What Is Social Bookmarking and How Can It Benefit Your Online Business?

What is social bookmarking and is this phenomenon really something that can boost your online business? As with most internet marketing techniques, especially the ones that are widely discussed in forums and message boards online, social bookmarking has received a great deal of hype for being an effective way to drive traffic and visitors to your website. Is this really the case? In this article we will discuss the true value of bookmarking, explain what it is, and how you can use it to benefit your online business with reasonable expectations. In fact, social bookmarking is simply a term for describing a website or service that allows you to "bookmark" interesting stories, articles, postings or links that you have found and read elsewhere online in order to share them with others on the bookmarking site. So basically, the original idea behind bookmarking is that internet users share their good content with the rest of the online community, which of course, is a nice thing. In most cases, the readers can vote for a story or link that they find particularly interesting, and by doing so the popularity of the story or link in question increases. Having this said, it comes as no surprise that many internet marketers also have realized the potential of bookmarking their very own websites and links. By doing this they can expect to get more traffic and exposure for their websites and products or services. Over the last couple of years, the popularity of bookmarking has exploded, and the search term "social bookmarking" alone yields some 135,000 searches each and every month on Google. But does not the overuse, or perhaps even misuse, of bookmarking lead to a devaluation of its importance in terms of getting traffic and search engine rankings? Well, yes. In the early days of bookmarking there were only a handful of websites that provided such services, today there are thousands, and the number of submissions to these sites are huge in numbers. Webmasters today can not expect traffic avalanches while using bookmarking, in fact, it is more likely that their submitted stories and links never will be read! So, if this is the case, is there any point in doing social bookmarking for marketing purposes? The answer is yes! First off, creative writers still may have a good chance at getting top voted stories, which in turn will result in decent traffic. A top rated story on a social bookmarking site like Digg for instance may lead to thousands of new visitors almost instantly. Secondly, many social bookmarking sites today achieve a great page rank and a high authority in the eyes of Google and other major search engines. This may help your website and online business rank better in the search results which in turn may lead to more traffic and sales. Finally, some social bookmarking sites also include some additional features like a social network where readers can friend each other, or the sites may for instance provide extended sharing options. This can lead to an almost viral replication of your promotional links. So, in summary, the answer to the question if social bookmarking really can benefit your online business is certainly yes. Social bookmarking is completely free and there are several great submission services that also are free available online.

Check out a really cool social bookmarking site with a social network, and get started with social bookmarking today!