Digital Musings

Everybody approaches Social bookmarking in different ways. For some bookmarking websites are an invaluable resource to save important links online so that they can access them from any computer, for some its a way to share some cool links and websites with their peers and for some its just a way to get some traffic to their blogs.

When I first got into blogging and was introduced to this fascinating trend, all I saw and read, pasted all over other blogs is bookmarking brings you traffic, use all the services, get a lot of friends in your network and viola its raining traffic. And being a new blogger, I took the advice. I started with great spirit and made a lot of friends on various networks, it worked out quite well. I have received most of my traffic and subscribers via this channel.But, the charm seemed to wear off after some time. Less people wanted to join in my network and the not many interacted, which isn’t much fun, if you are on “Social” site.

Now why did this happen, traffic was steady but the activity on my profiles was way down as compared to before. I thought what might be the reason, and then I realized what I was missing. Many people have been on these sites for quite some time and are smart enough to understand whats going on. As the time passes and your bookmarks are seem you can either be labeled as an active users - who get a good response from the community, a traffic greedy webmaster - who are ignored after sometime or the spammer - who is either blocked, ignored or removed from the community.

The whole point of social bookmarking is not just using it to get petty traffic but to share your knowledge, your reach and expertise on a subject. If you read a lot about technology or gadgets or blogging or any other niche and you bookmark some really awesome stuff that you encounter on the internet, your peers would appreciate this effort and reward you by joining your network, or sending traffic to your blogs.

To be frank I was initially shown the wrong way and approach. Its after using these networks for sometime I realized where I was going wrong. And believe me, if you do it right, you actually get to learn a lot. After I understood the approach and changed my stance and started bookmarking meaningful and useful stuff, I got a good response from my friends on these sites.

The two ways of going about sharing stuff you find on the internet:Just for Fun and Learning more about your interest.

Just for fun Approach:

First is just for fun. There are many sites that are for fun like online flash games, comic strips, funny videos and pictures, jokes etc. These are something that you can share with your friends while enjoying the great resource the internet is. Some of the sites that are good to share this stuff are:

1. StumbleUpon
2. Leaptag (now a Facebook application)
3. Tumblr
4. Twitter

Now since I have labeled them for just for fun doesn’t mean everyone uses them for fun, some use these sites for saving and sharing important stuff. These are the sites that I would use for sharing some fun stuff with my friends.

The Serious Approach:

The second approach is saving some really important stuff for future reference as a part of a research or study or just for more knowledge on a specific subject. Some really good websites to save this stuff and share them with specific users are:

1. Del.icio.us
2. Furl
3. Netvouz
4. Linkagogo

These sites are excellent to store your bookmarks and organize them in different folders and tags. They also provide an option to share it with friends, and if you want to keep some bookmarks private, we have than option too.

So its my advice to the new bloggers and Social sites users out there to start using these sites correctly as they are a great resource for those who understand the importance of collective knowledge. These sites are a road map of the web, based on the recommendations of people who have traveled it extensively. So either you can learn a lot from others and extend your knowledge while sharing it with others or just keep on bookmarking your own site till its ignored by everyone or worse banned from these networks.

So whats your approach?
Are you a Greedy webmaster hungry for traffic, a spammer or a active user who is valued a lot in these communities?

If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my Full RSS feed. Join the Discussions about Blogging and Social Networking in the Forum.Thanks for visiting!