In Can I Get My Blog Noticed Without Digg’s Help? I asked whether social sites were indeed the "silver bullet" to quickly gain a large and lasting audience for a fledgling blog.  To test the theory I proposed using my own blog to measure the impact produced by different techniques.  Last week we discussed how to track changes in your blog’s popularity.  Today we’ll explore pragmatic approaches to active social bookmarking, to test if they will increase your blog’s audience.

Step 3 – Bookmarking

Why Active Social Bookmarking?

Before using active social bookmarking techniques you must first understand what you are hoping to achieve with them.   Toprankblog describes active bookmarking as:

For more aggressive online marketers, waiting for visitors to find your content and then decide to bookmark isn’t enough. Building up profiles and networks of friends to introduce and share content with can drive great traffic that folds well with an active bookmarking strategy. Creating content and then purposefully sharing and promoting it with likeminded networks provides value to the community and also enhances content distribution.

While I wouldn’t class myself as aggressive marketer, I believe an active bookmarking approach could help my blog gain some public awareness while it is too small to be easily found by natural means i.e. search engines and contextual links from other sites.  So my goals for using active bookmarking are:

• Improve SEO through the creation of DoFollow links
• Increase referrals from bookmark site users utilising summary page, tag page or search facilities on the sites I am using
• Make it easier for my readers to bookmark my content by seeding descriptions, tags, and titles that should be used for posts (i.e. help specify "recommended tags" to appear during the bookmarking process)

Where Should I Bookmark?

There are hundreds of social bookmarking sites available so manually submitting to all of them would be extremely tedious, and absorb significant amounts of time you should be using to generate content. 

To pick my bookmark site shortlist I’ve decided to examine social bookmarking submission tools first, then choose sites that are compatible with those tools.  Additional criteria for selecting sites:

• Prioritise sites generating DoFollow links
• Prioritise sites with better PageRank and Alexa ratings, and have a sizeable and active user base
• Avoid sites that include adult material
• Avoid sites that appear overrun with advertising or are merely link exchange sites
• Avoid sites where technology focused bookmarks or English content will not be appropriate

The criteria are aligned with my previously stated goals, and are intended to increase bookmark relevance to the community while avoiding sites that would negatively impact SEO.

What Should I Bookmark?

There are three main items you should bookmark:

1. Your blog’s homepage
2. Permalinks for each blog post
3. Pages likely to attract visitors

Most popularity tracking tools consider a single URL rather than a complete site or directory tree.  These measures can have a knock-on effect (i.e. influence sites that may generate secondary traffic for your blog) so it is worth bookmarking all content that might lead a visitor to your website.

How Should I Bookmark?

There are three main approaches I could use here:

1. Automatic submission via software or a service
2. Assisted submission via web based services
3. Manually submission

Option 1 normally means buying software or paying for a service, which I’m not ready to do until I’m convinced the approach has merit.  Option 3 is impractical so I’ll be considering assisted submission sites during the remainder of this article.

After examining options suggested by Toprankblog, LiewCF and others, I’ve selected the following tools:

1. SocialPoster supports a variety of bookmarking sites, and lists the PageRank, Alexa rating, registration link and login links for each making it easier to choose appropriate sites.  Functionality is simple to use and effective..
   Note: The generator page still works after being saved by the Scrapbook Firefox extension, allowing you to save your preferred sites in your Scrapbook.
2. PostToaster supports an extensive range of bookmarking sites including a number not available on SocialPoster. It also provides a Bookmark and DoFollow selection options to simplify choosing appropriate sites.  This is a beta site and its functionality is less polished than SocialPoster, though it is effective as well.

Other tools considered:

• Socialmarker looked promising but didn’t have any compelling features or bookmark site choices beyond those listed above.  I’ll keep this as a backup in case either service is discontinued or encounters issues.
• OnlyWire is an automatic submission service (option 1 above) that I expected to become my first choice.  Unfortunately it is ineffective, with multiple attempts to use the tool failing to bookmark against any of my selected sites.
• Socializer only submits the Title and URL to each bookmarking site so it would require considerable manual effort to add tags and description information using this tool.  I need this information posted to meet all of my goals listed previously.

You still need to manually register for and sign into each bookmarking site to use the submission tools chosen so it pays to be selective.  Below is a table containing the available bookmarking sites I’ve chosen to use, along with which tools support them and whether they use NoFollow on their links (based upon advice from PostToaster).

Step 4 – Check Popularity

I’ve only started implementing active social bookmarking techniques today so will not be able to report on their impact until next week’s post.  The blog’s popularity hasn’t changed significantly in the past week, with any changes easily explained by organic growth and posting of new content.

Next Steps

Next steps are to continue active social bookmarking, monitor any progress and devise an approach for submitting posts to social news sites.  I hope to see you back here next week as we continue our experiment into getting a fledgling blog noticed!

Updates:

• Simpy has been removed from the bookmarking site selections because of site stability issues, its recent refusal to accept new bookmarks, and influx of marketing/spam.
• Please note that to gain the DoFollow links offered by various bookmarking sites you often have to adjust account settings to publish your links. Without making this setting change there will likely be no improvements to your site’s audience size.