Along with social networking sites, there are now a number of social bookmarking sites on the Internet. While social networking sites build upon relationships between members, social bookmarking sites create connections through the types of content generated by members. It is these connections that make social bookmarking such an effective business tool for Internet entrepreneurs especially.

Whether you’ve been following my journal on becoming a WAHM Baby Boomer all along, or are new to blogging, there’s always something new to learn about online business strategies.  The Web 2.0 field is evolving constantly, and there are many things you should be aware of.

Social Media Optimization

Maybe you have read a blog post or article on someone’s website. At the end of each of my articles or blog posts, you’ll see that I have a host of different social media icons that will enable you to favor the article to different sites.  Run your cursor over them and names like Technorati, Digg, Reddit, and Delicious pop up.  Some blogs have characters that represent the same social bookmarking sites.  What are these characters and what do the names mean?

These are links to social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking is much like what you would do with an actual bookmark. Physical bookmarks are used to mark a page or a passage that you want to find again at some point. This goes for social bookmarking icons as well. If someone wants to find that particular article again or let others know about it, they can bookmark the address on a site and mark it with keywords for future reference.

Not all social media sites are the same. The principle is the same across the board, but some social bookmarking sites specialize in different media.

Squidoo specializes in creating lenses that showcase an area of expertise of the lens owner. On my right sidebar, you’ll see that I’m a Squidoo Lensmaster and have created many different Squidoo Lenses in my areas of expertise.

Flickr concentrates on photos, and many of the photography blog authors that I visit will upload their photos to that site.  Some bookmarking sites deal with movie or music reviews in contrast.

Before choosing a social media strategy, find a site that caters to the content or type of business that you conduct. That will draw the most traffic to your business. If there is more than one, then join all that apply. One thing to remember is to create content that people will be interested in and use to track back to your business website. Remember that your site readers will mark your pages and posts on these sites because they find them informative and useful and think others will too.

Through quality content, a business owner can easily create a nice following of readers and possibly higher search engine rankings with the use of social bookmarking sites. For the purpose of content, look around the more popular bookmarking sites and see what others are viewing and find interesting and useful. That is the type of content you want to focus on with your websites. Investigating the more popular social bookmarking sites will make it easy to track down competitors and find out what your target market deems as useful information. Using these bookmarking sites will increase the visibility of your content and make it easier to market to your specific target customer or reader.

You’ll also be able to see that I’ve added on bottom footer links to various blog directories.

Social bookmarking is a simple, but effective way to bring traffic to a business website. Add bookmarking icons to your blog or website to help increase the chances of someone adding it to their favorite list of content.

© C. Matthews 2010

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1. Facebook Tutorial: Social RSS Helps to Promote Your Blog or Business
2. How to Make Your Blog More Social: WP Plug-Ins to Help Your Social Network
3. Tips to Amplify Your Social Media Presence on the Web
4. Social Networking And Twitter Tips
5. Facebook Tutorial Series: How to Create a Winning Facebook Fan Page For Your Blog or Business