Marketing on Social Bookmarking Sites

When Tag and Ping was released, the potential to destroy or at least disrupt a perfectly clean environment (social bookmarking sites) was born.

Now, I promote Tag and Ping as an incredible marketing tool and have been calling the social bookmarking phenomenon “Social Power Linking” for awhile.

The potential for great, new targeted traffic streams is massive.  And proven, now that marketers other than me have seen the results of participating in social bookmarking sites first hand.

But with every new marketing tool or system that actually works and is very powerful in the right hands, there is always a caution:  respect the tools and the communities they help you reach out to with your information!

The key to success with social bookmarking and tagging is caring and ethics.

Spamming places like jots.com and digg.com will not work.  You will get flamed, buried, and loyal readers of such sites will despise you.

Search engines WILL enact a no follow rule by the end of this year as a result of people spamming the many social bookmarking hubs, there is no question about this.

So just spamming to get links on high ranking pages will be a moot point.

The most important point is that interacting with and playing by the rules set by the blogoshpere when it comes to tagging will bring you vast rewards over spamming the directories with links having no clear intention of respecting the community in which those links show up.

Philip Nicholson, a writer for 4webresults.com, writes this about social bookmarking: 

“What’s going to make advertising to social networks effective is to engage the audience, and the audience will be engaged by targeted advertising and interactivity.”

That certainly is true for places like Digg.com.  Post something well thought out and you will get some action on your site and at Digg.com itself as readers “digg” your story and check out your site for more information.

Conversely, if you mess with that community and post cruddy content or irrelevant content, they will literally bury you from showing up on any pages of significance on their network.

Google only WISHES it had the same power of human edited content! 

If you want to learn more about social bookmarking for marketers, check out my Tag and Ping post and grab a free audio podcast with me interviewing Sean Wu, the author of Tag and Ping.