Think about sharing yourself and your work online. At the end of every bit of content you update your online presence with, including a link to a content sharing site such as StumbleUpon or Del.icio.us.
When people like something that you have written, they can use these sites to share your work with the whole world. Basically, the community can do the marketing of your article (and indirectly your business) for you!
As they are both very different bookmarking models, let’s look at each one in more detail.
Del.icio.us
This was the first social bookmarking site. The concept back then was simple: just include tags on all of your blog posts and Del.icio.us could find and track them. It has grown and developed now to a point where users can tag, save, manage and share web pages between themselves and the wider community.
Del.icio.us works much like the bookmarks that you might have in your own internet browser on your own computer. The only difference is that you can access those bookmarks even if you are not working on your own computer.
Not only that, if your network are also using Del.icio.us, you can send your bookmarks to them as well. You can also have a look around at what other members are looking at and bookmark those for yourself as well (back to the community idea).
StumbleUpon
As you can probably tell from their name, StumbleUpon is a lot more random in nature than Del.icio.us. With more than a million users though, that is clearly a feature that a lot of people prefer.
It basically works like this:
When you go to the homepage and click on ‘Start Stumbling’, the service starts to deliver random pages to your browser. With each new website, you have the opportunity then to either ‘like it’ (thumbs up), share it with your friends through email, Facebook or Twitter, review the site or leave a comment for other Stumblers to read.
If you don’t want to do any of those things, you just click on Stumble again and it throws up another random site, and so on.
You can actually refine it down a lot by selecting one of around 500 topics for the sites to have to relate to including graphic design, travel, web development, photography and so on. If you sign up to the site, with a thumbs up for example, StumbleUpon automatically passes that site on to people who like you which in turn helps to show you sites that are more relevant to you as well.
How do these help your small business?
I talk to a lot of small businesses about the importance of getting one-way links in an effort to increase traffic to your site and therefore increase your ranking with search engines. Social bookmarking sites are gold for that.
Once you are signed up to either or both of the social bookmarking sites, the first thing you have to do is budget some time in your day or in your week to use them.
See what people are looking at, what they are liking and passing on, and what they are not rating at all. Where do your site and your niche for that matter fit in with that?
Then you need to submit your own site or posts and see if the bookmarking community is interested in your stuff too. For this reason, it’s really important to have your Twitter or Facebook details on the page you submit as well – you might only get one chance with someone stumbling along through hundreds of pages so don’t blow it.
Do’s and Dont’s of Social Bookmarking
There are some simple and pretty obvious do’s and dont’s when you want to submit some of your work to social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.
The number one ‘do’ would be to submit your most newsworthy, interesting and entertaining content and not necessarily ever single page on your websites, no matter how dull they are.
The goal is to increase traffic back to your site so if you can get someone’s interest with the most commercial or trendy post you have, then you will get them (hopefully) back to your site to have a look at the rest of your content anyway.
Don’t spam people. Always good advice but especially when it comes to social bookmarking. If you just submit the pages on your site that are really sales-oriented or hard-sell then your stuff with get ignored by the bookmarking community pretty quickly. People who use this kind of application aren’t stupid, don’t treat them that way.
Do include your readership and your own community in the promotion of your work on social bookmarking sites. There is nothing wrong with promoting the fact that you use these sites by asking your clients and network to support you on it as well.
If you are able to do social bookmarking well, it can be a very valuable tool to promote your work, your sites and yourself. All of this stuff is available to everyone and all of it is absolutely free. Your articles and online content will never get a better advantage in a competitive world without having to pay for it.
If you would like to see how I can help your business’ social engagement strategy through setting up and maintaining social bookmarking sites for you, call me TODAY on 02 4324 2594.
This article appears in full in my book, The Business of Being David – How to use social media to make your small business big. To read the sample chapters and to purchase your own copy, click here.
Do you have any social bookmarking success stories? Or any good tips that I have missed? Let us know in the comments below.
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Need proof that StumbleUpon works? I just heard from one of my clients that I convinced to start using StumbleUpon to help boost traffic to their blog. In one (incomplete) month, they have gone from nothing to 779 link referrals coming directly from StumbleUpon.