As we are all aware, social networking is currently one of the hottest trends on the internet today. With that, social bookmarking websites are becoming vastly popular with majority of online users.

If you are unfamiliar with the term “Social Bookmarking”, it is basically a method for online users to store, organize and manage bookmarks of their favorite websites online instead of saving them as bookmarks in their own PC’s browser. These online bookmarks are usually categorized chronologically based on relevant keywords or tags. This process of tagging is commonly referred to as “Social Tagging”.

Technically speaking, “Social Tagging” is the process by which online users add “metadata” in the form of keywords to shared content so that other internet users with similar interests can easily find them online. These social bookmarks can either be made public ( usually the case ) or made private, shared only with specified groups of people within a certain network.

What Are The Advantages Of Social Bookmarking.

In my book, besides the viral marketing advantages, my top reasons for using social bookmarks lies in the fact that i travel a lot. Personally, I own 2 desktops and a laptop, and I switch between using the different machines very often. This has resulted in my browser’s bookmarks becoming overly messy and unmanageable.

With the advent of social bookmarking, now I can access my favorite bookmarks from any computer in the world as long as there is an internet connection.

But before you can start bookmarking, you must first sign up and create an account with a social bookmarking site of your choice.

Here is a list of Social Bookmarking websites on the internet today.

• DIGG
• STUMBLEUPON
• DEL.ICIO.US
• TECHNORATI
• PROPELLER

Once you’ve done that, you can start bookmarking interesting and useful links in your area of interest or expertise, in particular, interesting web pages from your own content.

Once you have bookmarked them, you can view, sort  & categorize them by keywords or tags as mentioned earlier.

The beauty of social bookmarking is that once you have properly categorize your links, you have the benefit of sharing and viewing other related links that have been similarly categorized by other online users.

It enables you to meet other people who are interested in the same topics and perhaps share knowledge of web resources that you aren’t aware of.

Most social bookmarking sites allows you to establish a RSS (Really Simple Syndication) web feed for each category that you submitted to. The main advantage of this is that it automatically alerts you to new bookmarking links in your areas of interest.

When your RSS web feed becomes viewable to other internet users of similar interests, they can copy your submitted bookmarks to their own collection if they find it to be useful or interesting, intermittently bringing additional exposure to your submitted content.

To achieve maximum viral marketing results, you can aggressively promote your RSS web feeds to the various RSS directories and search engines, syndicate them and make them available to an even wider audience on the internet.

However, do make an sincere effort to contribute interesting and useful links instead of a whole bunch of promotional or affiliates stuff.

As a viral marketing strategy, the main aim is to share links to your blog as well as links to other informational and resource websites you consider to be useful.

By doing so, you are actually killing two birds with one stone, not only are you increasing the level of exposure to your own website, you are also helping promote other people’s content as well.

In turn, others might return the favor as well, making it beneficial for all parties in the long run.

However, if you spice up your web feed with too much marketing related or affiliate links, you risk the fact that some of these internet users might discontinue your web feed and label you as a spammer and all your social bookmarking efforts will be flushed down the drain.

Balancing between being ethical and providing a useful service to others while promoting your own content enables you to morally yet effectively utilize social bookmarking as an essential viral marketing tool for your online business.

If done correctly, social bookmarking can achieve massive viral effects just by sharing information that you found to be interesting.