people ended up bookmarking the page. Here’s what the bookmark in Digg looks like: The Basics of The Internet.

A couple of days later, we noticed a rush a traffic to our website - to the Internet Basics page. This was a brand new domain name, just registered, and we hadn’t done anything to promote the site, but suddenly a flood of over a thousand visitors hit our site in a single day!

It wasn’t coming from Digg, though …

We used Google Analytics to track down the source of the visitors. A popular blogger, Jason Clarke, made a post on his blog about our Internet Basics page.

How did Jason Clarke find our one new little web page in the middle of the millions, billions, or possibly even trillions of web pages which now exist?

Apparently, the news about our page had come to him via Digg …

In the past month, since that first rush of visitors passed, we have had another 700+ visitors come to us from Jason’s blog post. In addition, over 160 other pages around the internet have linked to our page, and it has been bookmarked by other people at other social bookmarking sites like ma.gnolia.com.

This is the way social bookmarking is designed to work - word of a web page spreads “virally”, as real human beings look at the page, think it’s good, and pass on the news.

Now, for social bookmarking to work well, you must have something on the web page that people will actually find valuable. In other words, you need to produce quality content. There is no point in bookmarking a page of ads, or the “buy it now” page of your shopping cart - you won’t get the viral effect.

When you have quality content, social bookmarking can help to get the word out. Just remember to read the Terms of Service on your social bookmarking site, and stick to the rules.

Every social bookmarking site is a community, and the rules are there to protect the members of the site from being spammed with worthless links. The rules not only protects the members of the community for spam and the site owners from complaints, they also ensure that the search engines will continue to value links from that social bookmarking site highly in the future.