Smart webmasters know that by getting their sites listed on the ‘popular’ lists means a major influx of traffic, which can result in:

• Increases in RSS subscribers. A number of sites have documented a rise in subscribers after a post becomes popular on a social media site.
• Increased links back to your site. Many bloggers find things to write about on social media sites. If you’re popular, expect lots of nice links back from other blogs.
• Google Juice. The increased backlinks will ultimately result in better PageRank with Google and therefore higher placement in search engine listings.
• Reputation. As all these factors come into play, your site has the potential to become a trusted resource and this can all reinforce your reputation as an expert in your niche.
• Better advertising revenue. Maybe not immediately – social media users are an ad-blind crowd. But increased traffic and better SERP placement is likely to see better advertising opportunities over time.

As you can see, there is a lot to gain from leveraging social media sites. Note that I didn’t say ‘exploiting’ social media sites.

Seeding

Seeding is the practice of submitting links to social media and bookmarking services like Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Reddit. There are countless others, although the impact of seeding is less if the service is less popular. Which explains why attaining the Digg front page is the goal for many bloggers!

Seeding becomes controversial when you’re only promoting your own site, or you’re seen to be submitting stuff purely to gain traffic. This is frowned upon by the users and moderators of social bookmarking services for a very good reason – it’s considered to be spamming. And everybody hates spammers.

The only exception to this rule is if you’re creating quality content and otherwise participating in the community. If you’ve created a unique article or post that will offer real value to visitors, then there’s nothing wrong with seeding your own pages. Nicer if someone else submits it for you though.

My Suggestions For Ethical Bookmarking

• Limit your activity. Not all social networking services will yield a result, and some are barely used at all. Why waste time with multiple submissions – you could be creating great content!
• Participate in the community. There’s a reason they call it Social Bookmarking – it’s all about people and connections. Find people with similar interests, comment where you can and build a solid friend list. You might actually enjoy it…
• Don’t just seed your own stuff. Share the resources you find interesting, particularly in your niche. It’ll vary your submission list and it’s a great way to reward other bloggers whose writing you admire. If you only seed your own stuff, you’ll look like a spammer.
• Be inspired by the community. Lots of bloggers get their inspiration from their social bookmarking tool of choice. They can also discover great writing in their area that they might never have found before. All this can generate ideas for you to write about and experiments to try on your own website.
• Above all, don’t spam. Not every post is worth submitting to a social bookmarking service. Shorter posts, or link posts that point out a resource but don’t offer any real insight are examples of this.
• Hope that people start to seed your pages. The Holy Grail of Ethical Bookmarking – in my opinion – is when people start watching your blog or website and seed your links for you. Word of mouth is better than self-promotion any day of the week!
• Seed other people’s pages. Reward websites and writers that you enjoy by bookmarking their work. It’ll give them all the benefits listed above, and your Digg account won’t look quite so spammy!

Start Your Ethics Engines

Creating an account on every social bookmarking service available is counter productive, spammy and a waste of time. I believe that you’ll really only see benefits from social bookmarking if you’re participating in the community. That means seeding other people’s pages, commenting on posts and building up a network of friends.

Also, by focussing on one or two particular sites, you stand a greater chance of success with your bookmarking. And it’s long accepted knowledge that when you become popular at one site, it won’t be long before your content gets seeded to other bookmarking services. For instance, if you hit the front page of Digg, you stand a shot at getting popular on del.icio.us or reddit.

Self-promotion fuels hostility in social bookmarking users. Do it too much and you can expect a backlash. Let’s push to drop mercenary linkbaiting in favour of participation and fair use of social bookmarking services.

Some, like del.icio.us are no-frills, serious bookmarking tools. Others, like Digg are places where links get submitted and community discussions form around the pages that are submitted.

But for over a year now, there’s been a social bookmarking site that beats the spartan design of del.icio.us and has a raft of community features to beat the likes of Digg. The site I’m referring to is ma.gnolia.

Better Design

Where del.icio.us sports a utilitarian design, ma.gnolia is built for comfort. Instead of being harsh and high-contrast, the design employs pastel colours and is strikingly people-centred. Virtually everything has an avatar associated with it.

Less Focus On Populists

I wouldn’t say ma.gnolia is impervious to spammers. However, it places a lot less emphasis on popularity of links which makes it less attractive than Digg or Reddit as a place to drop potential linkbait.

More Focus On Community And Discussion

There’s a little feature ma.gnolia has that I’ve never seen anywhere else – Give Thanks. No, it’s not a cue to start praying! If you see a useful link in someone else’s bookmarks, you can click a Give Thanks button and they get a little message. It’s a great social feature, and a nice way to foster community. I’ve been thanked about three times now, and I’ve thanked quite a few users myself.

The community revolves around people and groups. Needless to say, you can establish connections with individuals in the usual friend/contact list manner. You can also create or join special interest groups. That’s where all the conversation happens.

The groups basically act as forums for specific topics. You can also submit links to a group. This can be useful, because if you come across an excellent web design resource (for example), you can recommend it to the group.

RSS Features and Blog Integration

There’s a full range of RSS feeds available in ma.gnolia. You can subscribe to the bookmarks of other users, and you can also subscribe to bookmarks by tag or by group.

The easiest way to integrate your ma.gnolia bookmarks with your (WordPress) blog is to use the RSS sidebar widget. Alternatively, you can use the Postalicious plugin to scrape up your recent bookmarks and post them as an entry on your blog, which is what I do here.

Give ma.gnolia a go…

All that remains is for you to give ma.gnolia a go. If you sign up for an account, don’t forget to add me as a contact! Remember, if you’re a del.icio.us user transferring across, you can always import your existing bookmarks and tags.