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Social Media … or Social Blogmarking?

Posted By Guest Blogger 28th of January 2011 Social Media 0 Comments

This is a guest post by Devesh of Blokube.

What is “blogmarking”? Many of us already use and understand social media, but very few of us tap into the great and growing potential of social blogmarking sites.

Blogmarking is the process of you bookmarking your blog post on a blog bookmarking site. Blogmarking can also be referred to as blog bookmarking.

How blogmarking works

The blogmarking process involves you writing a post on your blog, looking for a great and active blogmarking site, and then submitting your post to the blogmarking site.

Your post will be ranked on the site based on the number of votes it gets from users. If your post has a great title there is every chance that it will get a lot of eyeballs. If it’s good, it’ll likely get a lot of votes, and moved to the front page of the blogmarking site.

While blogmarking works just like social bookmarking, the concept is different. A social bookmarking site is highly influenced by power users who determine which posts can be promoted to the homepage. Most of these power users have been on the site since its inception, and they read and work on the site rigorously. It’s not easy for just anybody to become a power user.

The concept of a social blogmarking site is different from this, as any post can be promoted to the front page on the basis of the votes it receives from site users. If you’re not familiar with blogmarking, here are a few blogmarking sites:

Social media … or social blogmarking?

There are many ways to spread the word about your blog while building stronger relationships online. Currently, the key most popular options are social media sites. So let’s look more closely at the pros and cons of social media sites in comparison to social blogmarking sites.

Social media sites

You’re undoubtedly familiar with social media sites and are using them to promote your blog. Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and so on, allow users to create a profile, providing photos, website links, biography information, and a host of other personal details.

To get solid traffic from social media sites, you usually have to be very active on those sites, and that can take lot of time.

Advantages of social media sites

First, let’s look at some advantages of social media sites.

They’re open to anyone: A major advantage of social media sites is that they’re open to anyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re a new blogger or you’re already established, you can easily open an account on any social media site you love, and you can begin to interact with others immediately.

They foster community: Social media sites also encourage discussion and community interaction—that’s the main reason why they were established. Take Facebook as an example: a lot of your high school/college friends probably have a Facebook account and you can easily get in touch with them through the site. Another community-related advantage of social media sites is that they encourage personal discussions and people will be encouraged to discuss and interact with you if they know a lot about you as a person.

Disadvantages of social media sites

Even though making use of social media sites has strong advantages, it also has disadvantages.

They can help build relationships and brand loyalty, but take time and dedication: If you observe how marketing is done on social media sites you will notice that influence matters. Those with bigger audiences, greater popularity, and stronger reputations will have more success with social media sites than those of us who don’t. Social media sites also require you to spend a lot of time building your profile, especially if you’re a new blogger, and even though the results you will get will be great, this takes considerable time.

They’re littered with ads and spam: Another major problem with social media sites is that they can be havens for spammers, and many are laden with ads. Since it’s very easy to join social networks, a lot of people who are just using the site for spamming purposes join, and this can lead to a lower-quality service.

Social blogmarking sites

Social blogmarking is the process of submitting your blog content to social voting sites and blogging communities.

Many bloggers don’t utilize the power of social blogmarking yet, but it’s a great way to get traffic and connect with other bloggers.

Advantages of social blogmarking sites

They’re less time-consuming than social media sites: A major advantage of social blogmarking sites is that they tend to consume less time than social media sites. It doesn’t matter if you’re a new or established blogger, you have an equal opportunity to gain exposure. What matters most when trying to get attention for your blog is not your influence or reputation, but the title of your post and its content.

They help you connect with other bloggers in your niche: Another great advantage of social blogmarking sites is that they allow you to get in touch with other bloggers in your niche. Since these sites are mainly used by bloggers (where social media sites are used by a much broader audience) they make it easy for bloggers to get more targeted traffic. For example, I notice that I get more links to my articles when I submit them to social blogmarking sites because most people reading my content there are bloggers, and they’re more likely to share it on their blogs if they like it.

They allow users to comment and vote on their favorite articles: Another major advantage of social blogmarking sites is that they allow people to comment on blog posts through commenting systems like those we see on everyday blogs. It’s also easier for bloggers to connect with others using this feature.

They’re a great way to share favorite blog bookmarks: Social blogmarking is a great way to share your favorite blog posts with friends, family members, and your readers. Content can easily get lost in the social media space but with blogmarking it’s easy to share your content with other people who care about your blog.

They champion quality content: If your main aim as a blogger is to find quality content to link to, or you’re a reader who wants to read more about a niche subject, social blogmarking sites are highly effective because they are always moderated. The quality of the blog posts you’ll find there is usually high, and the sites are spam-free.

Disadvantages of social blogmarking sites

They’re very specific: The major disadvantage of social blogmarking sites is that they’re very specific, and they don’t yet have broad appeal among general or mass audiences. For example, most of the current blogmarking sites focus on blogging tips and making money online, so it’s often difficult for bloggers in other niches to make effective use of these sites.

They’re not well-known yet: Social blogmarking is a relatively new concept, so although social blogmarking sites are growing their audiences, the concept hasn’t yet gained the same traction that social networking sites have achieved.

Getting started with social blogmarking

Social blogmarking has its drawbacks, but it also offers a lot of advantages. You don’t have to have a high profile or a huge following to succeed at social blogmarking.

Have you tried social blogmarking? Where do you think this field is heading in future? Feel free to share your views in the comments.

Devesh is young entrepreneur and author of Blokube, a social voting site for Bloggers and Intenet Marketers. Follow him @blokube and join Blokube on Facebook.

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Comments
  1. Digg, Mixx, BlogEngage,…is pages for bookmarking only. It look like a “content farm”!

  2. Indeed I’m not fully utilize the power of social bookmarking and also social media, the power of it is unlimited, especially it allow everyone get connected under the same roof, and share the same favourite, it forms community and group of like mind.
    It’s one of the major tool that I use to find similar topic authors and get connect with them, discussing and sharing the same vision, supporting each other, and learn from each other. It help grows each other to the next level.
    But everything had it’s pros and cons, somehow many people use it to spam around, creating much useless contents on social sites.

    • It used to be that bookmarking (or blogmarking) was very popular among bloggers but the way it was abused and used to spam discouraged people. It’s good to know that it’s coming back again.

      • Exactly. As I said before we’re using awesome techniques to stop spam submissions. We rarely get any spam submissions.

        Thanks for the comment mate. Hope to see you around.

    • Hi Jia,

      That’s great to hear.

      At Blokube we rarely get any spam submissions or comments, we’re using some awesome anti spam techniques.

      Thanks for the nice comment Jia. Have a great day.

  3. Nice idea that!… It’s just getting people to sign up to another website that could be the tricky part. Maybe a quick sign up would be better, using the link-up feature with twitter or facebook.

    David Edwards

    • Great idea man. We have started the work on Integrating social media sites like twitter and facebook.

      Thanks for the suggestion mate.

  4. While I think this approach is valuable in theory I am not sure it will be all that good in practice. The reason I say this is that, as you point out in this post, influence matters. The big blogs will rocket to the top with ease but smaller blogs will linger around the bottom of the pile.

    I know we are all striving to produce great content and helpful articles but it can be very disheartening to see our blogs at the end of a list, yet again, and we struggle or beg for people to visit.

    I am all for good stuff being readily avaliable and I do think the articles on the front page are good, helpful posts but I am always coming across blogs that are not popular but get very little ‘star’ attention.

    Good post though and worth thinking about. You could say that unless your blog is on there then it has no chance of getting to the top!! Exposure is good.

    Cheers

    • Hi Simon,

      Social blogmarking doesn’t work like that. It depends on the user and the type of content he/she is submitting. If you’re active on these sites then getting on front page isn’t a hard task.

      Take a example of our most active member – Mavis Nong.
      http://blokube.com/user/history/Mavis/ Do you think she has a big blog. No but most of her posts get good votes and comments. Why? Because she is very active in doing voting and commenting.

      On other hand she writes quality articles.

      Anyways, Thanks for the nice comment Simon. Enjoy your weekend.

  5. Very helpful information – I have never heard of this blogmarking not until i read this post, good stuff ;-)

  6. very interesting thoughts about that. i think its pretty easy to puplish your site to the social bookmarks but who knows how exactly it will brig you traffic or up in the ranks?

    • Hi David,

      Glad like it too. Social blogmarking sites has power to bring traffic if you know how to utilize it properly.
      Many bloggers are getting good traffic from our Social bookmarking site.

      The best way would be, test it yourself and see how great it works.

      Thanks for the comment David.

  7. Thanks for the article, Devesh. Must admit I’ve never heard of blogmarking before! It’s certainly something I’ll look into further so thanks for the links as well.

  8. I had to stop by and thank you for sending a shout out to blog engage Dev! I know you have been a very dedicated member of our community for a long time now so thanks so much. I remember when I first started blogengage back in 2009. So many people questioned the reasoning to joining the website because of the little audience we had.

    What most people don’t understand is social networking isn’t all about building traffic it’s about building your online relationships. Traffic is just something that comes along with this behavior. My point is it’s a lot of hard work to gain an increase in traffic and like you mentioned in the article many people don’t realize how much work is involved. I will safely assume your in this stage right now with Blokube.com or maybe just getting past it.

    Jia Jun has a really good point in his comment too how many people submit junk links to these sites and it really is an issue with pligg powered websites. This is one of the main reasons I manually approve every story that is submitted into blog engage. The process is extremely long but it has to be done to ensure the quality of our community and its members.

    Regarding your question Dev I would say it’s only going to get bigger. The world is still learning about blogging and I predict everyone will soon have their own blog. The field still has so much growth potential.

    • You’re always welcome Brian.

      I see most of the people join social sites just to get traffic. If they just want traffic then stumbleupon is the best option.

      I know how hard it is to people sign up to these sites. It takes a lot of hard work, time and promotion to build a social community. I started the site 5 months ago but it’s growing very rapidly and now we have a staff of awesome bloggers. I’m working hard to make it better place for everyone but again it takes time.

      When i first started the site, it was getting more spam then actual submissions but after doing some awesome tweaks, we rarely are spam free. Some times we don’t get a single spam in a day.

      Thanks for the nice comment Brian. I really appreciate your support.

      Enjoy your weekend.

  9. Very nice article! I didn’t even know sites like that existed. I have given social bookmarking a little attention, but as you said results are not easy. You really need to get in good with a major referrer who you can count on for a nice spike in traffic. Doing it solo is far from easy. I will look into social blogmarking now. Thanks for the great article!

    • Glad you like it too. Social Bookmarking is great way to get traffic, building backlinks and connect with other pro bloggers.

      Thanks for the nice comment Scott.

  10. Those sites are great. They are also a great source for finding information that could be useful and worth looking into more. I spent 2 minutes on the site and quickly found some great tips that I could use on my blog.

    • Exactly. The sites are just much more then a bookmarking site. At Blokube we’re trying to build a social community and the site is growing very rapidly. We’re working hard to make it better place for everyone.

      Thanks for the awesome comment corey.

  11. Thanks for the information. I have been blogging for almost 3 years and my knowledge spiced up when i visited this blog site of yours. I’ve been researching on how to make money ideas and compiled it so that people will have a better view money making online.

  12. Hey Devesh, Great post. While I don’t necessarily agree that its less time consuming (because I submit and vote on multiple bookmarking sites, it is an untapped area to gain exposure).
    I use MMOsocialnetwork, blokube ;) , blogengage, serpd, kirtsy, digg, mixx, biz sugar, zoomit, olddogg, stumbleupon, reddit, pfbuzz, fwisp, buzz …I am sure there is more. LOL. Keeps a gal busy.

  13. I checked out Blokube. Cool website. I was a bit bummed though. I have a ukulele blog and tried to submit a story but there were no relevant categories.

  14. I am a part of a couple of social blogmarking sites, but I didn’t know the actual term for it. Great post! I especially like the fact that they’re less time-consuming to be a part of and they’re more of an equal-opportunity way to promote your blog. Will definitely be checking out the links you have mentioned!

    • That’s awesome to hear. Actually social blogmarking sites are much better then in terms of social media sites. Even social blogmarking sites take a lot more less time then social media sites.

      At Blokube we’re working hard to make it a better place for bloggers and marketers to submit their blog posts.

      Thanks for the nice comment Krissy.

  15. I think that the blogsharing site being very specific isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It will definitely hold people back from discovering them, but once they catch on they’re gonna be huge. And specificity will be what makes them popular.

    … or it will kill them. We’ll have to wait and see.

    • Hi Dave,

      Blookube is niche focused and only accept articles related to our niche and i think will make it huge.

      Thanks for your input dave.

  16. Great article and I’m definitely guilty of not using Social Blogmarking sites enough, I’m signed up to BizSugar but was initially put off at the work to get involved and get rated and ranked. Like anything building your credibility and real relationships on community sites takes time and consistent effort.

    That said you’ve highlighted the benefits to me as to why I need to get involved so thanks to you!

    Natalie

    • Glad you like it Natalie. That’s great to hear you’ve started using social blogmarking sites. Would love to see you joining Blokube.

      Thanks for your nice comment sisson.

  17. Yes, great read! I wrote about it few months ago. And I feel almost everyone knows it, but they still keep reading and never apply it.

  18. You nailed it. Social media is very time consuming and rife with spam. It’s nice to see that another alternative is coming to the foreground.

    Thanks for the insight.

  19. I have never ever heard of this! And I thought I was such a nerd :S

    Well, I’m on it right now :D

  20. What in the name of all that is holy is blogmarking? Never heard of it!

    It seems you can’t take your eye of the ball for one minute these days.

  21. After reading this post and visiting the websites, I immediate saw this is a Fantastic concept. I registered on one of the site and posted a link to one of my articles and look forward to seeing the results. I believe this concept has an outstanding future. Thanks for sharing this post. Now, I’m ready to see how many other sites are on the web like these.

    Much Success…

    • Glad you like the concept Crystal. Would love to see you joining Blokube ;).

      Thanks for the comment.

  22. I have been sharing content on sites like Stumbleupon, delicious and Digg, and several other pligg based sites, its pretty cool to have your content availible on high trafic sites.
    Wish more people would feel some interest for these sites though. I have a hard time enviting people, and most of them dont use the service activly.
    Cheerz! Great post!

    • HI Richardo,

      Great to see you’re running a social blogmarking site. Getting users sign up is the hard part.

      Anyways, Thanks for the nice comment mate.

  23. The advantages of the blogmarking concept outweight the disadvantages, especially since it’s not an either or situation. A blogger in the process of building up a following can certainly benefit from both!

    As another commentator pointed out, making it as easy as possible to sign up is key, and the one click ‘sign up through your social media page’ option makes a lot of sense.

    Good work Devesh.

    Jym

    • Hi Jym,

      Yeah, making sign up through social media sites is great way. I’m working on something like that.

      Thanks for the great support mate. Enjoy your weekend.

  24. I think digg, delicous, facebook, twitter one of best social networking sites. Its help us to rank up and improve page rank and traffic.

  25. It’s a very good idea, and I think it’ll give others a great chance to get themselves known who may be struggling otherwise. Kudos for the read, I’ve learned a lot this morning!

  26. new idea!

    social blogmarking

  27. Is this like DIGG?

    I’ve checked out BlogHer and have been disappointed they don’t let you use the articles from your blog (that are already written) instead they want you to write new stuff for their blog.

    Social Blogmarking sounds interesting.

    • Hi Mary,

      Yeah, it is digg like but for bloggers and internet marketers.

      Would love to see you joining it :). Thanks for the comment mary.

  28. Devesh, I am so impressed with how you take the time to respond to each commenter. Your post was so clear and persuasively written, on top of being informative. I was moved to action by it.

    You’re right, social media takes up too much time and doesn’t always translate to more blog traffic. My Facebook friends tend to be non-writers and non-blog readers. They just want the quick link to a music video or an update on the visit to the vet. It’s wonderful to know there are communities of bloggers who are like-minded. I do hope they make some room for bloggers whose niche isn’t “blogging tips” and “monetizing your blog” so that the rest of us can be encouraged to continue to write something worth reading.

    • Glad you like my work mate.

      Actually social blogmarking sites take less time compare to social media sites.
      There are many social bookmarking sites other then blogging niche, just google it.

      Thanks for the nice comment. Enjoy your weekend.

  29. LOL I’ve been blogging for over eight years and currently I am the top user at BlogEngage, but I had no idea it was called blogmarking. Thanks for updating me on my lingo. :)

    Good article and nice that you listed other services before your own.

    • Yeah, i see you’re most active member of blogengage. You’re doing super awesome work at Blogengage. Keep rocking alison.

      Glad you like the article. Thanks for the nice comment.

  30. I don’t understand why it’s been covered here like news? When I launched my blog 2.5 years ago I was submitting immediately to like 50 social bookmarking sites..and all those sites are just more targeted “Digg sites” for different niches.

    Never also heard about blogmarking – but I think it’s still better than just name it – social media promotion..which includes Twitter,Facebook..Digg sites..:)

  31. Thank you so much for the information. I am so glad to hear that there are other effective ways to promoting your blog other than the social network norm.

  32. Yes, I’d have to agree with Dainis above… this doesn’t sound like a new thing at all… just a new name “blogmarking”. Reminds me of Digg & Mixx, or am I missing something here?

  33. This is why I love Problogger–I discover all sorts of new ideas. I wasn’t aware of blogmarking, so this is a fun new path for me to skip down and explore. :) Thanks!

  34. Hi

    I have not heard of blog marketing before reading this article and thank you so much for giving us this informations and ope to know more . Keep it up. We do social media marketing for our customers and i am sure that we will do better implementing some of your ideas.

    Laks

  35. Thought I’d add something, you are spot on in your disadvantages to blogmarking. For the most part they aren’t about blogging but about blogging about blogging. It’s a circular problem that I find interesting. Most bloggers blogging about blogging (ahem) aren’t experts at blogging, they just want to be experts. So, as far as that is true, the self-promotion isn’t terribly helpful.

    I have the blogmarking sites move beyond that niche to the blogging universe as a whole.

  36. Been hearing a whole lot about BlogEngage lately and after reading Ileane, Justin, and now this post on the subject, I have decided to test the blogmarking waters as this tactic follows the original principles of Content Being King.

    “They’re not well-known yet” actually is an advantage for what seems to be some highly targeted traffic. I am about to find out just how targeted it is..

  37. Article Submission directories are not content farms unless the completely repost all content, a summary with link back to original content provides value to blogger plus allows readers to collect information from many blogs all on a single source without having to check 20 bookmarks a day or 20 RSS feeds via email. I find that subscribing to 1 article directory for a category like technology, gives me all the news I need from 20-50 sites in one shot instead of subscribing to 30 separate feeds. Although I would like to see sites like BlogEngage have more action in the other categories besides blogging.

  38. Great post! Extremely thorough! Thanks so much for the resources. I found you on blogengage. I’ll join the others you listed as well. Thanks!

  39. The limiting factor with blogmarking sites seems to be that they only attract bloggers. That’s why you get the circular pattern that Alison mentions above. The benefit of these sites is that you create relationships very quickly. That’s become my primary reason for using them.

  40. Never heard of blogmarking so thank you for writing on it. I will make an action to check it out.

  41. Thanks Darren and Devesh. But I have a question…Are these the social blogmarking sites you mentioned the only ones available or are they the reliable ones?

  42. Good distinction. I’ll b looking at blog and blog making differently now.

  43. Awesome stuff Devesh.

    Great to see you here (sorry Im late) and I have to share my 2 cents.

    Blokube is THE place to be if you want to get your blog known online.

    NO 2 cents about it, social bookmarking is dead to the blogger, and social blogmarking is where its at.

    Btw – You owe me for stealing my blogmarking expression LOL

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