Everyone seems to be talking about social bookmarking nowadays. Just like blogging used to be a hot topic previously around 2004 and 2005. So what exactly is social bookmarking? What makes it so popular? How can we make use of it?

Well, social bookmarking is basically the collective act of bookmarking and also a platform for sharing of internet links and resources such as websites, blogs, articles, videos and many others. Different social bookmarking services currently available on the web allow people to upload, store, bookmark and share various interesting information.

Some of the popular ones include Del.icio.us, Technorati, Flickr, etc.

Basically, social bookmarking involves the use of tags assigned to various Objects.

Most of the time, the object is linked to a unique webpage related to the assigned tag. However, it can also be a file format or any other format.

One can simply make use of such social bookmarking service to promote your websites, blogs or affiliate marketing programs. Such bookmarking sites are particularly suitable and popular for affiliate marketing programs as they offer a free and effective way to get inbound links (or backlinks), greatly enhancing search engine visibility, which is great news for affiliate businesses.

So, now you see how powerful social bookmarking can be?

Let us get started with some basic pointers.

1. Join major social bookmarking site

Try to choose some more popular ones such as Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, MySpace, etc. Popular sites have more traffic and they allow you to submit and bookmark websites and blogs just with the click of a button. In addition, they also take advantage of RSS feeds. RSS feeds can be used to syndicate user bookmarks or contents with the same tags. Users can also syndicate bookmarks that are created by other users using RSS feeds.

2. Site research

Different social bookmarking sites may cater to different types of users. Get to know the site that is popular with your targeted niche. Do some research and find out whether other users share similar interest in your niche. Pay close attention to the websites or articles that are being bookmarked with highest ranking or most popular. This will help you to determine whether your affiliate program will receive attention or not later.

3. Contents

Make sure you submit quality content to bookmarking sites. Do not submit for the sake of submitting. Do not ever (I repeat) spam. This defeats your purpose in your niche affiliate program especially if you are focusing on conversion optimization. This will only affect your status and only damage your reputation. And this is not the way to do affiliate business.

Unlucky (or luckily for you), most marketers have not caught on to social bookmarking as a method for generating links (or backlinks) as yet. So by reading this article, I bet you are already one step ahead of many others. At this moment, there are still quite a number of people who have no idea what social bookmarking is about.

Very soon, online social bookmarking will also become another norm method used for marketing. Slowly, it is already spreading like wildfire in the internet world. Dwell hard into this area if you are seriously into affiliate marketing. You will not regret it.

Copyright 2008