Many of the social bookmarking sites are considered to be "authority sites" by Google. Google sends out their spider robots to crawl these sites on a very frequent basis. This means that the bots will find your site quickly and Big G will index your site. (For more information on spider robots, indexing and authority sites please see my SEO section.)

Each bookmark will be seen by Google as a keyword based backlink to your site. It is believed that obtaining one way backlinks to your site is the most critical thing you can do to increase your rankings in the search engines.

Keeping it Simple

Just for the sake of sheer simplicity let's start by breaking social marketing into three segments; Content Creation, Social Bookmarking and RSS Feeds.

Finding the free traffic is all about creating content. There are many ways you can go about creating content. You can write articles and submit them to Ezine Articles and hundred of other article directories. You can create content on Blogger and WordPress blogs. You can create pages on Hubpages or a lens on Squidoo. Videos are an excellent source for creating content as well, and can be uploaded to You Tube and many other video outlets for massive exposure.

The second segment is social bookmarking. Sites such as Digg, Technorati and Propeller will allow you to set up a free account to store your bookmarks on their site. It's just like bookmarking a site within your browser when you are searching the web. The difference is that the public can see your bookmarks on these sites and your bookmark serves as a backlink to the site you bookmarked. So hopefully other visitors to the public bookmarking sites will see your bookmark and check it out for themselves.

The third segment is RSS (Really Simple Syndication). This is the one that I had the most difficult time grasping. The easiest way to think of the RSS is that it is sort an announcement service. Many of the sites that you will create your content on will offer the RSS option. They will provide you with a special rss url that you can submit to the RSS Aggregators (directories). These aggregators will distribute the link to your content to anybody that has directly subscribed to your rss feed, or to others who are looking for information on your subject matter.

Let's take a look at each segment in more detail...

Content Creation

It is well known that creating content is one of the best ways to drive traffic and turn profits on the web. For those just starting out and on a low budget it is about the only way to drive traffic. Please also see the Article Marketing Section of this site for additional information on creating content.  You will also be glad to learn that there is more you can do with your content than submit it to article directories.

You can publish your articles and/or videos on a blog. You can publish your content on a Squidoo Lens, or maybe a Hub Page. Google, Yahoo and MSN all have areas where you can publish content. You can post to forums and make comments in blogs. Video content can drive unbelievable amounts of traffic, and You Tube isn't the only game in town. There are many other video sites where you can submit your content. The places where you can publish your content are as never ending as the internet itself.

Your content should all be produced based on the keywords you wish to rank for, and all of your content should contain backlinks to the site(s) you are promoting. But this section is not a lesson on how to produce your content. I want you to just understand that there are many sites out there that want you to post your content.

Bookmarking

If you have been surfing the web for any amount of time, then you are probably familiar with bookmarking your favorite websites that you have come across. Firefox refers to the action as bookmarking, Internet Explorer refers to it as "adding favorites", and I think AOL uses the term of "Favorite Places", although I can't remember for sure. At any rate, any browser you use will have a means for bookmarking your favorite sites. Of course the reason for bookmarking is that you will now have the link to go directly to that site/page. It eliminates the need to search for it again in the future.

When you bookmark a site within your browser you are doing it on a personal level. Only you or others using your computer have access to those bookmarks. Social bookmarking is just a matter of bookmarking those sites in a public directory. When people run across a piece of content that they found useful or interesting, they will bookmark the page publicly so others can find it easily too.

These public bookmarks benefit you in two ways. First you will see some traffic from visitors on the Social Bookmarking directories. They will see your site bookmarked and if they are interested they will click the link there and come to your site. Secondly you will have a backlink (a link back to your site) on the bookmarking directory site and this will help you in your search engine rankings.

So the objective here is to have others view your content and encourage them to bookmark it in a directory. The fact is that you can submit any url to a bookmarking directory. You just copy it from your browser, login to your social bookmarking site and paste the link in the submission box. But many of the places where you create your content will make it easy for the viewers of the content to bookmark the page by placing plugins or widgets on the page. The image below is a screen shot of a Go Articles page.



What you are seeing is the bottom of the article page. All a viewer needs to do is click on one of the bookmarking site links. They will then be taken to that site and can login and bookmark the article page as something they think would be useful to others, or as a way to get back to the page themselves. No need to copy the url as it is entered automaticall upon successful login to the bookmaking site.

To see how this process works I suggest that you go to one of the bookmarking sites and set up an account. Then go through the process of bookmarking a site. You can find the above widget on any Go Articles page. Click the link of the site where you setup your bookmarking account and bookmark the page.

Now here is a comment you probably won't here on to many other websites. The truth is that unless you are creating exceptionally interesting content, you are not likely to see a tremendous amount of traffic from social bookmarking sites.

So Why Bother?

By bookmarking at so many sites, the traffic will add up and can be significant. So while it may not be enough to crash your visitor logs, it's nothing to turn your nose up at either. I just don't want you to have the impression that placing a couple bookmarks is going to turn your traffic spigot wide open. It's not quite that easy.

Secondly, you never know when you might just be creating that one piece of content that goes viral in a big way. If that happens folks will be beating a path to your site and that can mean a major payday. I wouldn't count on that happening though.

The main reason I use social bookmarking is because I get at least one backlink for every bookmark I place. As I stated earlier, backlinks are a very important ingredient in your SEO soup. For this reason I suggest that you bookmark your money site as well.

With all of that being said, it is wise to encourage your visitors to bookmark your site. If you can convince enough people to do so, then you can find your bookmark listed in a very favorable, high traffic area on the bookmarking directories, and that can mean serious traffic volume.

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