Social bookmarking sites are pretty abundant online. Some of them are extremely popular. Not only can you visit them to save bookmarks in a collection but you can share those bookmarks publicly. Those who want to make money from home can use sites like these to their advantage for several reasons including: SEO power, brand recognition, social networking, and reputation management. Not only are these sites free to use but they can bring your websites a lot of search engine traffic which could translate to sales and profit!



SEO Power

From an SEO perspective, social bookmarking sites are highly indexed in the big search engines. When you bookmark a website or blog entry, you can often insert categories, tags, and a review of a URL and search engines could apply that to real ranking results. By bookmarking sites of yours, you could help the search engine optimization of that site. When others also enjoy reading the page, they can often vote for the page as well which can further increase the search engine rankings as well.

Brand Recognition / Reputation Management

When you create a social marketing profile on many of the bookmarking sites, you can improve your brand recognition. By creating profiles for your company, your website, or your own professional name you give people something to find when they research you. When you sell something online, interested prospects will often investigate you by Googling you. By creating profiles on highly indexed profile sites, you create a 'name' for yourself so that people find these professional looking profiles when they research you. You can have 'some' control what people find when they search for you.

Social Networking

Search engines 'crawl' these sites but so do people. By participating on bookmarking sites, you can direct foot traffic to your site. By submitting great links and interacting with others, you can socialize your way to online success!

If people like your Youtube videos, you can market quite effectively on YouTube. If you have a lot of 'friends' on sites like Digg, Delicious, and StumbleUpon, your bookmarks have the potential of being seen by a large audience and being bookmarked by those 'friends'. One of the greatest things about social bookmarking and social marketing is the viral aspect of it. Not only can a little bit of effort bring you customers and referrals and search engine traffic but one small action of bookmarking a great article could have a viral effect that pays you on an ongoing basis. People could read that bookmark the day you mark it but they could also read it and act upon it a year from now as well!

How do you use Web 2.0 sites to your advantage?

Use social bookmarking as often as possible! Once you've created profiles and accounts, use them. Bookmark your great articles on article directories, bookmark blog posts, list the bookmark sites you use in your posts so people can bookmark for you! Add bookmark services to lifestreaming tools so your followers can see the sites you participate on. Bookmark your great YouTube videos by bookmarking them on sites like Delicious, Digg, FriendFeed, and others. Alternate your strategy and look at your website stats plus the search engines to see which sites are bringing you the most success!