Bookmark Yourself and Don’t Feel Guilty About It

Monday, October 1st, 2007

When you start your first blog, who’s going to find it? It’s silly to assume the “if you build it, they will come” ideology. It’s also silly to assume that producing great content is the only way to get an amazing increase in visitors.

Your personal network of online friends and real life friends might be large, but it just may not be large enough to give your blog to initial boost it deserves for the content you create.

With the advent of “Web 2.0″ (note the use of quotation marks), social bookmarking has become the new hot item. There are dozens of popular website out there that do this, and I imagine hundreds more that you and I don’t know about. You can use this to your advantage.

How Social Bookmarking Works

If you’re new to the social bookmarking concept, how it generally works is that these websites allow visitors to create an account and to submit or save website URLs. From there, sometimes other visitors can vote for the URL (making it more popular and more visible) or the visitor’s friends can see newly added URLs. Either way, it’s pretty straight-forward. If you use this, it’s a way to get your best articles out there.

Promote Social Bookmarking On Your Blog

A really great tool for this is AddThis available at AddThis.com. What it does is it allows you to supply your visitors with an easy button that lets THEM share your website and articles with their preferred social bookmarking website. Two people digging (Digg.com) your article and much better then a single person digging your article. Again, if a visitor socially bookmarks your article and his friend manages to visit your website because of it, wonderful.

Tip: If you’re looking for how to validate your AddThis URL and Javascript, replace all instances of & with &.

Bookmark, bookmark, bookmark

Start accounts with as many services as you prefer. With AddThis on your blog, it’ll make it easier to bookmark your own content too.

Don’t forget:

Actively participate in these websites as well. If people perceive you as a giant blog-spamming leech, you won’t get very far.
Exercise moderation. Do you really need to bookmark an article about the nice stew you just cooked? Think to yourself, will someone else think this is interesting?

Why You Shouldn’t Feel Bad

Users at these social bookmarking websites will be very critical of your work. If your article is perceived as trash by the community, you won’t be assaulting hundreds of eyes with your terrible content. Besides, it’s not like you’re writing articles every hour is it?

Sometimes it’s hard to figure out whether your article talks about a new, hot topic or if you’re just rehashing old content. You’re not hurting anyone by submitting content you sincerely think would help someone else out.

Hope that helps Bye for now.