Social Bookmarking And Blogging -Say What?Part 1 Get Ready For Reddit

This entry is part [part not set] of 1 in the series Social Bookmarking

What is Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is an online service which allows bloggers to add, comment, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents. It is a critical tool to help pump up your search engine optimization. SEO)

Social bookmarking sites can make it easy for people to find blog sites and help you generate backlinks to your website. If you bookmark your website more in social bookmarking websites, you will get backlinks from each website. This results in a higher page rank for your webpage or website.

A backlink is a link from some other blog to another blog page or post. Backlink strategies have been an important part of online marketing for a long time now. They help improve your website’s traffic, rank, reputation, and even relationships. It is critical that you have quality content, with something valuable to say in order to earn your backlink.(Not anything that looks like spam or needs to be trashed.)

Join Social Bookmarking Sites

Please consider taking the time to join Social Bookmarking sites. I challenge you to try and join at least 20 sites before the end of the month. Let’s start with REDDIT

WIKIPEDIA states: As of February 2021, Reddit ranks as the 18th-most-visited website in the world and 7th most-visited website in the U.S., according to Alexa Internet About 42-49.3% of its user base comes from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom at 7.9-8.2% and Canada at 5.2-7.8%. 22 percent of U.S. adults aged 18 to 29 years, and 14 percent of U.S. adults aged 30 to 49 years, regularly use Reddit.

Please note the demographic. That means, my fellow babyboomer, that you should post stuff that the indicated age groups may feel is quality content. I personally feel that most of what we write about is “quality content” but must be perceived as such by others.

How Does Reddit Work?

As  with all the social bookmarking sites you must first register. With REDDIT you submit your content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then voted up or down by other members. Posts are organized by subject into user-created boards called “communities” or “subreddits”, which cover a variety of topics such as news, politics, religion, science, movies, video games, music, books, sports, fitness, cooking, pets, and image-sharing. Submissions with more up-votes appear towards the top of their subreddit and, if they receive enough up-votes, ultimately on the site’s front page. Despite strict rules prohibiting harassment, Reddit’s administrators have to moderate the communities and, on occasion, close them

Reddit suggests that you join at least 5 communities. Once you do you can create posts, videos etc and select which community you want your content to be seen in. The interface  is easy, very easy for this boomer to use.

As you begin this journey it is important that you document each site you join and keep a record of the passwords and the sites you join.

I decided to provide a FREE copy of the blog directory form for your use. Although it does not say social bookmarking, you can still use for that purpose.

Let’s make this happen.

10 Top Reasons Why Baby Boomers Bloggers SHOULD NOT Use Social Bookmarking

This entry is part [part not set] of 10 in the series Baby Boomers and Social Bookmarking Can You Digg it?

I have discovered 10 Top Reasons Why Baby Boomers SHOULD NOT even think about using Social Bookmarking. You may disagree with me and that is your blogging boomer right but let me know why. So, here are my reasons:

  1. Blogging Baby Boomers have a hard enough time blogging and posting in social networking sites like Facebook and Orket, so who has time, during pre and post retirement, to post to social bookmarking sites?

  2. Most baby boomer bloggers only blog to entertain themselves or for therapy. Who cares about promoting an expertise, service or product when most of them are fishing, or baby sitting grands?

  3. Social bookmarking sites are a waste of time when all you have to do is use the FAVORATES in Internet Explorer and BOOKMARKS in FireFox. ( Who caresabout Safari or Opera, etc because most boomers are on PC’s right?)

  4. Baby Boomer Bloggers are not as smart as the generations before them. They will have a hard time keeping up with the passwords to all those extra sites.

  5. Most Baby Boomer Bloggers can’t see the SHARE BUTTONS.

  6. It has been said by critics of baby boomers that they are selfish. So why should the want to share  good information, articles, products, music,videos, etc with others in their friend networks that they find on other bloggers sites?

  7. Who said Baby  Boomers had friends. If they join a network who will they talk to?

  8. Most Baby Boomers no longer say “Hey can you Dig it?”

  9. Aunt Bea, in Andy Griffith, Macgyver or the Snurfs never used social bookmarking.

  10. Baby Boomers probably came up with those strange and scary names for the social bookmarking sites like the ones below. Who will trust those sites to be for nerdy boomers, scholars, business folks or artists?

* CiteULike

* Connotea

* Delicious

* Digg

* Diigo

* Faves

* Flattr

* folkd

* GiveALink.org

* Metafilter

* Mister Wong

* Mixx

* MSDN

* Newsvine

* oneview

* Propeller.com

* Reddit

* Simpy

* Slashdot

* Sphinn

* Squidoo

If you disagree with me GREAT!! Join me on my Facebook Fan Page and let’s continue the discussion. Also, I dare you to join at least three(3) of these sites. Let’s work on it together.

Social Bookmarking and Baby Boomers-Do You Have a Share Button?

This entry is part [part not set] of 1 in the series articles for boomers

Do you have a SHARE BUTTON on your blog? Regardless of the blogging platform, most blogs use some kind of SHARE BUTTON for social bookmarking. SHARE buttons enable you to easily bookmark a blog post on various social bookmarking sites.

There are many services that will give you a button for your blog. I am going to list a few  below. Before you decide on a service check the following:

  • How many bookmarking services do they provide?
  • Is the menu user friendly for your visitors?
  • Provide customization options?
  • Tracking?
  • Plugin or widgets for which blog platforms?
  • Are the buttons big enough for your visitors to see? (This is a real concern for me. I like bigger size for those who do not need to strain their eyes.

Here are a few SHARE buttons for your consideration.

Addtoany

Addthis

Smart Sharing Button for WordPress blogs

Share This

Share+

I am challenging each and every baby boomer blogger reading this article to start step by step venturing into social media.  After all, do you remember when you first started thinking about blogging? Did it appeal to you or did you say, “Too Much Time”.

All I want you to do is download the Share This plugin if you are on WordPress.org. Or if you are on Blogger, Typepad or any other blogging platform explore the sites above that will provide a SHARE button on your site. Please consider so we can all get more traffic. You wouldn’t mind having more traffic to your site do you? Ah, I think I heard a resounding YES!

Social Bookmarking for Baby Boomers-Digging Deeper with Digg Pt.4

This entry is part [part not set] of 10 in the series Baby Boomers and Social Bookmarking Can You Digg it?

When I first started using Digg I would merely sign in to be able to Digg an article I liked. But like most baby boomers reading this post, Sometimes you want to go deeper so it makes sense. You also go deeper so you can see how relevant it is to your blogging.

Here is Wikipedia’s definition of Digg.

Digg is a social news website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories.

Digg is supposed to be one of the best ,biggest and baddest  social bookmarking sites  out there right now. If you know how to treat it, you can get amazing floods of traffic regularly. However using just their homepage and simple techniques like I have done  aren’t enough.

Some Applications to Consider that Can Help You Go Deeeeeeper into Digg.

Digg Labs

Just like Google has labs so does Digg, The labs provide a deeper view of Digg.  A lot of materialf gets submitted to Digg every day, so good things can sometimes easet past you. Labs projects look beneath the surface of the Digg community’s activities. Here you can find several tools to make browsing and digging more fun as well as analyze internet activities. Oh, if you want to get to it from the site just go down to the very bottom and you will see it in tiny letters. Put your glasses on.

So, I just checked out Swarm. Very cool. Go play for minute or two.

Social Blade

Now this application is not for the faint of heart. Actually, if you have a little anal retention going on or simply love analysis you are going to love this tool.

This application provides detailed analysis, graphs and statistics allowing You to understand how many comments, diggs, friend diggs etc. are needed to hit digg front page. Analyze, what’s really happening on digg’s front page.

Now, you can go and play here for some more minutes. I will discuss some more applications in the next post.

Some Digg Applications You Can Consider