Social bookmarking is something that I do on a regular basis to promote my sites, drive traffic, and get the post indexed in Google. When I first started blogging, I had no inclination of what social bookmarking could do for a site. After I write a post, I submit the post to Digg and StumbleUpon. There are other social bookmarking sites to submit to but these are the main two that I use right after a post.

There are other social bookmarking sites that I use but it’s through Socialbot. Socialbot is a program from Incansoft that allows you to submit your blog or post to multiple social bookmarking sites. Socialbot is very inexpensive at a whopping $29.95 for a lifetime license. Big Mike, the creator of Socialbot does run specials from time to time and if you visit the Warrior Forum, you might find a discount.

What are the benefits of social bookmarking?

Traffic

First and most importantly, it drives traffic to your site. Traffic is the most important aspect when you are trying to make money online and building an online presence. If you don’t have traffic to your site, you aren’t going to make any money. Social bookmarking traffic is usually targeted which means that these users are probably looking for information in your niche. If other social bookmarkers find your bookmark helpful, they might bookmark your article and drive even more traffic to your site. The sky is the limit!

Backlinks

Having backlinks to your site will give you more authority and help you rank higher with search engines. Backlinks are like roads leading back to your site, the more you have the better. The backlinks you create for your site should be relevant to your niche to increase popularity. I will get more in depth in a later post about backlinks.

Authority

The more authority you have, the higher you will rank in search engines. When you site becomes popular, it will show up more in search engines. Authority also keeps your visitors coming back to your site for more information.

Conclusion

Social bookmarking should be a part of every Internet Marketers arsenal. It’s a great free way to drive traffic, build backlinks, and build authority. Without traffic, backlinks, and authority, it’s like taking a bath in a swamp, it just won’t be very good.

There are many ways to direct traffic to your site, but one that I have found to be very effective is Yahoo Answers. If you have ever been to Yahoo Answers, you will notice that there are tons of questions being asked about various topics.

Over two years ago, I was religiously on Yahoo Answers helping users remove malware from their computer. I was shocked at how many users are infected with malware on a daily basis. I helped so many people remove their malware, but never thought about leaving a link in the resource box to my tech blog.

One day I was going through my tech blog stats and noticed that I had traffic coming from Yahoo Answers. Someone found a post of mine called Ten Signs You Have a Computer Virus and added it to the Yahoo answer resource box. Now I have traffic coming to this particular post on a daily basis.

As you can see, using Yahoo Answers can be a very lucrative traffic resource. The great thing about Yahoo Answers is that the topics are very specific and you can receive laser-targeted traffic to your site or your offer. For example, a user answers a question about treating acne and you happen to have an acne site with affiliate offers. You can answer the users question and leave a link to the affiliate offer or to your site.

Always remember to provide helpful and useful information. This shows that you are sincere and genuine; which means more people will click on your link. Don’t just say, “hey check this out it will help.” Be smooth! Be sincere! Be helpful! Say acne is something like, “I have battled in my teen years. Occasionally my face will break out and I have found this eBook to be very helpful in treating acne.” Then provide your affiliate link or link to your site. It’s that simple.

Yahoo Answers is a great resource to drive targeted traffic to your site. Your answers and links will be archived and when someone visits the answers, your links will show up. This means that the traffic from Yahoo Answers will be long term and not short term.

Over the past few weeks, I have been trying to create a few Blogger blogs so I don’t have to keep buying domain names.  I had one Blogger blog about two years ago and everything was fine, but boy have things changed.  Before I could get things set up and put up some content, my blog was flagged as spam.

I did some keyword research using Micro Niche Finder and found a few keywords that I wanted to use in my Blogger URL.  I went to Blogger and logged into my old account to create an investing blog (I love the stock market).  I went through the blog creation process and the blog was published.

I then went to write some content, which took about 20 minutes, and when I went back to my account to publish my article, it was flagged as spam.  This really pissed me the fuck off because I just created the blog and it didn’t even have any content.  I submitted my blog to Google to be reviewed but I haven’t heard anything back from them.  I did some research and it turns out that this is very common now.  Google has been trying to clean up some of the so called SPLOGS that are all over the net.  They do have a four-step process that I didn’t feel like going through because after reading the Google Forums, the average waiting time was long.  A few rare cases got resolved rather quickly but one that really upset me was a mom that posted memoirs of her kids so friends and family could view them.  The blog was private so only a select few could see it and BAM…it was flagged as spam and deleted immediately.  The woman was pleading and begging for someone to help her and about 15 posts later, someone finally answered her.

The morale of this story is to go for paid hosting.  With paid hosting blogs, you don’t have to worry about getting your blog deleted.  My blogs run on WordPress and the flexibility is truly amazing.  I will no longer be trying to create Blogger blogs because the risk outweighs the reward.