Social bookmarking, over the last couple of years, has risen to a highly popular level with regards to generating highly targeted traffic for your website. The web hasn’t been truly social until the last few years but the effects on this have been immediate. When you have a blog or a website which you want more people to look at, you can use social bookmarking to reach that goal. Every day this zero cost traffic and exposure generation method proves to be beneficial to more and more website and blog owners. But how do you make the most out of social bookmarking and actually get good results?

Never Use a Sales Pitch: If you want to use social bookmarking to get people to visit your website, you need to remember that most of the people who use sites like this are only looking for information and do not want to get anything else. Bookmarking your sales page on sites like this is the same thing as doing direct sales. People who use these social bookmarking sites know immediately that you are trying to make a direct sales pitch instead of helping them. This turns all of your hard work into a waste of time. Instead, what you need to do is link to a pre-sales page that will offer some real information to your target audience so that you can warm up potential buyers before you send them on to your real sales page.

Stay Ahead of Everyone: Social bookmarking is catching up with everybody since it’s a highly effective way to promote your website, which is why you have to be aware of your competition and stay ahead of it. You have to stay alert when you use social bookmarking sites to generate traffic for yourself because even a little bit of leniency will give away some of your ground to your competitors. For example, when you choose “dog training” as your niche, keep giving away valuable and useful information that they can put into action right away. This will allow you to compete with all of the other site owners who are also trying to use social bookmarking to generate targeted traffic.

Use a Profile Picture: When you make use of sites like Digg and Reddit, you will see that other users identify you by the profile picture you use so you need to make sure that the one you use is eye catching. Even though your profile picture may not seem to be a big deal, it does make a difference. It can make you seem more believable and your profile will seem more interesting. No matter what type of marketing initiative you take, you need to concentrate on getting the best reaction possible from the users. Boring doesn’t help sell anything because, obviously, boring is not the same thing as interesting.

Is it Noteworthy?: It is users who make social bookmarking function well. Seriously. You will get all sorts of votes if you are able to impress the users of these sites by offering up something newsworthy. Offering something worth sharing to your audience is your primary goal in this situation. Offering content that isn’t worthy of the news will only get you negative votes. Before you submit any form of content ask yourself if that content is actually worth it. Will it benefit the other site users? While social bookmarking sites have the potential to give you long term traffic, that traffic depends entirely on the effort that you are making yourself.

In conclusion, from the above article we come to understand how social bookmarking can prove to be a powerful medium for any website that’s looking for extra exposure.