Timing is everything, at least that is what I have been told. It seems to be true then it comes to social bookmarking as well.

Do you know where your ‘friends’ on any of the social bookmarking sites. For many sites such as Digg, they say you have 24 hours for your post to get noticed, after that forget it. For Digg, it can often be as short as 12 hours.

If your in the UK and many of your followers are in the US, when would be the most appropriate time to submit your post. Social bookmarking can be tricky. You can submit a post and get zero response one day and then next day get a flood for a different post.

Timing can be important, both in what time you submit and on which day. Some days do seem to perform better than others depending on the genre and your target audience. It is only by trial and error that you can determine the times and days that produce the best results for your genre.

As a general rule, social bookmarking across the board is more active between 10am and 3pm US Eastern Time and between 8pm and 11pm. Weekdays appear to be active than weekends. Different genres will produce different active periods and it seems that weekends are more likely to see page one activity for topics that generally don’t get a look in during week days.

There is no hard and fast rule for submitting to social bookmarking sites, however, if you can find an ideal time then make the most of it.

Blog marketing can be interesting particularly as we humans are a strange race. If there is a road accident, we cannot help but slow down and take a look. When it comes to many of the social sites, the same can be true. When a topic becomes popular, people will have a look, even if the subject matter doesn’t particularly interest them.

The best place to undertake any blog marketing campaign is when you have a crowd gathered. Sometimes you need to be a little like a hot dog vendor who always seems to know where a crowd is going to develop.

Perhaps your blog marketing hasn’t reached that stage, however you certainly don’t want to be marketing to an empty room. Being able to get into any of the social sites and read where the trends are going, what topics are heating up and which ones are cooling off can be a worthwhile art to learn. Being able to place yourself so that you capitalize on any opportunities is an even harder art to master.

Master these two areas of social bookmarking and you will find that blog marketing through social sites is much easier and the results more than worth the effort.

Social bookmarking is a popular way to get your blog posts out into the broader online community and StumbleUpon is one the most popular bookmarking sites available. However, if you occasionally thumb your own posts, be careful you don’t end up in the Stumble graveyard.

StumbleUpon can really provide your blog with a boost in traffic. When it comes to social bookmarking, get a couple of thumbs up and if your lucky, you will get a steady stream of traffic. However, to get that traffic the thumbs up  or ’stumble’ has to be done the right way.

I have seen many good posts killed because they were not stumbled correctly. The person who ‘discovers’ your post by thumbing it has to also provide a review. If they fail to write a review, the stumble ends up in the graveyard.  There are many theories as to why this happens but the general consensus is that for the first stumble, a review is required. If no review is offered then the stumble sits in limbo continuing to wait for that first review. Social bookmarking is fine, if everyone follows the rules.

If you get one of your social bookmarking friends to ’stumble’ one of your posts, make sure they also write a review. If you stumble it yourself, don’t be afraid to write that review. Some bloggers seem to shy away from writing reviews for their own posts, however this is the easiest way to kill the post.

Social bookmarking is a great way to meet people and promote yourself. It can also cause problems. I am waiting for the day that individuals start to abuse this stumble gliche to effectively kill posts from their competition.  Perhaps the powers that be at StumbleUpon can find a way around the problem.

Too many bloggers ignore the real power of social bookmarking when it comes to SEO and SERP benefits. There are distinct benefits from social media marketing particularly social bookmarking.

Sites that are bookmarked are often spidered much more frequently than a humble blog. That frequency can be hourly compared daily. To have a post ranked within an hour or two of posting can be important, particularly if you are trying to break a story and beat others to the punch.

The most effective social bookmarking sites for SEO purposes are StumbleUpon, Digg, del.icio.us and technorati. Don’t however limit yourself to these sites as other dedicated sites such as Sphinn are often just as quick.

When it comes to social bookmarking, content is king. The aim of any social bookmarking strategy is to get other users to ‘vote’ on your post using the sites voting pattern. For SU its a thumbs up and for Digg, well its a dig of course. These votes are a mark of popularity, the more popular the post is, the faster it will be ’seen’ by the search engines. With a post that is also optimized well in the use and placement of keywords the position within the search engine results can be maintained for an extended period of time.

Over time your post may well lose the top spot, in may in fact disappear of the front page altogether. That is fine. You have had your hit. While the topic was hot your post was as the top of the results. Once the topic goes off the boil the number of searches will reduce. Time to move on to the next ‘hot’ topic.
If you wear badges on your posts, eg, number of Diggs, Sphinns etc, it can become viral with people voting on Sphinn to outdo the Digg count. One social bookmarking site is rarely enough to get to number one. You need to work the rounds and get a boost from a number of sites. Likewise, you will not get voted on for every post. Pick your posts, pick your moments, then get the boost while its there to be picked.

Social bookmarking seems to be dividing into two distinct groups who are then using social bookmarking sites for different reasons.

The first group join social bookmarking sites that best reflect their genre and their interests. They interact within that social community slowly developing a group of friends (or at least acquaintances). Bookmarking is done on the basis of quality and interests and does not often reflect their own sites content. These users are more like your social butterflies in the offline world. If they find something new and interesting they like to be the first to tell others.

Part of this online socializing includes visiting other blogs from within your sphere of friends. If an article stands out then you will signal that fact to others by flagging it in someway. This then sets of a chain reaction where your friends refer that article to their friends. This of course is the viral principle at work.

The second group join as many sites as possible and make as many friends as possible. Their aim is to promotes their own content and get as much traffic to their site as quickly as possible. The quality of the article is not considered, in fact almost every article is either thumbed, dugg or flagged in some way in the hope that it will go ‘viral’.

Smart operators have found a way to have a foot in both camps. They sign up to as many good social bookmarking sites as possible. Spend as much time as they can to socialize and build a network. Once established, they then start to promote their own articles, often by getting their closest ‘friends’ to flag the article for them.

Which camp are you in? Social bookmarking that has been done carefully and with consideration to the friends list will generally drive more quality traffic, traffic that will stay and read and perhaps even subscribe.

Traffic that is driven from an artificially created viral exercise may be useful in pushing up the articles authority and search engine rankings. The traffic generated in this manner will generally have a high bounce rate and a very low conversion rate.

What is your preference? The buzz created from a close group of ‘friends’ that generates a reasonable conversion rate, or the buzz created from an artificial viral campaign that may boost your search engine ranking but has a low conversion rate?

Both can be effective. By gaining a higher search engine ranking the traffic derived will be quality traffic with a potentially high conversion rate. If you are smart, and can have one foot firmly planted in both camps, you will have the best of all worlds. A viral campaign that brings in traffic with a moderate conversion rate whilst boosting your search engine rankings. This intern leads to further traffic with higher conversion rates. Learn to work both ends of the social bookmarking scene. There are plenty of benefits to be gained.

The number of social bookmarking sites that have not gone the no follow route is slowly declining with Flickr the latest to join the no follow list. The seems to be an unhealthy interest in whether or not sites, social bookmarking sites included, use the follow or no follow tags. It seems that everyone is looking for rank juice rather than publishing for a audience.

Don’t get me wrong. Link building is important and if you can get inbound links with no follow tags then your ranking is going to be marginally affected. However when it comes to social bookmarking sites then is more value in what other are saying about your pages than a simple no follow link.

If your articles are bookmarked in a variety of social bookmarking sites then the search engines are going to notice you far quicker than by a simple spider crawl. If your article or page has been bookmarked by many then articles ranking climbs. Add to this the tags that are added to your page when it is bookmarked and the area of relevance is broadened. If I bookmarked this article with ’social bookmarking’ tags then that is one area. You come along and like this article and bookmark it but the tags you use are SEO and Linking. The article now has three points of reference. Each point of reference is reinforced every time someone bookmarks the page.

Whether or not the links have a follow or no follow tag, the search engines will still find the page within the social bookmarking sites and still reference them. I have had pages published, submitted to a site and been indexed by Google within two hours - the index is to one of the bookmarking sites, but that link still leads eventually to my page.

If you really want a social bookmarking site that does not use the no follow then check the following. From what I can see they don’t use the tag, however things are changing almost daily.

Furl
Propeller
Digg
Technorati
Slashdot

When planning your blog content, do you write naturally, or do you plan for a particular audience? There is nothing wrong with either style, however, if you write to a particular audience, how effective are you.

If your blog content is aimed towards a particular social media audience, do you write for one particular outlet, or do you write in the hope of targeting them all? Each outlet has a particular leaning.  Skellie wrote a post on Problogger today that pretty much summed up the target areas for blog content on Digg Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.

……Each service likes certain types of content and dislikes others. Digg likes mass appeal. Del.icio.us likes anything its users like, but an item won’t go popular unless the source page gets thousands of hits.

If you’re in a niche without mass appeal, SU can help you where the other services won’t. Digg’s categories are deliberately broad to avoid diluting its power to send waves of traffic……

If you are writing to target these social bookmarking sites then you need to have a thorough understanding of what is required.

Where I do take issue with this philosophy is that it can be difficult to write to this market every day.  Often it is more fruitful to write naturally on topics you understand and are completely comfortable with. Along the way you are going to have some good articles; some articles may be so so; and every now and then, an A++ article. When you strike that A++, you need to examine it carefully to see which social bookmarking site you can target, then fully optimize the article for that site. Hopefully you can then reap the benefit.

While waiting for that A++ article in your blog content, be active in each of your target social bookmarking sites. Promote the articles of other. They will come to appreciate your daily articles and when one of those articles shine, they will help promote it for. Try to get them to promote your post every day and they will become jaded and turn off.

Your blog content is very important. Your target audience is very important. It stands to reason that your blog content is written to satisfy you target audience.

Social bookmarking has to be the most cost effective way to promote your blog. The cost in dollar terms can be nil. The cost in time can be minimal once you are established. The rewards can be huge compared to other forms of blog promotion.

One of the biggest mistakes that new bloggers make is to try and get on the Digg or Stumbleupon hit parade. If you can get on the front page of Digg or get a good surge from Stmbleupon then sure, you are in for a fun ride. However  your bounce rate is likely to be huge, your click through rate low; and the
long term affects on traffic can be negligible.

If you are prepared to take your time, research several of the social bookmarking sites to get the feel for them and then spend some time getting to know the players, your long term traffic can be boosted; it will be quality targeted traffic as well.

By fostering relationships within these sites you will slowly build subscriber numbers and just as importantly slowly develop backlinks. With the increase in backlinks comes the increase in recognition by search engines and with that development comes the increase in quality targeted traffic.

The key to successful social bookmarking is to get to know the important people on these sites, promote yourself to them by visiting their blogs and leaving thoughtful and appropriate messages. Don’t jump in and add them to your contacts. Become known first. Don’t throw every article you write into the mix; promote your best articles. Finally, respect the other  players; promote their articles only when they deserve promoting; don’t promote articles to become popular. You will gain a reputation for being selective in what you promote, what you submit and who you befriend. Your opinion will start will be valued.

Compared to other forms of blog marketing, social bookmarking can be very productive and very cost effective.

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.

In an earlier post we wrote about the benefits of Social Bookmarking. What if I told you that with the press of one button you could send your plog or each post to over 30 different social bookmarking sites? I have come across one tool that does it all for you.

Social Marker from socialmarker.com is a powerful little tool that can be added to the browser or inserted onto your blog - there is also a WordPress plugin available. For Social Marker to work you need to sign up to each of the sites listed. This will take roughly an hour if you wish to sign up to all 31 sites. If your like me, you have probably signed up for a lot of the sites already. You also have the option to select which sites you do (or don’t) want to include.

You will also need to install a tool onto your browsers toolbar or insert the buttons code onto your web or blog page. If you have the toolbar button in place then you only have to select the pages URL, press the button and away it goes. It takes 5 to 10 minutes and your post has been submitted to all sites. Installing the button enables your visitors to quickly submit your page as well.

Why use a tool like this? Social Bookmarking sites provide very quick back links to your posts. The more back links you can acquire the better your Page Rank is going to be. The added benefit of course is that your page or your post will be available to over 30 communities - instantly. If you get just 5 visitors from each of these sites, that is 150 extra visitors - all for 10 minutes work submitting your post. The following is the list of sites that you can currently submit to.

It’s the new year and like most fearless forecasts, there are a lot of website predictions coming out like the 40 Plus 2008 Web Predictions presented by authors of ReadWriteWeb.  

Here at BlogMarketingJournal, we are confident that the year 2008 will be a better year for bloggers and the blogosphere as a whole.

It will be a more fruitful blogging year for old and new bloggers alike. Here are BMJ’s Blog Predictions for 2008:

1. Blogging will be more lucrative than ever.  Those who have just started with problogging can expect an improvement in pay per post.

2. More blogging jobs will be made available. More and more people will hire bloggers to post whether for personal or corporate blogs.

3.Blogging will become a household term. It will go more mainstream and the public will know more about blogging.

4. Bloggers will be the new media. Companies, agencies, and even media outfits will look to the opinions of bloggers as part of the new media. These companies have started to realize the power of blogs and bloggers and no one’s going to stop them now.

5. Bigger blogs like Engadget, Mashable, and TechCrunch will continue to grow making a fine line between new media and mainstream.

6. Smaller blogs will continue to have revenue no matter how small.

Now there. As compared to last year, blogs will be a bigger and better thing this year as the Internet world will realize the importance of social marketing.

So here’s to a successful 2008 blogging! Cheers! Blogging rules!

When it comes to marketing your blog, there is more than one way to skin a tiger. And just in case you’re wondering, no I don’t play with tigers. They play too rough.

Nevertheless, blog marketing is something that every blogger should give some consideration to. There are different methods for marketing your blog and almost all of them can be done at no charge. Here are the most popular ways to go about blog marketing:

• SEO
• Directories
• Trackbacking
• Leaving comments on other blogs
• Social bookmarking
• Article marketing
• Guest blogging

Guest blogging is actually gaining a foothold these days. It’s becoming very popular. But one method of blog marketing that is often overlooked is social bookmarking. Many blog marketers will bookmark their entire blog and totally forget about bookmarking each blog post. I think social bookmarking each blog post is a good idea. In some cases, you can get a hundred new visitors to your blog just by bookmarking one post. Of course, I wouldn’t expect that with every post, but if you bookmark 10 posts and get a hundred new visitors on one then you’ve done well. Don’t forget about social bookmarking.

I found this list useful for social bookmarking your blog posts:

1. Look for lots of different angles
2. Spoofs are popular
3. Top 10 lists are favorites
4. No long articles or face the dreaded “TLDR”
5. Tamar suggests “eye candy with intriguing titles”
6. Videos are good; short videos are better
7. Be funny. Now!
8. Free products or coupons are big in the virtual world, too
9. Have a contest
10. Go “far out”

Essentially, if you want to be successful at social media marketing then you need to join the community first and “mill around.” Get to know the ins and outs first. Talk to people, do a little networking, find out what the biases are, the likes, and the dislikes of the members. Only after you’ve built a few relationships should you then start “marketing.” But if you do the networking part right then the marketing will take care of itself.

Based on my own experience, the blog posts that do best at the popular social bookmarking sites are the ones that meet the conditions of this list. The ones I think are the best suggestions are:

• Be funny
• Use short videos
• Top 10 lists

But not necessarily in that order.

It’s been a while since we talked about social bookmarking… you didn’t forget about it did you?  Especially if you do list type posts like we mentioned the other day, these are the perfect types of posts for sites such as StumbleUpon or Digg.

People love to “remember” things they think they may need at a later date, and if they add your post to a social site, it will grab the attention of other users.  It’s best to have someone else do it naturally, but if need be, add your posts yourself.  Either way, the whole point is getting the post out there for even more people to be able to find it.

Plan one day a week, say Friday or Saturday, where you do a “bookmarkable post”, something that is sure to be a subject people would want to come back to, and make sure it gets out there for all that lovely social traffic!

Have you added propeller.com to your list of sites to bookmark to yet? If not you definitely should.

Formerly netscape.com now renamed propeller.com while netscape.com now points to netscape.aol.com, propeller is a great place to bookmark your blog posts.

It takes a short time to submit a story, but the traffic and the search engine listings you get make it more than worthwhile.

You just go to propeller.com, click submit a story on the right hand side. Copy and paste the url of the blog post you just made, copy and paste the title in, write a short summary, pick a category, add 5 keywords as tags, and you’re done.

If you participate there, vote on some stories submitted by others, and add people as your friends, you can share the story with them and they can vote on your story bringing you higher up in the directory.

Check google in a few days. Your stories submitted to propeller will start showing up. Pretty simple.

Add propeller to your bookmarking sites and you won’t be sorry.