The benefits of social bookmarking sites to a blog can never be overstated. Frankly put, if your blog becomes a hit on a social bookmarking site then the potential for your blog to receive thousands and thousands of additional hits is quantified immensely. Yet, there are many bloggers who do not take advantage of social bookmarking sites simply because they are unaware of how these services work. Ok, so let's take a look at some of the basics of social bookmarking and how they can effectively aid in boosting the traffic to your blog.
Social bookmarking is a spin on the traditional internet feature of bookmarking your favorite web pages. The main difference is that with social bookmarking there is a collective sharing of these bookmarked web pages. That is, you can recommend your bookmarked pages to others within your social bookmarking community and other members can make recommendations to you. As time progressed, added features such as reviews and emailed updates on user bookmarks have been employed by numerous social bookmarking sites to make the experience unique and constantly interesting. New bookmarks often go into internal networking RSS feeds and a bookmark that is truly eye catching can lead to a significant increase in traffic. This is where bloggers have the potential to thrive!
Of course, in order to do this one needs to understand that members of most social bookmarking sites discover various sites via headlines of bookmarks. The main factor that determines whether of not people will visit your blog will be whether or not your bookmarking headlines are effective. With social bookmarking sites you need to realize that you are competing with other members of the sites for the reader's attention. As such, you will need to draw potential readers in with snappy and intelligent headlines that are total "grabbers." Think of it for a second – how successful would newspapers be if their headlines were dull, boorish and unexciting? If you blog is a movie review blog, for example, headlines such as "A Review of Rambo" will never turn heads in the same manner as "Rambo Blows The Critics Away!" With social bookmarking, a little bombastic creativity goes along way.
It also should go without saying that your blog needs to be well written or else any traffic boosting methods will, at best, be short term successes. Yes, you can attract people to check out your blog but if the quality of the blog is weak then no social bookmarking in the world will be able to sustain decent traffic.