SocialMarker is a free tool that I use fairly often.  It makes it a heck of a lot easier to submit my sites to social bookmarking services, than if I was to do it manually.

After my negative review of SocialBot yesterday I figured I should discuss what I do find useful for social bookmarking.

So why do I use SocialMarker?

• It helps me get traffic.
• It helps me get a lot of backlinks, some from high PR sites.
• It works with many of the popular social bookmarking services…51 in total!
• It’s free!

Now let me explain how it all works:

1. First I load up whatever page I want to submit in FireFox.  I’ll use im-fun.com as an example.
2. I have a “SocialMarker” bookmark in my Bookmarks Toolbar.  The SocialMarker site explains how to get this setup.
3. I click the “SocialMarker” bookmark.
4. Another tab appears with SocialMarker loaded and the Title and URL of my page auto-populated.
5. I manually enter text (a description of the page) and appropriate tags.
6. I select the social bookmarking services that I want to submit to (I usually choose the “Dofollow” and “Best” ones, not all of them).
7. I click “Submit”
8. SocialMarker loads up a frame that opens up pages for each service, with buttons at the top to navigate between services
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9. I then go from service to service, logging in (often I’m already logged in from a prior session), and submitting my page by dragging and dropping each field from the helpful bar at the bottom of the screen.  Often SocialMarker is smart enough to populate these fields without me having to do anything.
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So, although there’s still some manual effort involved, SocialMarker does make it easer to submit sites to social bookmarking services.  And it sure doesn’t hurt that it’s FREE.  I’ll keep using it until I find something better or win the lottery and can finally afford to spend more money on internet marketing tools.

One last thing I should mention – I also use the Tag Format Converter tool (or the downloadable spreadsheet) that I wrote.  There’s 5 different tag formats that social bookmarking services require; you can’t just use the default comma-separated format for each service.  Yes, it sucks ass.  Hopefully one day those social bookmarking bigwigs will decide on a standard format.  But that’s just wishful thinking

This is what I use for submitting my sites to website directories.  I know there’s a debate about how useful “directories” are for improving search engine ranking, but it’s hard to argue with the benefits of getting a bunch of 1-way backlinks for free.

Some people complain that directories are a waste of time because “they’re sooooo 1999″ (ie. Web 1.0) and not hip and trendy like social bookmarking sites.  I don’t subscribe to that jazz.

Here’s the features that I like about Directory Submitter:

• Ability to see and sort by Google PageRank in the list of available directories (there’s 350!).  I only choose the ones with PR of 4 or higher.
• Can create a “project” for each of your sites and submit them all
• Tracking of which directory you’ve submitted each site to

This is the shit that annoys me:

• When you delete a directory it re-appears in the list the next time the app opens
• No way to just sit back and let the submissions happen automatically; you have to manually change between directories and projects

The complaints above may simply be because I’m too much of a cheap-ass to buy the full version so I’m stuck with limited functionality.  Anyways, I haven’t found anything better yet, but if you have let me know!