The Authentic Life: Social Bookmarking Tips and other thoughts

Friday, December 9, 2011

Social Bookmarking Tips and other thoughts

Social Bookmarking can sometimes be exhausting. I have been doing it for a little while. I started out doing it on facebook and twitter. These are usually the first two places people go to social bookmark. I think one important rule on facebook is not to post your new blogs posts, or any article more than once. Your family and friends will like to see it once, but won't want to be bombarded with repeated posts.

They are your family and friends and should stay that way. You don't want to start ticking someone off. As it is if you are sending them lots of articles, they probably won't be able to catch up as it is. And they probably will never read them all. But, seeing as they are your loved ones and friends, you don't want to force things on them. They will read things if they are interested.

I have recently heard that you can tweet your popular links to twitter more than once. It sounds like some people go into twitter at peak times of the day and tweet their most popular stuff to get more followers. I am going to start trying this with some. It's fun to read other people's tweets. I like to retweet the ones that make sense.

Some of people's tweets are hard to understand and seem to usually be mostly made up of links. I think when you are posting a link it's important to also put in a title so people know what it is about. Your link gets automatically shortened and people might not know what it is about.

Sometimes it is just fun to go into twitter and tweet your favorite sayings, some of your thoughts of the day and other stuff. Then, the followers get to automatically know who you are before they decide to follow you.

Digg is a neat place to social bookmark. You do have to be careful there though and make sure you are sending lots of links to sites that you think are neat, besides your own sites. Then, you can occasionally submit links to your stuff.
Reddit is neat for this too, but in the short time that you submit one link to a site and then you send a second one to the same site, it won't let you do it in the space of a few minutes. So you probably have to leave that site and come back.
I'm trying out Fark, and am not sure of what the results will be yet. It is letting me submit a bunch of links. That site also automatically will shut you off to submitting links to the same site in a certain time frame. So a little bit at a time there.

Traffup is neat. You can submit up to ten links to your stuff and then if people retweet them, you get more points. The more points you have, the better. And everytime you get a follower from there, you get more points. As long as you have points you can have a free account there. You can buy points but I'm not sure the reason behind that.
And you can only follow about thirty people in a certain time frame, so you would have to come back an hour later and follow more people then. It's a quicker way to get followers from Twitter.

Pingler is kind of neat. I am going to try them out. For about $5 a month you can submit up to 50 links to your sites and every three days pingler will automatically ping them all to a whole bunch of sites.

I signed up with Overwire, but I'm not sure if I like them. You have to sign up to about forty to fifty social bookmarking sites and then when you submit a link to overwire, it will send your link to all fifty places all at once. Well, as I signed up for the site, there were different package plans. You have to pay for some. I chose the free plan where it says that you can submit up to 300 links a month free of charge. They lied. I wasted a good forty five minutes there this afternoon starting out by sending out forty to fifty links. Then when I was done, I went to check out my submission history.

Then it came up that my account was suspended for going over the limit of links. Then I was forced to choose to upgrade myself to a paying plan. I decided against it. I don't want to pay to social bookmark too much if I can help it. That's nuts.

Definitely wasted my time. I was going to start submitting some of my links to Netlog and Tagged. I think I am going to cancel out of at least Netlog. I got a warning sign that Netlog isn't a safe site and someone could get access to my computer and hack into personal information. So I think I am going to figure out how to get out of that soon.

Same with Tagged. I have heard it has a bad history like Myspace. I am thinking I would like to spread the word about my links just for a little bit to see if it generates anything. I'm not sure that it will. I have heard there are a lot of teenagers using and abusing that site, so I'm not sure of the quality of the readers there.

I really enjoy igoogle. That is a great place to spread your word, and just plain old make friends there. At igoogle you will find a lot of other bloggers, hubbers, triond people, squidoo, mashable, any where that people are trying to make money at their writings also keep tabs on their friends at igoogle to see what everyone is writing about.

There are hangouts in igoogle happening too. I am guessing these are live hangouts and maybe they are video chats for a brief amount of time. I haven't participated in one yet. I bet it would be fun though. You do have to watch out with igoogle though. Once in a while someone pops up and wants to chat. Which is okay. But if they suddenly want to know all about you and then ask for your private email, your cell number etc.. it raises a red flag. Be careful about giving out personal information. You never know who you are talking about.

Although, I will say that most people on igoogle are honest people who just want to make friends and want to learn about others and see what makes everyone tick. Everyone has their own creative personality.

I've got some books on social bookmarking. I should read them a little more. Sometimes, though you can usually find what you are looking for online. There is just so much at our fingertips. We hold the world in our hands nowadays.

Keywords are so important. I have really learned that you have to have very focused keywords in order to gain traffic to your site. Good SEO is key to success. For a while, my keywords were all over the place. Longtail keywords are good to use a little bit too.

Go to Google Adwords often as you will be able to type in your topic and see what good keywords pop up. Choose the ones that look like they get the most traffic. I'm not quite sure what your limit would be for how many keywords you can use. I know with hubpages, if you use too many, they don't like it. They will call it excessive keyword tags.

You can always advertise on your blogs and gain followers to your stuff. That's probably why it might be a good idea to try blogging or writing articles, recipes, poetry fiction etc... on all kinds of different sites. That way you probably can eventually spread your word quicker.

Jennifer Jo Fay

Copyrighted December 9, 2011