7 Tips to Rock Your Social Bookmarking Profile

In the last article I went over the basics of what social bookmarking is and how to use it.  In this post we’ll learn what it takes to build a profile that will get you on your way to building a rockin’ bookmarking personality that gets noticed.

Ask Yourself: Who Am I?

I can hear some of you now grumbling about more profiles, popularity contests, and the whole “be my friend so I can be popular like you” mentality.  Unfortunately, we all know that social media can be like a popularity contest whether it would be Twitter or Facebook, and yes…even Digg & Delicious.  The bright side is that once you get one profile set up the best thing you can do is be consistent across the board with your bio, pics, and so forth.  There are social bookmarking tools out there that will automate some of this, but be sure to take a good look at them, and remember there are always free options out there.

7 Tips to Rock Your Social Bookmarking Profile

1. Be Human – You don’t want to look spammy. Use a real picture of yourself, use your real name, give bit of personal info about yourself. The more real and approachable you seem, the less likely you’ll be taken as a spammer. This is very important with any social media, but especially in social bookmarking because there are so many spammers and so many people that are just trying to get traffic. In an earlier post, 6 Tips To Help You Connect With Your Readers, I went over why this is so important on your blog, but the same holds true anytime you are using social media.
2. Observe First – Just like with Twitter and all the other social bookmarking and networking tools, observe first. Don’t just storm in there with your content and try to get people to buy your stuff. Observe first, then participate, then contribute.
3. Know What’s Popular & Trendy – I use a site called www.popurls.com. You can check out headlines to see what is becoming popular and what it is that is creating the headlines.
4. Read Comments – Check out the conversations going on to better equip yourself to leave relevant comments of your own.  You’ll also become aware of the who’s doing a lot of commenting and who’s spamming.  Keep this in mind when you are adding friends.
5. Vote and Join In – If all you ever do is put up your own stuff and then don’t visit it for another few weeks, then it looks suspicious. Users gain more power and influence by participating. You need to write comments that also get voted up.  Think of every comment you leave as an extension of your profile or blog.  If you make it interesting and relevant you will build authority and traffic to your site as people want to learn more about you.
6. Befriend People -  If you’ve got a good profile and you make lots of friends, then you become more popular. Find friends in your own niche and if you can befriend one “fire starter” and get their attention you will go far in a much faster way. Just like with many other things in life, sometimes it’s not WHAT you know, but WHO you know. Without those fire starters, your content hasn’t got a chance because you need to get votes in order for anybody else to see it. Pay attention to who you add as a friend.  Don’t associate with known spammers…and you won’t know who they are if you are not doing all of the above.
7. Vote on  Great Content – Don’t only submit your friends’ stuff, or worse yet, only your own stuff. If I’m always voting on MarketLikeAChick.com or I’m always submitting MarketLikeAChick.com, it’s going to look suspicious. Remember, be real.  Think back to a time when you had a friend first join Amway or some other direct sales network.  How annoying was it when your friend became this person that was always trying to recruit or sell you something?

Basically, you need to make your votes natural. That means you need to have lots of friends and you need to vary the voting and you need to vary the submissions. Just make it look natural.  Some of the things the social bookmarking sites look at as unusual activity are:

• If all of your votes are for the same site
• If people are getting their friends to vote up their content or if they’re making the same content submission all the time.
• Are all the votes coming from one referrer? Did someone send all their friends to one page and ask them to vote on it?
• Have all the votes come in the same 10-minute timeframe?
• Are all the people in your group always voting on the same things?

Make sure you take part, make friends and contribute. You have to be you. You have to create a really good profile that absolutely represents you and be yourself in voting and commenting. So if you have good content, well-submitted and promoted, then you’re going to see success. Without any of those three things, you’re not going to have success.

What other questions do you have about social bookmarking? What social bookmarking sites do you belong to?  Feel free to leave a link to your profile in the comments and add me to your friends!  What other questions do you have about social bookmarking?

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4. Marketing, Social Media & Personal Branding -Top 10 Posts from Market Like A Chick
5. Social Bookmarking For Backlinks

Tagged as:  Marketing · Online Marketing · Social Bookmarking · social media marketing