Social bookmarking is a great tool for getting your site or individual articles out into the blogosphere. To bookmark a site or post you need only log in and submit your site or post. Social networking on the other hand is time consuming and involves befriending others. Reading their blogs and commenting or entering into discussions.
There are many different networking opportunities available. They range from all purpose sites like BlogCatalog to the numerous topic specific forums. To find a forum for your niche just visit your favorite search engine and enter the niche and the word forum, for example, golf forum or SEO forum.
Why is social networking important? Social networking is a way to get your name out there (along with your site). One of the things I have noticed is that the big name bloggers just don’t have the time to answer every question thrown at them, except through forums where they can pick and choose the topics and discussions to participate in.
Forums are a particularly good place to develop a name for yourself. Find areas where you have good knowledge of the subject matter and start to answer some of the general questions. Over a period of time you will develop a reputation for being the person with the answers. With that recognition comes the ability to answer questions through blog posts. Forum users will then add your site to their regular reading list, or better yet, subscribe to your posts or newsletters.
One word of caution. Make sure you are aware of the forum’s rules regarding the kinds of posts you are allowed to make and whether or not you can include your own sites URL. Most sites don’t mind referencing your own URL so long as it is in context and you art not spamming. Social bookmarking is a great short term method to gain traffic – social networking is much better for gaining long term traffic and building your name.
You will increase your traffic and link popularity by using social bookmarking sites.The problem is that Digg, and other big sites use the “no follow”-tag.It is important to participate in the smaller sites also which do not use this tag and allows you to have a link back to your site.