Skippy's Internet Thing: most popular bookmarking Web sites

How to Make Money Bookmarking

SDW

With about one-third of the world's population now online in 2014, there is a huge opportunity for anyone with the time and some creativity to make money using bookmarking websites. These websites, like Digg, Twitter and Facebook let you post links, or bookmarks, to online content. When you post bookmarks to your own content, you can generate traffic and money. While this can be a rewarding way to earn money at home, making a decent income isn't all fun and games. It takes consistent effort and time to create content, bookmark it and then monetize the traffic it generates.

Making Money From Social Bookmarks

There are several dozen popular social bookmarking sites you can use for directing traffic to your own online content. Some lesser-known sites, such as KarmaLynx, Xomba and RedGage, may pay you for posting content, but most do not. To make money with most social bookmarking websites, you need to create your own content on a website, blog or a service such as YouTube and post links to your content on these bookmarking sites. It's a simple process in theory, but making a measurable income takes a lot of work and requires a monetization strategy.

Monetizing Your Content

Once you have people coming to your website, you need a way to monetize that traffic. Selling your own products and services is one way to do it. In this case you can put links to your sales page on the pages your traffic is going to. Another way is to use ads, such as Google AdWords, which pay you a small commission each time someone clicks on an ad. Affiliate products are a third option. These involve posting ads on your website for another company's products, which pay you a commission when someone buys an item. Amazon is one example of a company that lets you create your own storefront on its website.

Creating Your Own Bookmarking Site

If you have a domain name, a web host and some knowledge of HTML, there's nothing to prevent you from creating your own bookmarking website. Instead of creating your own content and posting it to other websites, you can look for great content already online and bookmark it on your website. If people find your bookmarks interesting, they will come back to it to see what your latest finds are. Use services such as Twitter and Facebook to share links to your bookmarking site so people can see what you have to offer.

Things to Consider

There is a tremendous amount of competition for people's attention online. YouTube alone publishes 100 hours of video every minute. Simply bookmarking content from your blog on services like Digg and Twitter isn't going to generate a lot of traffic unless you publish a lot of really good content or, alternatively, a few exceptional pieces that go viral. Many social bookmarking sites have free badges and widgets that make it easy for visitors to bookmark your content themselves. Posting these on your website or blog increases the likelihood that more people will find what you have to offer.