The only way to effectively increase your blog's popularity with social bookmarking is to spread out your endeavors across multiple social media sites. This may include Technorati, Google Links, Del.ici.ous, and Yahoo! Links where your individual articles and submissions are mentioned either within another blog, or standing alone in a particular category.
Tools such as SocialMeter can help you keep track of how well your blog or webstie is doing in the social bookmarking networks at any given time. SocialMeter scans the largest social websites and ranks them against each other based on how many times your link or website is indexed in each one. You just type in your URL and the results will run a search on each site to give you a final tally.
Badges and 'chiclets', the tools that you can add to your blog or website are very effective ways to develop your social bookmarking activity. Your blog's popularity will instantly increase because you are:
- Providing users increased interaction. You'll be surprised how many static sites that make this shift can start building traffic with very little direct marketing. Once the news spreads that you are offering this added value to your website, you can look forward to increased traffic on a regular basis.
- Making it easy to reach Digg and other social bookmarking networks hat allow users to vote. Voting and rating articles is becoming a very popular activity on the web, and if you write something particularly compelling you can start to create a traffic boost overnight.
- Increasing your exposure naturally in the social networking hemisphere. Social networking and bookmarking gives you a chance to increase your exposure tenfold; visitors who find an article worth sharing will help you reach a much more targeted and refined audience than simply publishing a website and hoping to get readers. You will be delivering your news and information with a much stronger reach.
In addition to promoting yourself on social bookmarking sites, there are some effective ways to market the blog itself. Again, this will encourage your visitors to share the 'news' from your blog on their own. Some effective strategies for blog promotion may include:
- Join an RSS submission network. These will help you submit to an even larger listing of sites, all from the RSS feeds that you create. Syndication allows you to reach a much larger audience, and building a steady list of subscribers can increase traffic flow instantly.
- Post announcements about your blog and website on forums, bulletins, and community boards. When you have identified your specific channels, start promoting yourself with news announcements, new articles, or simply an introduction to community members. Include your link and you'll easily start to drive traffic.
- Join discussion groups and forums about your industry or topic, and leave a link to your blog or website in your profile every time you post.
