Benefits of Linkbait
Links – duh!
Link profile
Traffic
Branding
Bookmarks
Media Publicity

If you are looking to spread the word about a relatively boring industry then search Digg, Reddit, etc. to find what’s worked on these sites in the past pertaining to this industry.

Throw out ideas. Get them up on the whiteboard. Brainstorm.

Once your content is published you have to submit it to the social bookmarking and news sites.
Make sure you tag the story properly. Relevance and popularity are essential in choosing categories.

Keys to Promotion
Power account
Good titles & descriptions
Proper category & tags
Targeted sites

Crafting Social Linkbait
Research is extremely important
With the current events you need to know what’s happening
With the how-to guides you need to research what’s effective and working

Title & Description
Title’s and descriptions are where we see the most errors
Needs to be simple, strong, and focused
Once you have a title you need a story to back that title up
Make sure you capitalize the first letter of each word
Avoid spelling out numbers

Interact & Share
You need to have buddies to add comments and promote your story
Make friends on the social media sites that you use
Get you friends to vote on stuff
Return the favor when they ask

Social Media Tips
Relate to the community
Use images
Limit Ads
Offer a summary
No spelling errors, jargon mistakes, or bad information
Is it duplicate?
Check what worked before
Digg effect
Be link worthy
Submit at the right time

Definition
There are sites that are strictly for bookmarking, meaning that the text fields simply require the URL, Title, Description, and Tags, i.e. Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Bluedot.us, Simpy, etc. However there are other sites that fall under social news (Reddit, Digg, Shoutwire), Social clipping (ClipClip.org, Clipmarks), How to Guides, Directories, List sites, and tons of niche sites that fall under these categories. So how do we make sense of all this noise so that we can most effectively leverage them? First we have to save, then organize.

Organization & Categorization
Different folks have different ways of organizing their campaigning efforts. For me, I use FireFox and store all my useful search marketing links as such:

You can see the large amount of subcategories that I have under link building. The most used categories are the Bookmarking (General) and Social News (General) but you can see that these verticals branch out to other niche sites like Social News (Shopping) and Social News (Tech). It’s important to make sure that the content you are submitting is relevant to the site you’re submitting to. If we submit content about baby products to the tech site we’ll obviously get zero attention and probably some angry readers. Additionally, this won’t help you build a presence within these sites. Since most of these sites have a social or sharing aspect to them, you’ll want to aim towards building a trusted profile. You’ll want to be seen as someone who is contributing to the site’s intent and not just peddling your wares.

Accounts & IP Addresses
It’s best practice to open an account in every site with the same username, password, and email address. This keeps things simple and you won’t be running around trying to remember the unique password you created for dogmeetscat.com. Also remember that most of these sites record your IP address and associate it with the username and password that you’ve created. If you create three accounts with three separate gmail addresses for dogmeetscat.com, they might know that these three accounts are coming from one IP and are most likely being used to spam the system. Don’t be surprised if you’re IP address gets banned if you’re doing this.

*If you have to be a dick you could use open wi-fi networks to create accounts. This way you can have 3 accounts for dogmeetscat.com and have a unique IP address for each account.

Fields: URL, Title, Description, and Tags
When bookmarking your content, be sure to change the Title and Description of your post for each site that you post to. This prevents the bookmarking sites from ranking for the content you’re trying to get your URL to rank for. It will also look less spammy, because there’s no way that 10 different people will submit the same URL with the same description. Maybe the same title but entering the same title and description for every site you post to will obviously indicate that a single person was submitting the same content to multiple sites.

Use common sense and practice these same methods (non-duplicitous) when submitting content to social news, directories, list sites, how to guides, wikis, etc. Oftentimes you won’t be able to add anchor text with your keyword phrase to these locations. If you can, great! If not, the next best thing is to make sure that the keyword(s) that you’re trying to rank for are contained within the URL of the content to be submitted.

How to expedite the bookmarking process
There are a few services out there that can help you post quicker by basically populating the javascript bookmarklet links of the bookmarking sites with your content and then displaying the posting link for your quick posting pleasure. Here are a known few:

http://socialposter.com/
Good but it’s slightly buggy when it processes the content for submission. It sometimes adds symbols to the information or removes commas. It also directs you towards using the same Title and Description for each post. User interface is pretty bland but it does a good job at speeding up a tedious process.

Alexa: 46, 261
Compete: 97,436
Yahoo! Backlinks: 6,658

http://www.onlywire.com/
Another mass bookmarking application. This one records your account information. However these guys seem rather shady because in their TOS they claim they have the right to add their own affiliate links into a user’s bookmarks.

Alexa: 5,122
Compete: 39,477
Yahoo! Backlinks: 51,294

http://www.addthis.com/
AddThis is a widget that blog users can add to the bottom of their posts. When you click on it, you can choose from a list of 34 different bookmarking sites to post to. This is not a web app, simply a widget.

Alexa: 3,206
Compete: 2,067
Yahoo! Backlinks: 3,199,868

We here at Squareoak would love to hear more information about this topic. If you have anything to add or know of other web applications that perform similar functions, we’d love to hear it.

Happy Bookmarking!