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Social Bookmarking is the practice of posting links to articles and web pages to various "link aggregator" or social bookmark sites, including Digg, Stumbleupon and so on. Social bookmarking sites rise and fall in popularity fairly quickly, but they generally have a couple of common features:

1. Users can submit links which other users can browse, providing a sensible way to expose your content.

2. Links go into large pages of lists, that are normally very easy to navigate, and tend to be usually divided up right into a "main page" of the best links during the day, and various sub-sections which help you to definitely get exposure in additional relevant circles.

3. Links can usually be "voted on" to determine which links get more airtime on the front page of numerous sections. The more votes your links get, the harder traffic they get.

4. Some sites, like Digg, attach a weighting to certain actions and users, so a person who submits very popular links will have a vote that carries more importance.

5. Most social bookmarking site users are fairly jaded when it comes to the internet, and will ignore stuff that aren't interesting, funny, or very entertaining. This isn't a place for your boring pr announcements.

6. Most bookmarking sites normally have some kind of "social" element for them, allowing users to generate profiles, have a friends set of other users, etc., with the hope of getting users to share content between themselves.

These are the basics, so let's take a look at how best to approach social bookmark submitting. I'm going to use Reddit and Digg as my main examples, having said that that Reddit itself needs a great deal of familiarity with its culture until you are able to submit links that anybody even clicks on.

Choose your niche

Social Bookmarking - Submitting articles on growing bonsai trees to the front page of Reddit won't do you any good - you'll get 30 visitors maybe, none who will buy your products. But submitting it to /r/bonsai, although it only has around 1,100 readers, will most likely garner you more attention from interested people.

Ironically, submitting to /r/trees could have much less of an effect, because /r/trees is committed to marijuana culture. The lesson here is: know your subreddits.

Write an appealing title, and use a picture

Social Bookmarking - Standard newspaper/advert headline formats fail to work too well on the internet, because everyone has become immune to them. Instead you should think of a clever title that interests people enough for more information about what you're writing, or at least promise pictures of cats.

Most bookmarking sites add a thumbnail from the page you're linking to, a treadmill you provide. Go ahead and take trouble to do this - it generates much higher click throughs.

Keep at it, to make your links simple to share

Social Bookmarking is focused on persistence, so if nobody selects your first link, make another article, make a more clever title and check out again. Put a social bookmarking widget on your website or blog, and encourage people to share with you your articles. If you've submitted them already, and they've accounts, it only takes an additional to click an "upvote" or "like" button.

If nothing else, having links to all of your articles on half dozen Social Bookmarking sites is great for SEO.