Social Bookmarking Networks: How do you create the popular stories?

It's probably the dream of every social bookmarking network's user to have their submitted stories and articles make it to the front page of the site. Why? Because making it to the front page (and not just in the “just submitted” category) means that a lot of people voted positive on this article. It only follows that they like the article because they voted positive for it. By liking it, it means they have read it. By reading the article, it means they have visited your site. This is very rewarding in terms of traffic and, more importantly, in potential income.

If you have a site and/or a blog, you should know how the basics of making money off them goes. It's either one or all of these money-making strategies:
  • People buy your service or product
  • People click on your affiliate links and other advertisements and purchase from them
  • The page views and page loads that you get is converted into money by some ad servers
This is, of course, impossible without traffic and attention from potential visitors which is why social bookmarking can help especially if you're just starting out with your business or site. In order to achieve good traffic from these bookmarking sites, you must first learn how to attract people into voting for your articles and making them popular for more people to see.

Listed here are a few tips and tricks (depending on how you call them) on how to create that popular article to promote your site:

1. Offer something unique
I know, I know. Being unique these days is either overrated or too hard to do. My vote is on the latter. With so many “unique” stories popping out everywhere on the internet, people's attention are divided into the many different unique articles being submitted into social bookmarking sites. Try to scour the web for something that you think would make it big; if it's not there, you can bet that it's your time to shine, and if it is, think of some ways on how to beat that existing article that you found.

2. Offer something useful and informative
It always helps to offer up an article that other people will find useful. Be it a technique on how to fix a software bug, a review on a newly released gadget or the latest news on nuclear warfare, people tend to flock to something that will give them more information about their daily lives and the world around them.

3. Titles and descriptions make a big difference
There are some members of social bookmarking sites who rarely read the stories being submitted. These people are more into the “social” part rather than the “bookmarking” side of these networking sites. One common characteristic that these kinds of users have though is that they vote on stories based on the titles and descriptions. Even if the story is really dull and boring, they wouldn't care (and neither would they know) because they didn't read past the title and description. So make sure that you have this really great title that people will quickly notice among a sea of other titles and write a description that will complement the title.

4. Voting for other stories may be a good thing
Some users will be kind enough to reciprocate story votes in bookmarking sites. You shouldn't just submit your stories – you should also vote for others. It would give you more exposure to the social network that you belong to.

5. Make friends
Don't be shy to invite other people to become a part of your friends' list. The tendency is that they might opt to get an update of the stories that you submit, or at the very least, visit your page every now and then to see if you have something that they might be interested in. You get to have more votes this way. Being a network that this is, their friends will see the stories that they voted on and there is a chance that they would vote for your story too. This is the endless cycle of bookmarking sites.

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