Social Bookmarking v Story Submission for Self Promotion
Scenario: You are an Internet marketer and you have a whole bunch of websites, blogs, articles etc that make you money. You wish to promote these in order to develop backlinks and drive traffic. I am not talking about the kind of self promotion where you literally promote yourself as a person, such as via a personal blog like this one. I’m talking your non-public earning websites.
Social Media Promotional Strategies
I began to learn about social media in general from the Thirty Day Challenge and since then I have become a regular user of Facebook, StumbleUpon, Sphinn and Twitter and an occasional visitor of Digg. The issue that I have, is that I have a personal profile under my name on all of these websites. I often promote my own blog posts from this blog on those sites but I don’t wish to promote my niche sites because I don’t want people to know what they are.
I have discussed this dilemma before when I posted the question of whether or not you should have multiple accounts on social media sites. In that post I actually highlighted the difference between social bookmarking, story submission and community type social media but at the time I didn’t quite understand how I could make use of that distinction.
My Personal Interest in Story Submission
The two services I use most days are Sphinn and StumbleUpon. I sometimes look at Digg but it’s usually a little too juvenile for me. These are all story submission services and the key point here is that the person who submits a story or website is saying to the users of that service, “Hey, look at this - this is great content and I think you’ll like it.” By submitting something you are shoving it in other people’s faces and this is where the whole issue of social media abuse comes in.
I first experienced this whilst taking part in the Thirty Day Challenge. I wont repeat the whole thing as I talked about it in my earlier post but the point was that people were submitting their own niche sites into these services to get the rankings / backlinks / traffic etc but in doing so they were effectively spamming the social media with irrelevant or poor quality submissions. Some weeks later I published another post saying that I was dropping social media completely as part of my niche marketing efforts.
Lightbulb Moment - Social Bookmarking is Personal
The reason I decided to drop social media is because I had got it into my head that social media = story submission. I totally forgot about bookmarking sites and this is most likely because I don’t use them myself. I like the hierarchical organisation of my Firefox bookmarks. For some reason I had a lightbulb moment today when I realised that social bookmarking is a personal thing. You are making personal bookmarks of your own choices and you are not thrusting those bookmarks onto other people.
Of course, bookmarking a page provides a backlink to it, and these bookmarks are public so other people can find them. Furthermore, most of the sites work by the use of tagging which means you can use your chosen keywords to tag your sites appropriately. Now that I’ve cleared that up in my own head I now realise that I was wrong in my previous decision to abandon social media!
The New Way Forward For Me
No, I don’t want to have multiple Facebook accounts or Digg accounts and get myself banned but bookmarks are different. I now intend to create an account for these sites and it will not be in my own name but I can use the same name for all of them. I don’t need to be keeping track of lots of names for lots of niches because they are simply bookmarks. I’m not trying to build a profile here.
I do feel somewhat silly changing my position on this matter several times now but that is what this blog is about! I am learning and therefore much of what I write is me thinking out loud about the thought processes that I am going through.
If you've enjoyed reading this post then please subscribe to my Full Text RSS Feed.
Stumble it!
WarriorBlog
October 9, 2007
Well you don’t HAVE to bookmark your own story for self promotion on your website. Just bookmark your article you submitted to article Directories.
Unfortunately, I don’t use Social Bookmarking to bookmark people content I like, just my own content on Article Directory. I don’t think it is necessary at all…
My honest opinion,
Sean.