How Delicious, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Technorati Help Grow Your Chiropractic Blog

If you’re new to blogging, one thing you’ll quickly realize is that if you don’t attract readers and increase traffic, you’ll be writing as a hobby instead of for your business. Consistent readership and increased traffic is vital to the growth, health and longevity of your chiropractic blog. Besides, there’s nothing more frustrating than writing what you consider as the world’s best blog post, publishing it and then anxiously awaiting for the myriad of comments to come pouring in only to be disappointed by the sheer silence on the other end.

So, one question that remains constant in new bloggers’ minds is how does one attract readers and build traffic?

Unfortunately, there isn’t one pat answer. One needs to consider search engine optimization, keyword analysis, niche marketing, harnessing the power of social media networks and producing valuable content just to name a few.

Nevertheless, there are tools out there that can help put your chiropractic blog on the map much quicker. One of the tools is social bookmarking websites like delicious, digg, Reddit, StumpleUpon and Technorati.

Wikipedia defines social bookmarking as a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Unlike file sharing , the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.

Descriptions may be added to these bookmarks in the form of metadata, so that other users may understand the content of the resource without first needing to download it for themselves. Such descriptions may be free text comments, votes in favor of or against its quality, or tags that collectively or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, “the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content”.[1]

In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks.

Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.

As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features.[2]

So, as Wikipedia points out, social bookmarking is not only popular among Internet users but also extremely powerful to help launch a blog into the blogosphere for increased visibility and traffic.

But, where does a chiropractic entrepreneur start?

Even though there are a multitude of social bookmarking sites, I recommend that you at least start by opening an account with delicious, digg, Reddit, StumpleUpon and Technorati.

Once logged in, make sure you take the time to build your profile. Include a professional photo, the URL or web address for your chiropractic website or blog and other relevant business information.

Most social bookmarking sites allow you to choose which category or categories to place your content in. For example, Technorati will allow you to categorize your chiropractic blog under four separate and distinct categories.

Also, take the time to write a short bio that describes who you are and what type of service you provide. Conclude by determining what tags you’d like associated with your content. For example, chiropractic, chiropractor, chiropractic blog, chiropractor blog, et cetera. I also recommend you use the name of your city or town as well as your state. This way people from your community will be able to find you quicker through search.

Now, obviously, efficiency is the game to internet marketing, blogging and social media networking. In other words, as an entrepreneur and small business owner, you simply don’t have time to sit around and update each social bookmarking site one at a time. You’ve got patients to see, money to collect and bills to pay.

So, how can you update not just the heavy-hitters but also the smaller, less known social bookmarking sites all in one shebang?

Enter Social Marker.

If you’re familiar with how Ping.fm and Posterous works, then you’ll be very familiar with how Social Marker performs.

As stated straight from their website, Social Marker is a powerful tool in promoting a website. But going through all of those social bookmarking sites is very time-consuming and downloading all toolbars is madness. That’s where Social Marker.com comes in, the free service designed to reduce the time and effort needed to socially bookmark a website.

It can help you spread a link on 48 of the best social bookmarking sites in under 15 minutes!

• It helps you get a lot of backlinks.
• It helps you increase your traffic.
• Your link gets indexed by Google in a matter of minutes.
• Best of all, it’s free!

The key to using Social Marker is Firefox. So, if you don’t already have Firefox installed on your computer, I encourage you to download and install it. Then, simply add Social Marker’s free bookmarklet to Firefox’s bookmark toolbar.

Once accomplished, visit your blog, click on the particular blog post you’d like to submit, then click on Social Marker’s bookmarklet. Social Marker will then open their website with your blog’s URL and title automatically filled in. Simply fill in the text description, descriptive tags associated with your chiropractic business, click submit and watch as Social Marker updates 48 of the best social bookmarking sites all at once.

In closing, I’d also encourage you to share the love with other chiropractic bloggers. In other words, when visiting sites like mine, if the content is worth sharing then do so. It takes just a few minutes with tools like Social Marker and can help disseminate the information quicker to colleagues that may need it to grow their practices.

Tagged as: Blogging, Content, Internet Marketing, Social Bookmarking, Social Media