Both social bookmarking and article marketing are commonly used by marketers for a variety of purposes. Primarily, these are concentrated around the twin aims of either:
1. Increasing the amount of traffic to a website, or
2. Boosting its ranking with search engines.
Needless to say, the second aim also inadvertently ends up helping the first, which is why both social bookmarking and article marketing are such attractive options, and are so widely used nowadays.
However, when you combine both of these techniques, you're going to be able to achieve far greater results than if you were to just use them individually.
Essentially, social bookmarking is primarily a form of building backlinks. Admittedly, it can be a good traffic source in its own right, but only under very special circumstances with very specific types of content. In terms of backlinks though, there are very few ways of building up a large quantity of backlinks in such a short span of time.
On these same lines, article marketing also has a similar dual purpose too, only this time, article marketing is a much more effective traffic source than social bookmarking. In fact, if used as a traffic source, it can also act as a ‘pre sell’ of a conversion, which makes it all the more powerful in its own right.
Due to this, the best way of combining both social bookmarking and article marketing is to let both play to their inherent strengths. In other words, article marketing should act as the traffic source, since it is good at playing that role, while social bookmarking can be used to boost the articles ranking with search engines, by building backlinks to it.
To put it simply, what you should be doing is publishing articles that are designed to garner traffic, and then once they’re up on article directories, you should build social bookmarks to the article.
Do so, and you’ll notice that your article is listed faster on search engines and ends up ranking higher than it otherwise would. As a result, you’ll end up having more traffic viewing your article, which in turn will mean more traffic clicking on your backlink and heading over to your website.
See how this is going to multiply your traffic results by an enormous amount?
Of course, for this to work well, you’ll need to be able to write articles that are convincing enough to ensure that the extra traffic you get to your article is going to be channeled to your website effectively.
But if you can pull that off, you’re pretty much home free, and on the road to achieving a thorough success in terms of pulling traffic to your website.
From there on out, what you do with the extra traffic you’ve attained is up to you, and you can turn those traffic numbers into profit numbers then you’re going to be appreciating the full value of combining article marketing and social bookmarking!