Top Social Bookmarking Sites For Your Content Promotion Strategy

Ifyou expect your content to go viral or at least get the traffic you wantwithout doing anything apart from pressing the 'Publish' button, you're wrong.There are many ways to help people find your content – social media is thepreferred method, but bookmarking is still useful, if used correctly.

Whenit comes to content promotion, not only must you use a variety of channels, youneed to have a strategy. As part of your strategy, as well as your promotionalarsenal, should not be overlooked. For sure, you still need to engage on social media,as well as have a rigorous outreach strategy, but social bookmarking sites are still an effective way of putting yourcontent in front of the people who are interested in your industry, productsand services. Therefore, these should be implemented into your SEO and contentpromotion strategy.

Key Benefits of Social Bookmarking and ContentCuration Sites

Whilsttimes have changed and social bookmarkingis no longer considered a link building practice on a massive scale, there arestill a lot of benefits this can generate for your website. These can include:

Moretraffic– Many of the top social bookmarking sites can be a great referralsource; for example Coolbacklinks often appears as one of the top threereferral sources

Qualifiedvisitors –If you operate in a specific industry, the use of highly targeted/niche bookmarkingsites can help you gain qualified visitors

Moresocial signals –The more social signals your content receives across multiples sites thebetter, as it is believed this can have a positive effect on your rankings

Fasterindexing – Social bookmarking platforms arecrawled almost constantly by search engines which can often result in yourcontent being indexed much faster

However,given Google's recent algorithm updates I believe you need to have a strategywhen it comes to social bookmarking to avoid any pitfalls, or even worse,receiving a penalty from Google.

Bookmarkingthe Right Way

Accordingto Google's latest quality guidelines, links coming from low-qualitydirectories and can be seen us unnatural and therefore couldhave a negative effect on your rankings.

Yearsago, social bookmarking was prettymuch about getting your content bookmarked on every site, no matter thequality, out there in order to generate as many links as possible. Well, thesedays are gone so if you're still doing it, STOP now!

Thecorrect way to use and content curation sites is to use them on a regular basis. You need to beactive, grow your followers (if possible) and most importantly engage with theaudience, otherwise you won't get the results you want and you can actually putyour website at greater risk.

Iwould highly recommend applying the Pareto 80/20 rule where 80% ofthe content you bookmark/curate/submit is not from your website, but stillrelevant to your industry. The rest (20%) of submitted or shared articlesshould be from your website or blog.

6Rules for Social Bookmarking In the Post-Penguin World

Findquality bookmaking sitesthat are relevant to your industry, products and target audience

Createcomplete profiles whensetting up your profile/account as you would with Facebook, Twitter or Google+

Qualityover quantity –avoid bookmarking your content on as many sites as possible, relevancy is thekey. Stop using automated Social Bookmarking tools

Usethe 80/20 rule –don't just promote your own content

Builda portfolio of good bookmarks that will help other users. This can help youbuild trust; in other words people will be more likely to share, like or voteup your bookmarked content

Beactive –re-share other's content, engage with people, ask questions and post comments

TopSocial Bookmarking and Content Curation Sites

1. Pearltrees

Pearltreesis one of my favourite bookmarking sites as it's very powerful and aneasy-to-use platform. I use it as my number one personal bookmarking site andhave already seen good results in terms of traffic, as well as likes within theplatform itself. Below you can see how I structure the content I share.

2. Coolbacklinks

CoolBack links is a social bookmarking site which allows you to store, organize,search, and manage bookmarks of web pages. Users save links to web pages thatthey like or want to share, using coolbacklinks

3. Digg

Diggtogether with Delicious are top bookmarking sites with a high authority. Ifyour website/content is shared and voted up and makes the Digg Home page youcan expect a lot of traffic.

4. Flipboard

Flipboardclaims to be social magazine which collects news and other content and presentsit in magazine-style format. With Flipboard you can create your own magazine onany topic you like. This way you can create visually appealing magazines ontopics relevant to your industry and audience.

Howabout you?

Whatexperience do you have with socialbookmarking site? What other socialbookmarking and content curation sites do you find useful and effective inthe post-penguin era? I would love to hear your suggestions and thoughts.

Formore details you can visit our website: http://www.coolbacklinks.com/