I spent about what would amount to a day submitting my so-called social blogs to all those RSS directories. I tend to get the most traffic from RSS2, Blogcatalog, TopBlogArea and Blogtoplist. This isn’t an on-going operation. You submit once and you’re done. It’s not like article submissions or even bookmarking. Once the feed is in there, it’s there. You claimed it. That’s that. Many of the top RSS directories make you put reciprocal links or buttons on your blog. That’s a good thing as every time someone clicks that link, like for Blogtoplist, that is a vote for your site and it helps your blog get to or stay at the top of the listings. Which in turn gets you more eyeballs, which gets you more visitors. Anytime I’m at a new IP I make a vote for my sites. Even just a few will help.

Now I will be bookmarking these blogs. But where I was nice with the RSS directories, I’m pretty much not with the bookmarking sites. I will only manually add my links to a couple of bookmark sites. The vast majority of bookmarking will be handled by Bookmarking Demon.

I bookmark these social blogs two ways: 1) BMD can crawl your site and collect the links then allow you to go through and write tags, descriptions and titles. 2) Using the RSS feeds of my blogs.

Bookmarking sites do not like self promotion. If they get wind of it they will ban you or your sites, supposedly. BMD added the ability to “hide” your links by loading up the tool with RSS feeds from any site you want. You add the links you want to bookmark as well as feeds from Google, Yahoo, Boing Boing, Lifehacker, etc. The tool randomly selects your links from random accounts you’ve set up as well as RSS newsfeeds. As long as you aren’t demonic about it your links will be hidden.

Where I get a little creative is that I put my social blogs into the feed listings sometimes. It’s a little lazy as the description and title and all that becomes duplicated across the various accounts across the various bookmarking sites. But I have so many posts and there is so many bookmark sites and I have numerous accounts that I doubt it will matter much. I mix it up from time to time and add the blogs into the main BMD site listings to get posted, but mostly I just use those blog feeds for posting.

If you use your blog feeds you have to make sure your title is what you hope to rank for. It will be the anchor text. If you are adding the blog to BMD normally, then you will have the opportunity to title the bookmark post anything you want with and give it alternates for it to cycle through. The blog feeds won’t give you that option so you have to make sure your blog titles are good, which they should be anyway.

How do I keep from being banned? One bookmark session per one IP a week. I have easy access to 5. Anytime I can jump on some wireless network and I have my computer handy I’ll start a bookmarking session. I’ll only bookmark from home once a week. Once from work. Once from the bookstore, etc. This may be a little too cautious but I prefer it this way.

Bookmarking is an on-going thing. It’s why I love BMD. I noticed yesterday in the logs that it stopped itself from bookmarking an RSS posting on a bookmark site that already had the link. That’s powerful stuff. I always wondered how it would handle that.

The reason I like to use the social blogs as fodder for hiding my “money” links is that if the bookmarking admins manually checked those links being dropped in there, they will see it has no monetary value at all. It’s a social link. It’s a fun link. But it will benefit me greatly with backlinks and more potential traffic. And it also serves to hide my money links.

So if I run a session I will set it up to post 5 to 6 links. It will randomly choose links to post from my main sites. I carefully rework the descriptions, tags and titles which will help with the dupe content issue (non-issue). I will add a bunch of feeds from popular blogs like Lifehacker, Google news, Mashable, etc. And I will add my social blogs too. When it goes to post it will yank out a couple of main links and a couple of listings from the feeds. Hopefully my bookmark listings won’t look spammy with listings of:
Body detox diet, GPS units for boats, Iphone killer apps, Angelina Jolie on the red carpet, Financial crisis in the banking system, as an example.

Every week I create one new account. I use different email addresses and I don’t use the same IP address more than once a month to do it. Cautious. When I started out I was more aggressive, so I have a ton of accounts now. One new one a week is good enough.

So does this work? I dunno. On some of the bigger bookmarking sites my profile is listed when I do a search for the keyword I’m targeting. Much like with RSS directories. All I know is that it is backlinks. You can’t be penalized for “someone” bookmarking your site. Once you set BMD up it just runs. You can have different profiles for different things. It’s very flexible. Creating a new account might take 20-30 minutes after you go through the captcha’s and verify the emails. You can crawl your website and then delete the pages you don’t want to bookmark. It takes about a minute. Of course you can spend all the time in the world creating various title, descriptions and tags. But overall getting backlinks can’t be easier and less time consuming. I set it to run, 2-3 of my sites get bookmarked to each bookmark site and I go play a video game with my kid while it runs. Multi-tasking at its best I think.

Maybe the pros have a better way of using this tool. This is simply what I do.

I intended this post to be a continuation of my efforts to popularize some of my blogs. But it became a BMD tutorial of sorts. At any rate, it’s my favorite way for getting backlinks for any site that I own.