July 1, 2009
Why You SHOULD Submit Manually to Social Bookmarking Sites
 |
Why You MUST SHOULD Submit Manually to Social Bookmarking Sites
It can be extremely tempting to use automated forms to submit your website or blog to social bookmarking sites. After all, it saves you a lot of time and hassle. In fact, there are companies that you can pay to make automatic social bookmarking site submissions for you so that you don’t have to spend any time on the effort at all. There are even sites and software that allow you to press a button and instantaneously submit your articles to dozens of social bookmarking sites. It is very tempting to use these services. Posting to social bookmarking sites is a very tedious, time consuming task. It can take hours every day to perform a successful social bookmarking campaign. However, you will have a much better result if you submit your articles by hand. In fact, I think that it is crucial to always engage in manual submissions on the popular social bookmarking sites. I will discuss this further on in the article.
Why Do I think That it is Important to Manually Submit Your Articles to Social Bookmarking Sites?
(1) To ensure that your article was submitted correctly.
Some of the social bookmarking services have been reported to not work properly. The only way to ensure that your article is submitted correctly is to submit it by hand.
(2) To ensure that you don’t alienate users.
It sounds like an exaggeration but the Internet really is run by users these days and if you alienate enough of those users, you run the risk of ruining your business. Automatic social bookmarking submissions are considered bad form in the current online world and can greatly decrease your credibility with the users who can drive traffic to (or away from) your website. Bad word-of-mouth on social bookmarking sites is just like bad word-of-mouth out there in the real world; too much of it can destroy a business.
Even though there is software out there that will let you automatically submit your website to social bookmarking sites, people who use those sites regularly are opposed to the use of that software. The reason for this is that social bookmarking sites really are seen as a community, a place where users can get together to discuss the things that they do and don’t like on the web. Despite the fact that most people on social bookmarking sites are there to promote their own online work, the sites are still widely used for the purpose of community and online sharing. People who violate the community by not taking the time to manually submit their sites are essentially seen as outsiders who the community will ultimately shun.
(3) To ensure that you and your site isn’t banned or buried.
Being shunned from social bookmarking sites can have a devastating effect on your ability to use them for website promotion. Many social bookmarking tools have ways of not only voting for content that’s placed on the site but also of voting it down. Enough votes down and your content can be buried so that the time that you took to put it on the site is completely wasted since the content isn’t seen anyway. And the effects of automated social bookmarking can be even worse; some sites will actually ban your entire domain from the social bookmarking site if you are caught failing to manually submit your content. This means that you won’t be able to use the social bookmarking site at all in the future, even if you do decide to change your ways.
(4) To Continue to Expand Your Social Network
When visiting a social bookmarking site, you will be able to build up your social network. How? Well, by visiting the site, it is inevitable that you will see articles or sites that you will want to visit and therefor digg, stumble, or rate. Every time you rate another site or communicate with another user, you are building up your credibility and your social network. This is very important in a social networking campaign.
(5) Out of Respect of The Social Bookmarking Sites’ Members
The issue is basically one of respect. People who use social bookmarking sites want to know that you care enough about your content to submit it manually and to tell them why they might be interested in it. Get on the good side of these people and you can use social bookmarking sites to greatly increase the traffic to your site. But make a fatal faux pas like failing to manually submit your site to these places and you’ll quickly find that you’ve been ostracized from the online community to the point that you might as well just move out of the virtual town that you were calling home.
HOWEVER, Social Bookmarking Submitters Will Bring You Traffic
Yes, social bookmarking submitters will bring you traffic. You will just get tons more traffic if you submit manually. And your efforts will pay off.
However, if you don’t have the time to submit manually, these are my suggestions:
(1) Manually Submit to the Most Important Sites.
This would include the major social bookmarking sites as well as your article’s niche category. For this article, submitting to sphinn.com would be the most important for me. Sphinn is a social media / SEO social bookmarking site. And I consider the major social bookmarking sites to be Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Slashdot, and Simpy. If your submission is a video, then YouTube is the top video social networking site. Here is a huge list of social bookmarking sites.
(2) Only Submit Your Best Articles to the Social Bookmarking Sites.
There is no reason to submit all of your articles to the social bookmarking sites. If you aren’t crazy about one of your articles, you could be pretty sure that noone else will be either. There are some articles that just aren’t worthy of being bookmarked, so don’t feel that you have to submit every single article to the social bookmarking sites. Instead, reference your articles within other articles that you write.
(3) Use an Auto Social Submitter and then Follow up on Each Site.
I suggest this for only quality articles. Don’t submit your cr@p articles to social bookmarking sites. This isn’t fair to the users who value that community. These users shouldn’t have to wade through junk to get to the good stuff. My suggestion is to use a social bookmarking submitter to submit your article to multiple sites, but then follow up on each site to make sure that your article was submitted properly. Also, as an added benefit, if you visit each site, you might digg a link or make a new friend while you are there. At the minimum, check up on the major sites to make sure that everything was submitted correctly.
(4) Let Your Visitors Do the Leg Work.
If you already have a popular site, let your existing network bookmark your articles for you. I have tried a service called AddThis, and it worked great for me. Here are more social bookmarking widgets and tutorials that might help you:
Apostolos Dountsis Social Bookmarks Plugin for WordPress
Beautiful Beta: Dynamic Rollover DHTML Social Bookmark Buttons
Blogger Social Bookmarking Tool
Darxr.net: Social Bookmarks Sidebar Widget for WordPress
Easy Wordpress Widget for Social Bookmarking Sites
Ekstreme: Social Bookmarking Submission Code
Gath Adams: Build Your Own Social Bookmark Widget
GrayWolf’s Social Bookmark Scripts & Widgets
Oscandy: The Multiple Social Bookmarking Widget
Manhattan Service: Social Bookmark Tool
Social Bookmark Script: Web 2.0 Optimierung
Tips n Tricks Social Bookmarking Buttons
Top Ranks Social Bookmarks Creator
WidgetBox: Ultimate Social Bookmark
YouFame.net: Social Bookmarking Widget Generator
(5) Speed Up The Process
To speed up the process, I suggest using copy and paste.
Open up an email or text file and copy and paste all of the information that you will need on the post submission forms. This usually includes the article’s title, article’s permalink or url, articles tags (sometimes with a space, sometimes with a comma, sometimes with a colon), article’s description, and sometimes a clipping of the article.
What are Some Social Bookmarking Submitters (Auto Social Bookmarking Submitters That is)
I hope that this article was helpful to you. I suspect that might people might disagree with my views. Please feel free to rant if you like. 
Technorati Tags: social submitters, social bookmarking submitters, social networking submitters, manually submit, automatically submit, auto bookmark submit, auto bookmarking submitters, social bookmarking, social networking, social bookmarks, bookmarks, bookmarking, networks, network, networking
