Some writers use social bookmarking tools to follow the bloggers that they regularly read and to occasionally chat with other writer friends.  Social networking can be a great way to take some of the isolation out of working from home alone. But if you’re not also using social media tools to your advantage to boost your writing business and to help you attract new clients, you may be leaving money on the table.  Here are a few ways that social media has helped me with my writing career:

Bookmarking for Writer Self-Promotion and Earnings

When I write a blog post or article that promotes my writing business, my passive income efforts, or one of my niche blogs, I might take an opportunity to Stumble it, Tweet, or Yahoo Buzz it. I might also link to it on Facebook, Friendfeed, and Plurk as well as link to it from another blog post or article of mine, too. Those extra bookmark links can drive up the popularity of the post both from search engine optimisation perspectives as well as the fact that many of my online friends or followers will then give the link their own nod by voting it up, re-tweeting, etc. An article or blog post gone viral can be a very good thing.

Networking with Potential Customers

Over the years, I’ve had quite a few different queries from new clients who initially found me on social media sites instead of in the search engines. While I actively promote in places I believe clients go looking, it doesn’t just take someone looking for my services to decide I might be a good fit for a writing project. There are times when people randomly happen upon  something I wrote and decide from there that maybe they’d like to hire me.

Tip: Because nearly everything you say and do online has the ability to be seen by others, particularly if you use your own name, it’s a really good idea to remember when socializing online that potential customers may read your words. Social search engines are increasing in popularity and so are background checks by potential employers.  Some social sites are really fun and casual but I typically remind people to behave in a “business casual” manner, rather than as if it’s perpetually “casual Friday”.

Social Marketing as a Service

Because of the power of social media and all I’ve learned about it, I’ve also taken my knowledge and used it to my advantage by making it part of my solutions offerings.  Some customers have me manage their own social media campaigns as well as pay me to post their links on certain accounts of mine.  While there are times that I have to force myself to back slowly away from Facebook or pry myself off Twitter so I can be productive (they are fun as well as useful), social media tools  typically do provide great results for me and I highly recommend that writers explore using them for self-promotional purposes.

Social bookmarking is another free self promotion technique that writers can use effectively. It’s also an excellent way of keeping track of your writing research, though I won’t say much about that here. If you’re interested I wrote a post on Why Writers Should Use Social Bookmarking which explains that function in more detail. So, what exactly is social bookmarking and how does it help you promote yourself?

What Is Social Bookmarking?

You’re probably familiar with using bookmarks or favorites in your browser to mark the sites you want to find again. Social bookmarking works in a similar way, but online. You can use a site such as delicious, which is one of the best and most popular examples, to store links to content that you like – and there’s no reason why it can’t be yours. You can use tags, as you do for blog posts, to categorize the content that you post.

Where the promotion comes in is with the social aspect. With social bookmarking sites you can choose to share some or all of your bookmarks with others. People who like the things you bookmark can become fans or friends, and you can participate in groups based on your interests.

Choosing A Social Bookmarking Site

There are many, many social bookmarking sites, but you have to be careful which ones you choose. For example, if you promote your own links too heavily on StumbleUpon, you will be penalised. Some sites regard self promotion as akin to spamming, but there are plenty of sites where it’s ok to push your own stuff. Some of the sites I use include delicious, Digg, Mixx and BloggingZoom. I also use several social networking sites, though I will cover those in another post.

Getting Started With Social Bookmarking

To get started with social bookmarking, choose the services you like best and sign up for accounts. With some sites you can import your browser bookmarks so that you can use those online too. I’ve found this feature quite useful in the past. Then start bookmarking any of your content that you think is worth sharing. Posting quality links usually results in traffic to that site or resource. (Watch out for the Digg effect; if you are running a WordPress blog, using a plugin such as WP-Cache or WP-Supercache will stop your site from buckling under the flood of traffic.) Submit your posts regularly and you will get more readers and more links in the search engine results.

Remember to participate in sites which are very social. Leaving comments on the links others submit will help you become a part of the group and will also increase your visibility.

Now, we all know how long it’s supposed to take to get your site listed in the search engines, right? Well, guess what? The home page of this site is already listed in Google.  This was before I did any search engine submission. So how did it happen?

Simple – it’s because of Stumbleupon.  One of my friends stumbled the site and now it appears in the search engines.

Of course, there’s still work to do. I need to get some of the other posts and pages listed. That’s why I’ve added an archive page and why I will add a sitemap. (The archive is for readers and the sitemap is for search engines.) But it’s a good start, isn’t it?

As writers, we spend more and more time on the Internet, whether we’re researching articles or story ideas, looking for work, or just browsing for fun. As we do this, we often find information or websites that we think will be useful later. The old way of doing this was to use your bookmarks or favourites to keep a list of these places. You could even use scrapbooking tools such as those built into Opera or available for Firefox to keep notes on useful pages. But these tools mimic an old style of working, which is not as intuitive as it could be. Enter social bookmarking.

What Is Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is a way of bookmarking the sites/posts you like on a website. The ‘social’ part is because the bookmarks are usually public. You can also see whether anyone else has bookmarked the same sites. If you’re interested, it shows what interests you share with the rest of webkind.

How Does It Work?

It’s fairly simple. You need to sign up for a social bookmarking site (these include Blinklist, Blogmarks, del.icio.us, Furl, Kaboodle, ma.gnolia, Simpy , Spurl and Wink, to name just a few. Other sites which work on a similar basis are reddit and digg, though these seem to be for submitting stories of interest rather than keeping track of your web life. You can then drag a little button to your browser toolbar which allows you to add pages to your public bookmarks list. On some of the sites, such as Blinklist, my personal favourite, you can keep some bookmarks private (which means that in theory you could use it instead of your offline bookmarks (after all, you only need them when you’re online, right?)

Getting The Best From Social Bookmarking

The key to using social bookmarking is tagging. Tagging is using single words or phrases to describe the links you are posting. If you were to tag this post, for example, you might use the tags: social bookmarking, writing, writer’s resources. If you thought it was important, you could even use the name of the author as a tag. The key is to keep tags simple, so they can apply to many things. And they don’t all have to be words in common use, either. For example, I have a ‘myblog’ tag to help me find the posts I have done.

The other way writers can improve the usefulness of this tool is to use the notes and comment fields when they tag pages. This is a good place to put an excerpt of the page (some of the services do that automatically) or notes about why you thought it was useful in the first place.

Finding Information

Your profile on the social bookmarking site contains a list or cloud of the tags you have used. Click on these to see all the sites that have been tagged in a particular way. Want to do a more complex search? Easy. Put the terms you want into the search box on the page, and magically a list of all the items with both tags (such as ‘freelance’ and ‘writing’) will appear. In many of the bookmarking services, you also get a list of related tags you can click on.

As a writer, I find this a great way of keeping track of information and I use it more and more. What I’ve learned, though, is that it’s only as useful as the tags you use. When tagging, I try to think of three or four words that describe the page, but I don’t always get it right. Typos can really mess up the system, too. (The other day, I discovered that one of my tags was ‘r’ – I still don’t know what I intended to type.)

Other Benefits

Social bookmarking is also a way of bringing additional traffic to your site as there are many users who look at the ‘what’s new’ page and decide what to click on. An easy way of tackling social bookmarking is to use Onlywire. Once you’ve signed up, this will submit to all the sites except reddit and digg.

Minor Annoyances

Not all the sites tag in the same way. Some accept single word tags separated by spaces, others accept phrases separated by commas, which is far more useful.

Blinklist Is My Favourite

As I’ve said above, I like Blinklist and now use that almost exclusively for my non-traffic-seeking bookmarks. Here’s why:

• I imported all my offline bookmarks and del.icio.us bookmarks very easily and it created a set of tags based on my bookmark folders and tags
• Searching is easy and it gives me a tag cloud.
• I can star favourite tags or links (like in Gmail).
• It’s lightening quick to add pages.
• It automatically takes a snippet of the page when I Blink it.
• It doesn’t allow duplicates.
• It’s got a clean, uncluttered interface.
• I can keep some bookmarks private – handy for bank login pages and the like.

Screenshot

If you’ve been following this series of posts, by now you should know almost everything I know about website promotion. We’ve talked about keyword research and placement, the importance of a sitemap, search engine submission and article marketing. But it’s not over yet. There are still a few things you can do to increase and retain the traffic you’ve started to build up. Here are a few suggestions to keep those numbers on the rise.

Speak out

Join a few forums that are relevant to your area and post regularly. Like WritingUp, most forums allow you to customise your signature so that every comment you make has a link back to your site or blog. These posts are also indexed by search engines. I must admit that maintaining three blogs and growing a writing business doesn’t leave me much time for forum posting, but the posts I made a few months ago are still appearing in search engine results.

Get a blog

This strategy also works well for blogs. The advantage of blogging is that that you can write more or less what you like and there’s nothing to stop you from putting in affiliate links. This is perhaps the quickest way to get your content found as, for the time being at least, Google, Yahoo and MSN can’t get enough of blogs and bloggers.

Network like crazy

Sign up with Ryze, a networking site where you can find people with similar interests. Most networks have promotion days where you can advertise your products or services. WritingUp members can go straight to the Vertical Blog Tunnel, which is moderated by Mitch Allen and is a good place to start.

Bookmarks on steroids

Make use of tagging. Posts or sites that are tagged by Technorati and del.icio.us (a social bookmarking service) are picked up very quickly by search engines.

Keep it fresh

If you’ve got your own site, you can keep the traffic coming and rise higher in the results pages by keeping the site content fresh. Add a couple of pages to the site or update something at least once a week. Better yet, add a blog to your site and update it regularly; this will keep the site fresh as far as search engines are concerned. You can then use a service like Pingoat to alert sites when your blog content has changed; there is also a blog directory where you can list your blog. One option I’m also considering when I finally get around to hosting sharonhurleyhall.com is to just have a blog with a few static pages. (I think this suggestion came from Ashok.)

Syndicate to accumulate

Finally, add an RSS (really simple syndication) feed for site updates and news (or include updates in your blog, which is likely to have its own RSS feed). Use the pinging service to alert people that your content has changed. See Haven’s post on RSS for more information. If you then burn your feed with Feedburner, then you can make this happen automatically.

If you do all this, the traffic will keep increasing. Just so you know there’s hope, this month I have had 700 unique visitors, more than 15,000 page views and 19,000 hits on my website.

In the final instalment of this series, I’ll offer my quick-fix solution for increasing site traffic and a quick recap of the key points.

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