How To Let Blog Visitors Social Bookmark Your Page

Is your blogger gaining in popularity? Have your happy readers help you back!

Do you have comments thanking you for your help? Great time to let commenters know that they can bookmark the page with their favorite bookmarking services. Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon are some of my favorites.

I have been using Onlywire bookmarking button on some of my blogs. This button is a bit overwhelmingly complicated so I decided to standardize on AddThis.com for my blogs. AddThis claim to be the one of the most popular bookmarking and sharing service on the net. I'm sure you must have seen their button in many places.

You will see the AddThis button on the bottom of this post. To see if this is something you want to add to your blog, try it out right now!

Locate the Bookmark button on the bottom of this post, hover over it, and select your favorite bookmarking service. Click! It is not as simple as bookmarking with your browser, is it!

However, it works and it will increase the visibility of your blog, both through referrals and through higher search engine rankings.

AddThis has made it very simple to include their bottom in various publishing media. Login or register at AddThis.com. For blogger, you will have two options.

First, include AddThis button as an element in your sidebar. That one is straightforward and highly automatized as you will see.

I recommend the second option. Here, add AddThis button on the bottom of each of your blog posts. To do so, you must add the button script as directed. To find the place they refer you to in your blogger template, go to Customize/Layout/Edit Html. You must select "Expand Widgets Templates". Use Ctrl-F or find to locate the <div class='post-footer'> tag as directed by AddThis. Insert the code.

You're done!

From now on just gently remind your happy commenters to bookmark the page they found useful.

What do you say? What bookmarking service do you use on your blog? Have you seen increase in traffic since you have implemented it? Have you seen referrals from social bookmarking sites? Let me know, please comment below!

A Surprising Way to Get Dofollow, High PR Backlinks from Technorati

I was just telling you about signing up for Google Webmaster Central. The main purpose was to find out more about which links to your blog Google deems to be high quality. I was surprised to find a technorati.com backlink there. It was pointing to a specific post of my blog! A deep-linked, dofollow, possibly high Page Rank backling from a trusted Page Rank 9 site! Nice find!

How did that link end up on Technorati? Simple. As a member of Technorati, my blog is regularly scanned by Technorati. Whenever I link to another blog that is also a member, that blogs ?reactions page gets updated with a direct, dofollow, possibly high PR (up to 6) backlink to my page. Technorati also extracts the text from my post around the reference. The reactions page looks like this:


http://technorati.com/blogs/echoesofwisdom.blogspot.com?reactions

Here's what Technorati says about Blog Reactions. The blurb also explains what Technorati Authority is:

What Are Blog Reactions?

Technorati defines Blog Reactions as the number of links to the blog's home page or its posts from other blogs in the Technorati index. A subset of blog reactions, Technorati Authority is the number of unique blogs linking to this blog over the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has. To see reactions to specific posts, you can find them listed on Technorati post pages.

Translation: Blog Reactions are Technorati version of Backlinks for Technorati member blogs only.
And the Technorati Authority is akin to Google PR, again for Technorati member blogs only.

How can you take advantage of the high PR, dofollow Technorati links? Well first, go ahead and register and authenticate your blogger with Technorati right away. While you are there, you can find dofolowcool.blogspot.com and favorite it ;) Also, write a short description and the most important tags for your blog. And, on the same page, you will see code to a Technorati favorite link widget that you want to place on your blog. That way, you will score favorite points on Technorati, and Technorati will possibly get a new blog-member. Not sure yet how being a favorite will help you. A good question for another post.

When you are writing a new post, do not link to Technorati member blog posts just for a sake of getting a Technorati dofollow backlink. However, if you are looking to refer to a blog post with specific information that is widely available you may want to search Technorati blogs first. I did that today when posting about the free image manipulation program Gimp for Windows.

Best of Onlywire.com Social Bookmarking Sites

I wrote recently about a social bookmarking strategy I use and recommend. As a first step I suggested using Onlywire.com bookmarking syndication. In this post I will show you how Onlywire.com works and how you can use this post to verify your submission to Onlywire.com!

Onlywire.com is a great bookmark syndication tool. It will help you get your bookmarks syndicated into some of the largest news and social bookmarking sites quickly. Mostly they are not dofollow. However, you will receive substantial referral traffic from these social bookmarking sites. That's just because of the size of their audience. If you are able to make your title and description attractive, and if you are bookmarking great content, you may end up on the front published page of these services, such as digg or stumbleupon. This way you will get additional referral traffic, way beyond the norm. In addition, most of the sites represented in Onlywire.com have good reputation with google and other search engines. This will quickly bring you search engine traffic, sometimes within hours of publishing the bookmark.

And just how quick is it to publish with onlywire.com? Well the setup phase can take a while because you need to manually register with the participating bookmarking sites. The bookmarking of a single page takes me about 10 minutes. It takes 5 minutes for initial submit, and then 5 more minutes to "finalize" the submission with a few sites.

You do not need to sign up with all bookmarking sites represented on Onlywire.com. Here are the ones I found easy to use, user friendly, and without overzealous censoring. Your mileage may vary; use the comment form below if you found sites in Onlywire that I am not mentioning. Then let me know and I will include them here.

First Group: Sites I use, no finalization needed:

Ask.com
Bibsonomy.com
BookmarkSync.com
Delicious.com
Facebook.com
Faves.com
Google.com/bookmarks
Jumptags.com *
Mister-Wong.com *
Multiply.com
MySpace.com
Propeller.com

Second Group: Sites that I use, finalization needed:

Digg.com *
Mixx.com *
Reddit.com

Third Group: Sites that currently fail consistently, at least for me:

Bebo.com
Blinklist.com
Connotea.com
Diigo.com
Newsvine.com
Plaxo.com
Stumbleupon.com *

As the sites that require finalization are quite large, it should be worth your time to go ahead and do manual finalization with the second group. If you have extra time on your hands, go ahead and bookmark your page with the third group manually, directly on the websites.

The great thing about this post is that you can verify if your submission was successful. Wait perhaps a few hours or a day after submission with Onlywire. Then just come back to this post and do search on this page. It is  a Google Custom Search for the sites mentioned above. Use keywords from the title of your bookmark, and, optionally, your site name to narrow down search results. You will see just how quickly your site is indexed by Google.

Here is the Google Custom Search:

Dofollow Social Bookmarking Sites Strategy to Promote Your Blogger

You've done a couple of things with your blogger blog so far: you've set your blog to dofollow, encouraged and rewarded commenters for quality coments, implemented keyword exchange for comments, monetized your blog, doubled its pull and your adsense income, and enabled others to easily navigate the site. Now it 's time to get the word out. And I mean get the word out in a big way. Your content is precious. Right?!? You want people to know about it.

One of the quickest ways to get the word out is post a social bookmark. Social bookmarking is a great way to get links back to your blog. Links that are well categorized. Social bookmarking will bring you targeted traffic. Social bookmarking, when done right, will increase your blog's popularity with search engines. You can find more about social bookmark basics by simply signing up for delicious.com, one of the original social bookmarking sites. Roam around and you will find how the system works. Yahoo has recently bought delicious.com and seems to be putting some efforts together to integrate delicious more tightly with Yahoo search and other offerings. There are hundreds of other social bookmarking sites out there and new ones are mushrooming daily.

How to make sense of all this? Should you go and sign up for all the sites and bookmark your blogger pages? That could take forever! Well you are in the right place to see about bookmarking selectively and speeding up the social bookmarking process.

I recommend using two tools:

1. Onlywire.com
2. This very page! ( see below )

I'll cut to the chase. You want as many backlinks as possible and you want them to be dofollow, so they count more for google. Onlywire represents 40 of the biggest social bookmarking websites and you can submit easily to all of them in 5-10 minutes. The backlinks will mostly be nofollow, but they will bring you targeted traffic.

Step two, go for the dofollow social bookmarking sites regardless of the size. There is no established tool for dofollow social bookmarking sites so below you will find a clickable list of those that I use and recommend:

List of recommended dofollow social bookmarking sites. Combined mainly from two sites, http://niceblogger.com/2009/08/05/101-dofollow-social-bookmarking-sites/ and  http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/do-follow-social-bookmarking-sites/, then double checked for dofollow:

• buddymarks.com
• spurl.net
• linkagogo.com
  
• a1-webmarks.com
• diggyourpost.info
  
• savethislink.net *
• newsmarked.info *
• ebaumsworld.com *
• seedz.org
• tungaw.com *
  
• hitmarks.com *
  
• bookmarkglobe.com
• iorkut.net
• starton.us
• bookmarkplace.com
  
• gyach.com *
• tedigo.net
  
• websapiens.net *
  
• totalpad.com *
• mysitevote.com
• maple.nu *
• blurpalicious.com
• socialogs.com *
• spotback.com

Dofollow bookmarking sites just for blogs:

• wikio.com
• bloghop.com
• technorati.com
• buzzup.com
• wagg.it
• blogengage.com *

Where possible, I have included the link directly to the post page to post the bookmark, so it is more convenient and faster. You do want to use cut and paste for your Title, Text, and Tags but you also want to vary the Title, Text, and Tags a bit so search engines do not consider these entries duplicated content.

Another point when bookmarking: Don't just bookmark your sales pages. Or just your blogger. Add some spice to the mix, bookmark pages in the news that you read and you found remarkable. For example, today I bookmarked  this page http://www.pyrabang.com?id=50ac1b and this page http://www.pyrabang.com?id=50ac1b, just because I found them interesting and illustrative of what is happening in the USA today. I highly recommend you bookmark websites with a wide variety of topics. Bookmark news. Bookmark sites you like. Bookmark sites that represent a cause. When the social bookmarking site editors look at your bookmarks they will be less likely to consider your bookmarks "spam" or "self promotion" if you bookmark a wide variety of sites.

Here is how you can verify whether your bookmarks are active on the above sites through Google Custom Search: