If you have ever investigated the various means of driving traffic to your website you’ll know that using social bookmarking sites is definitely one of the most effective. The problem is that it is so very time consuming which was why I was pleased to discover some social bookmarking software – Socialbot version 3.

Social bookmark sites are a step beyond your favourites folder – they are online bookmarks that users can manage easily and more importantly share with other users. The advantages of having your sites listed in the social bookmarking sites are numerous but they include obtaining backlinks from these bookmark sites to any sites you have listed, exposes these websites to other users of each sites (some of them have millions of users) and just generally just brings in more traffic.

However all this comes at a cost – to manually create accounts and add individual bookmarks to your sites can be extremely time consuming. This is something you have to regularly put aside days for if you have any number of sites – believe me I’ve done it manually for some time but still think it’s worth the effort. One of the other benefits to being listed in these bookmarking sites is the speed at which your pages get indexed from them – extremely quickly!

So Socialbot is a software program that runs under windows and automates many of the tasks that are involved in creating links to these bookmarking sites. Here’s some of it’s features in no particular order –

Website Spidering – point Socialbot at one of your websites and will spider the whole site and list all the URLs. This is extremely useful as you can then simply select which sites to add.

• Currently supports over 120 English language Social boookmarking sites
• Automatically submits each selected page to any site you select
• Allows multiple profiles – this is extremely important as you can submit to multiple accounts on each bookmark site – more links

The software installs very easily and is an attractive well written product. I first tried spidering one of my main web sites and it scanned and listed the 200 pages very quickly. There is also a filter setting which will allow to you specify pages to ignore in the spidering process. You get a long list of web pages listed under each URL ready to select and submit.

The first thing you must do unfortunately is create user accounts at each of the social bookmarking sites as this is not done automatically. This is quite time consuming – all the pages are listed and you just click and register at each site but it does take some time to do 120 of them – took me about 2 hours I think. To be honest there’s no real way around this – I have used some very expensive software (about $900) which did automate this but it created random user accounts which mostly ended up getting banned on the bookmark sites.

So you should build in this effort before you use socialbot – however this is a one off job for each profile so it’s not too bad. After I had registered at all the social bookmarking sites I decided to use the software to start adding my links. I specifically selected a group of my web pages from the spidered list and then selected all the social bookmarking sites. Then it was just a matter of pressing the submit button – socialbot then went to each bookmarking site and registered each link. Even automated it took quite a while but the advantage was I just let it get on with it whilst I did other things.

Socialbot registered my selected web pages and I logged in to a few random sites just to see they were all listed. It’s a very useful program and well worth the investment I made in the product. Remember though only add a few pages at a time to these sites – don’t spam them – I will never generally add more than 10 pages a day but I do use Socialbot now pretty much everyday to add mine and my customers pages.

The process definitely boosted my traffic and I’ve started to see quite a lot of visitors from these social bookmarking sites. One of the most instant benefits I saw was indexing – any page added seem to get indexed almost immediately and my indexed pages under Yahoo and MSN jumped up almost overnight – I have hundreds more pages indexed now.