I recently observed that I’m being quite enthusiastic about social bookmarking sites; I find myself reading and studying more about them these past few weeks. Well I guess no one can blame me about that, because social bookmarking is indeed fun and very useful.

A lot of bloggers are venturing, incorporating their blogs with social bookmarking sites. But I observed, as I read across forums and blogs, that almost 70% of bloggers says that social bookmarking is not working for them, and that they prefer to use other services such as MyBlogLog and Entrecard. Well I guess this is so because they use bookmarking sites to only one purpose: To generate traffic. It’s their only basis whether social bookmarking is for them or not.

Generating traffic is just one of the power social bookmarking sites has. If a blogger wants to be successful in social bookmarkings, he must learn how to explore and exploit the powers it possess:

THE POWER OF QUALITY CONTENTS

In bookmarking sites, bookmarkers bookmark contents that they find interesting and valuable. Which means quality contents are sifted out from mediocre contents, making the resources in social bookmarking sites very rich. Gaining free access to these rich contents is indeed a privilege.

If you ran out of ideas to post in your blog, contents from social bookmarking sites can give you brilliant post ideas. You can share, reblog, recycle, or use it as reference. Just don’t forget to pingback.

THE POWER OF RAPPORT BUILDING

The members of social bookmarking sites are very diverse, from big time entrepreneurs to plain house wives. With this, social bookmarking sites are firm grounds to build-up rapport. You may prefer surrounding yourself with like-minded people and share personal interests; or perhaps with fellow entrepreneurs and exchange business ideas.

Sharing, discussing and gaining new knowledge from the person itself is something we should treasure. Me, as a blogger, have learned a lot from more experienced bloggers. I seek advice and ask for some tips. I even had a great opportunity to let Marko of HowToMakeMyBlog.com assess my blog and give his recommendations.

THE POWER OF DO-FOLLOW

Some social bookmarking sites such as Furl does not use “No-Follow” tags. Meaning bloggers can benefit from them by receiving some “link-juice” which can help increase their blog’s Page Rank. Google prioritizes blogs/sites that has higher Page Rank.

Learn more about Page Rank here.

List of “Do-Follow” social bookmarking sites here.

THE POWER OF RIPPLE EFFECT

A bookmarker bookmarks a content then share it to another bookmarker. If this bookmarker finds it valuable, he’ll bookmark it and share to another bookmarker…and so on and so forth.. This is a powerful way spread the knowledge or the information.

We can benefit in 2 ways:

1. If the content was shared to you, it has a high probability that the content shared is valuable.
2. Just imagine if your content is being spread this way. Traffic!

THE POWER TO BOOKMARK

Getting back to basics. With lots of benefits social bookmarking sites offer, people may tend to overlook what bookmarking is all about. The ability to simply bookmark contents you find is very valuable. This can help you gather contents that is important to your research or study. It is also a nice way to collect articles that you find very interesting and worthy to be shared.

I find bookmarking sites very handy especially if I found a very valuable article but don’t have the luxury of time to read it.

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Don’t just use social bookmarking sites to generate traffic, there’s more to it.