On many sites, you will now see a huge cube of buttons for social bookmarking sites. While it’s always nice to give your reader options, I think this is pretty useless for most blogs. In fact, I think it just becomes too much information and background noise to your readers.
What makes more sense is to find a select group of social bookmarking sites that make sense for your topic. One way to do that, if you’ve been using social bookmarking buttons and you’ve been submitting your posts to these sites, is to see which ones bring you the steady and regular traffic.
For example, if you have a tech-related blog, Digg is probably a must-have button. If you have a site on women’s issues, Babblz and Sk*rt make the most sense. New bookmarking sites are emerging constantly, so keep an eye out for any new ones that fall under your topic.
If you decide to use one or two sites, take a moment to email the site and just let them know. It never hurts to have a contact, and they will probably appreciate the promotion on your site.
Be sure you promote the submission button in a logical place to make it easy for visitors to vote or submit. You also don’t want it to be so obtrusive it interferes with your actual content. You can usually find easy instructions and snippets of code on a specific social bookmarking site to insert on your site.
If you’re afraid you will eliminate too many options for people, you could consider one or two key bookmarking sites to use as well as an all-for-one site like AddThis or Social Marker. At least this provides one button encompassing several sites.
