For the last couple months I’ve been working on this new Web 2.0 social bookmarking services community.

What is it all about?

• Rather than submitting merely your own bookmarks to the many services available (like Digg, BlinkList, Delicious, etc.), members submit each others’ bookmarks
• This makes it less likely that you’ll be considered a “spammer” for constantly promoting only your own sites
• This also gives your pages potential to be bookmarked many times with each service, rather than only once like you would do for yourself
• The bookmark submission process happens behind the scenes and is fully automated. You only need to enter your account details once.
• Members are encouraged to only submit quality pages; we don’t want to promote garbage
• The functionality is easy-to-use…it literally takes seconds to add your own bookmarks or to share other members’ bookmarks.
• No more messing around with different tag formats!  SocialAdr takes care of all that craziness for ya.

What prompted me to create this website was a few things:

• Even though SocialMarker is a very useful tool, it can be extremely time consuming because it still involves a lot of manual dragging-and-dropping.  Just to submit a single webpage to 20 services usually takes half an hour!
• I thought about “link sharing” networks which are (as far as I can tell) getting to be pretty outdated in the ever-evolving interweb.  I wanted to come up with a way to combine that philosophy with Web 2.0 social networks and social bookmarking.
• I’m a member of Traffic Drill, a forum in which members can request other members to bookmark their webpages.  But since the bookmarking process is manual and unable to be controlled in a “fair” manner, it’s entirely possible for a member to contribute WAY more to the community than they receive (I was a perfect example of this).  I think it’s a great idea, but I saw room for improvement.
• There’s many software packages out there that do social bookmarking submissions, but for each webpage you have, it’ll only be submitted once to every service.  With SocialAdr, you can potentially have your webpage submitted tens or hundreds of times to each service!  Instead of merely 1 backlink, you’ll get 10, 20, 30…50…etc.  And this all happens on auto-pilot.

I’ve had beta testers in the system for about two weeks now and they’ve been great!  Lots of bugs have been fixed and new features added.

Hopefully in a few more weeks I’ll be able to open it up to the public!

If you’re interested in helping beta test (it’s really not that difficult and you’ll get free backlinks and traffic while doing it), you can either read this WarriorForum thread, or contact me for more info.

 

Edit [Sep 12, 2009] – It’s now open to the public, so go get your FREE account now!

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