Social bookmarking has become a powerful tool for many online business people, and you are losing a lot if you do not know how to use social bookmarking for your website's advantage. Take note that almost everybody has been using this traffic generating tool, so you have to make the most out of social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking is one of the top techniques that you can use to promote your website and build more traffic. If you're not involved, it's time to get with the program!

Social bookmarking started for me when I joined a few of the top social bookmarking sites. You may think this is all you need to do to get involved, but trust me – there is more to social bookmarking than simply joining the social bookmarking circles!

The first thing to do is visit a few of the top social bookmarking sites: Digg, del.ici.ous, Furl, and Yahoo, just for example. You can do a Google search for these to find them if you've never been there before.

Then, sign up for a free account with each of these. When signing up for an account, you will have the opportunity to select buttons that you can add to the end of each of your blog posts. This will allow readers of your blog to "Digg" your post over at the Digg social bookmarking site.

When someone clicks on your Digg button, it will bring them to the Digg site, where they would login with their account username and password. The blog post or article would then appear as a URL, and the person who clicked "Digg" will have the opportunity to post a comment about your post.

This can do nothing but good things for your website. If everyone gives your post a Digg, think of all the links in Digg you will have pointing back to your site. This will certainly increase your traffic when someone goes onto Digg looking for a post on a topic that interests them.

This is where I initially went wrong in my social bookmarking efforts. You don't want to stop after just joining these social bookmarking sites and leaving a button on your blog posts for everyone else to find and click. You want to get actively involved in the social bookmarking process by becoming an active member of these sites.

What I mean by being "active" is that you want to visit these sites, and find topics of interest to you, or topics that relate to your online business. Once you find other posts on your topic of interest, then you have the opportunity to bookmark, or "favourite" those posts, and add a comment.

Doing this can really increase your traffic, as evidenced by my own increasing website stats just by doing this one thing alone. If you "favourite" other people's sites and they "favourite" your site and you each comment on other's posts, then you will soon have a network of links pointing back to your site.

This important piece of the social bookmarking puzzle is something I didn't even realize myself until I got involved with my latest social bookmarking site called "Squidoo". Apparently, Google just loves Squidoo at the moment, so I jumped on the bandwagon along with others I know joining the site.

The great thing about Squidoo and sites like MySpace is that you can create a "lens" which is just like a mini web page, or landing page that gives visitors to that lens a quick overview of what you have to offer. This will hopefully entice them to click your links and bring you more traffic.

I've made darn sure this time that after creating my lens I did not just leave it at that. I have visited other lenses on my topic of interest, added those lenses to my "favourites" list, and sent comments to others in hopes that others will visit my links as well. So far, this has increased my traffic very quickly and I may even reach a personal goal thanks to this technique alone!

Next, I am going to try creating more than one lens and link one to the other, which will hopefully entice visitors to read one of my lenses, and then click on to the other, increasing my traffic even more!

The thing to watch out for when using social bookmarking sites is that you don't want to be a spammer who is out there just to get your links seen and clicked. As with anything in internet marketing, like forum posts, no one likes someone who is just there to advertise themselves. You want to offer valuable information, and make a valuable contribution by offering good advice, and great content.

Finally I would like to say a big thank you to the guys at Digg, del.ici.ous, Furl, Social Bookmark World and Yahoo, for producing such a great site. Not only for the traffic that it produces but for also providing lots of really useful bookmarks. My only criticism is the lack of categories which means that some suggestions are not always well matched although there is a search facility.