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October 10, 2008
Backlinks - We all know they are one of the most important factors in a websites’ success or failure! Unfortunately, it also the most time consuming process we will use to promote our sites and due to that time investment, most of us skip it!
In a nutshell, Social Bookmarking is a way for you to store all of your favorite web pages on a third party website like Digg, StumbleUpon, and literally hundreds or even thousands of others! The benefit to using these online repositories, is that search engines love them and index them regularly!
You open accounts at places like Digg, StumbleUpon etc and when you see a page you like, like one of your own, you bookmark it in your profile! Wonderful right? Its easy enough to do and only takes 2-3 minutes to go in, anter the url, tag the post etc. Well… what if you have profiles at 20 bookmarking sites? You can easily see how long it will take to get them all done in one sitting…
Enter - OnlyWire!
This is where it starts getting cool…. You create a free account at OnlyWire, which lists a group of about 20 different social bookmarking sites in its main interface. In those boxes, enter your account info for ALL the bookmarking sites. All of them are free to setup, so if you don’t have an account at the named site, just click the links and set one up real quick. After you have all that information entered, you add the OnlyWire bookmark to your toolbar in FireFox (ONLY works in FF)
As you browse the web, you can now add a bookmark to 20 social bookmarking sites in one fell click of the mouse! As you can see in the image above, when you click the toolbar shortcut you created, a small box opens up that asks you for the post title, the post tags, URL and a small area for a snippet from the page. Most of the info is already populated from your post, so it is very easy to fill in the rest!
Complete the form and click on the bookmark link… you have now submitted your bookmark to the 20 sites you configured earlier!
2 minutes - 20 inbound links from the Bookmark Sites!
Tomorrow - I will review a commercial submission tool that takes this method to the EXTREME!
What is YOUR Bookmarking Strategy?
38 Responses to “The Easiest Linking Strategy on the Web!”
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I like also socialmarker.com which is also free ;-) It supports a ton more of social networks than onlineWire does…
@ Manny -
Yes, SocialMarker is also GREAT!! You may be getting 1 step ahead of tomorrow! :-)
Mark
Awesome! I have heard of it but didn’t know it was free. I use an RSS sumitter program and Bookmarking demon to ake all this to the next level, it rocks but can be very dangerous in the wrong hands, yeah, it’s that powerful.
I like bookmarkingdemon. They just released version 4 of the software. I haven’t had a chance to give it a try yet, but I liked version 3 alot.
I’d read somewhere that having a site appear on a bunch of social websites all in one go was an alarm bell for Google & Co. Any thoughts? I have OnlyWire and used it on a few of my sites (can’t remember which ones now!), then I read something by one of these big shot bloggers (can’t remember who!) warning about suddenly popular sites. I got paranoid and quit using it.
nice post I was not aware of services like this I will no doubt sign up in the morning. I use several bookmarking services and anything I can do to make things easier, is always welcome.
Dean
http://www.ireviewiphoneapps.com
http://www.ireviewtechnology4biz.com
As you say Mark, link building is an often neglected part of our success strategy. Thank you for sharing the social bookmarking advice
I took a quick hike across to socialmarker.com and I must say the instructions leave somewhat to be desired. I like the instant button. But the interface for submission seems a bit glitchy. With me not being a member of many social networking sites it left me registering for accounts which is fine. Then it mentions your verification email may take a while by this stage you click to the next site and repeat. Does any other users use socialmarker.com maybe I am missing a bit of information
I use a service from SocialMarker.com - which is awesome and has a pretty extensive list of social bookmarking sites categorized accordingly by do-follow etc…
I’m gonna try this one out though, it’s very intriguing!
I am a bit confused about how to set up onlywire. Do we need to add the information that appears on the API and “Add to Onlywire” pages to our websites and articles?
Mark,
I will also ask about the same concern as Alice’s, would submitting the same info about a site to a bunch of social bookmarking sites generate a backlash from Google??
I signed up and submitted one site but am leery.
BTW I sure wish I had noticed your “only works in Firefox” before I got frustrated trying to drag the Save button to my toolbar. :- I
Yael
@ David - (I couldnt get myself to call you hot sexy abs)
I agree with you, it does take time get all of your info ontered, but in the longrun, it saves a gunch of time.
@ Elijah & Yael -
Just to reiterate what I mentioned to Alice above, make sure you are not submitting a link to the same social network on the same account twice. ie; submitting to stumble on one service/account, then repeating this on another service/same account.
@ Yael - Even though I titled this an easy strategy, its not something you should be using on ONLY your own sites, and as your only linking strategy. It is designed as a place to store & share your bookmarks online…. and you should use it for all types of sites!
Using Social Bookmarks is just one small leg to your overall link building strategy… using the words of John McCain in a recent debate, this is just one tactic, in an overall strategy.
Bad choice of words on my part…
Mark
I take a bit more of a roundabout approach. I submit articles at various top article directories and then I use the social sites to bookmark my articles.
20+ links to my articles invariably gives me a solid PR which then passes on through the links to my own site. It takes a bit longer to become effective, but you wind up with more powerful links from the articles.
This strategy should sidestep the fears some others have mentioned that Google will punish you for bulk linking to your website - just do it once removed.
@ CN -
Thanks for posting and welcome!
Good strategy for sure!! Part of the kudos you get from bookmarking is making sure your account pages on the bookmarking sites, are indexed as well, which is risky as hell!!
Good strategy on the article submission!!
Where do you primarily submit your articles?
I’ve just started playing around with some of the social sites so can’t comment on how effective it is yet. There is so much spam on there from people touting their sites that I hesitate to add too much more junk that will just get ignored! So I’m still working on a strategy.
But I’m curious about people who have multiple and varied niche sites. Do you set up a different identity for each niche? I can’t think that the people who want to follow your news about your ladies’ high heel shoes will be too excited about your invisible dog fence site!
@ Alice -
Surely… dont post a link to a high heel site on another site about yard tractors. I just posted a bit ago about a commenting strategy.
The purpose of commenting is to join those communities in your niche - you may have MANY sites in each niche that you visit and comment on…
If you write a post today on high heels… then you should be commenting on fashion type blogs.
If you write a post tomorrow on yard mowers, you should be commenting on different blogs, not the fashion blogs.
this is one of the main reasons if you have fewer sites you are hoping to grow, it is much easier.
Mark
@Mark,
I understand all that.
I was talking more about the social sites like twitter and plurk etc, where people “follow” you presumably because of something in your profile caught their interest. Would you use the same ID to post about high heels as you would about lawn tractors? Or would you have different ones? This is what my question was about.
Posting comments on blogs and forums is easy, because you can change your website link to fit the topic of where you’re posting. But the social sites are different - you have more of an “identity” that’s visible to everyone than you do with blogs and forums.
@ Alice -
I dont use Twitter or plurk or any of the microblog formats to promote sites.
If you only have 1 blog that you focus on, great… but for using it to promote niche sites… I dont do it.
@Mark,
I know you don’t do it, but there are plenty of others who do. :-/
I was just curious how people worked it when they had multiple agendas they’re pushing!
Hi Mark
Thanks for the welcome.
You asked “Where do you primarily submit your articles?”
I use the Top 50 Article Directory list that you can find at http://www.vretoolbar.com/articles/directories.php and submit to a selection from that list. EzineArticles is always my first port of call because I always seem to get a PR6 link out of them.
Hey Mark
I’ve tried to answer a couple of times but I included a link and I gueses you’ve got some software that thinks my comment was spam, so this time I’ll answer without the ink.
You asked : Where do you primarily submit your articles?
I go through the top 50 article directories that are listed on the VRE Toolbar website where the sites are ranked in order of Alexa ranking and the PR is also displayed.
I recently had two articles declined by ezinearticles. I was told they no longer accept articles that link to auctions sites. Has anyone else experienced this?
@ Crumpled Notes - GREAT resource list - thank you for that!!
@ DrBob - I have not found that issue… but I can see where they are coming from. What sites were the links sent to? Were they BANS only sites?
As we all know… BANS is not in good standing on search, so it may be trickling farther down the line.
Mark
BANS only sites.
DrBob -
Thats probably the problem… do you know for sure the sites are still even in the search indexes?
Mark
Not in google for sure.
While I have your attention. Some time ago you mentioned you would show us how to add the form in ‘contact us’. Is that in the near future?
@ DrBob -
I use a very simple plugin called Secure and Accessible Contact Form Link
load it up, activate it… all done!
Mark
I submitted 3 articles to Ezine about a month ago, all 3 were “held up” because of the “link” i had used which was a BANS link. I resubmitted 2 of them and they were approved. The 3rd one i resubmitted 2 times and it never would go through. It DID have a blog attached to it so i resubmitted using the /blog in the URL and they accepted it!
Alan over at Affiliate Confession just posted abou tthis same thing today!!
http://www.affiliateconfession.com/2008/10/20/ezinearticlescom-strict-on-linking-to-bans-sites/
Mark
Mark,
Did you check at Social Marker if we need signing for the 50 bookmarking sites to which it submits if we go to it through its All in One Plugin?
Or don’t we need signing, as it never asks me to do so.
I just want another person’s confirmation which will confirm to me that I am not doing anything wrong!
@ GB -
From everything I could tell from my own usage… you DO need to have accounts and sign in to each of the services it is submitted to.
I have not got the standalone application yet, but do plan on it soon.
Just moderating my efforts so i dont overdo it all at once.
Mark
Just how is the OnlyWire tool supposed to work? I had it on my old computer and never gave it much thought. But since it was mentioned here I added it to this one. All of my account data for the various social networks was still there. I used it on my latest blog post, but the only thing that got posted was an ad for OnlyWire on Twitter! Nothing else appeared.
I seems pretty easy to use…but did I miss something??
For OnlyWire to WORK AT ALL… you MUST be using Firefox, and you MUST login to the individual bookmarking sites one time, saving the login info in FF. After you have saved the PW and logged in, the auto bookmark button will work right and submit to all at once.
If you submit a url without being logged in, it will not post anything.
Mark
So if I have 6 bookmarking sites listed with my user name and pw, I need to log into each one, make sure I save the pw in FF, and THEN save the url?? Do I have to log into the sites every time, or just one time? It seems to defeat the purpose of using OnlyWire if you have to log into the sites to get it to work.
I know that when I tried it, I was actually logged into Twitter at the time, but OnlyWire didn’t post anything.
I wonder why this isn’t posted on the OnlyWire site? I looked for instructions, and didn’t find any…
@ Alice -
To be honest, I am not 100% sure of this all, but my thoughts are that It works off your active cookies… so once you login to the indivudal sites one time, or save your OnlyWire settings page, it should work fine as long as your cookies remain active.
I have used it almost daily and all the posts are being bookmarked.
Has anyone figured out how to make the Twitter entry show a link to the post I’m promoting? I finally got this thing to work, but all it posts on Twitter is the text name of the article & blog, but no link to it. Seems pointless if that’s all it does…
I like SocialMarker better than Onlywire because it has so many more sites available. Also, BookMarkingDemon is great.