What in the world is Social Bookmarking? Social bookmarking has become a HUGE force both in internet marketing as well as mainstream culture. The wildly popular Social Networking site MySpace sold to News Corp last year for $580 million despite having no real measurable revenue. The value placed on the site was from the enormous traffic it generates and even at over a half billion was considered a bargain. YouTube sold to Google for 1.65 billion with only 20 million in revenue. These big ticket sales just demonstrate how popular and how important such sites are. 

 Okay, enough news. How does one actually use these services to make money? First off, let me forewarn you that just like sending out B.S. emails and setting up SPAM blogs or SPLOGS as they are known online, abusing the social bookmarking services will result in getting your site banned by them and you will get exactly the opposite results from what you are seeking. With that said, I suggest you pay close attention to what I talk about in this report as well as some of the resources that I am going to suggest to you.

Like many online marketers I am always on the lookout for new techniques and methods for driving free traffic to my sites and try to reduce the use of methods such as PPC (pay-per-click) and co-registration promotions. If you can get enough of your target keyword pages to show up in the top of the major search engines you just about have a license to print money without having to put out any of your own.

There are quite a few bookmarking sites out there but for the purposes of using them for internet marketing we are going to focus on a few of the more popular such as Del.icio.us, Furl, Digg, Spurl, and the one I really love, Technorati. There are some automated tools that I will be sharing with you later on that will help you to automate the process of bookmarking your sites.

Before we get into an overview on the sites themselves, let me give you a short definition of what social bookmarking is overall. In a nutshell, it is a way for people to bookmark their favorite places online instead of on their own computer. The difference in this method is that instead of having your favorites saved in folders on your own computer you have them saved online under certain “tags” or keywords. In addition you can also set multiple tags for an item. For example if it were an affiliate marketing site you may have “marketing, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, affiliate programs, etc.” Another aspect is that just by the nature of how the social bookmarking sites are set up, other people can also see and share your favorite sites with you. Flickr is a social bookmarking site that specializes in sharing pictures and is therefore particularly popular.

 All of the major bookmarking sites will help you to get traffic and if you have a blog you will get the greatest benefit by having constantly updating content that can then be sent to the directories when your blog updates. They love fresh and UNIQUE content. There are software plugins you can use which I will give you later that will put buttons on your blogs which make it easy for someone to recommend the articles or content from your site or blog. One of the other sites that has become extremely popular recently is Digg. The site was started by Kevin Rose for under $1,000 and now with over 400,000 members and 200 million page views is one of the largest news sites on the internet. Just to give you an idea of how big they are, their readership is almost as large as the New York Times.

One of the new things that some of the better bookmarking sites have been doing of late is ranking bookmarked pages. So how does this help you? Simple, the pages with the highest number of bookmarks are shown at the top of their lists. Just like search engine results, the higher you are in the results the better the benefit to you.

Personally, I like to give my readers a lot of options which is why I will put buttons to Del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit, Ask, Blinklist, Blogmarks, Google, Ma.gnolia, Spurl, Yahoo, and another service called Socializer that covers many more. This gives me a large coverage of all of the major sites. I will share some of the better plugins and automation software at the end of this report. In addition to the buttons that I put on my blogs I will also create “tags” for Technorati and add them to my posts. I will cover the subject of tagging in a moment. I really try to focus a lot of my efforts on Technorati because they have given me really good results. I strongly suggest that you do the same. You should also sign up for OnlyWire, it is a free service that allows you to manage multiple social bookmarking memberships from one location at OnlyWire.com.

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