If you’ve been trying to market your brand, products or anything else via social bookmarking, then you may have found out the hard way that if you get a wee bit zealous with bookmarking your links you may end up getting either your account, or worse, your IP address banned by the offended service.

Most of the time you’re not even really trying to game anything, but simply trying to market as aggressively as possible, and in doing so run afoul of the site’s terms of service. Here’s some tips to avoid being kicked off these various sites, and still get the job done at the same time!

• Make sure not to “discover” your own sites, if possible. Have a friend submit it the first time.
• Don’t only bookmark your own stuff. Make sure you bookmark other sites you find interesting as well, particularly in your niche.
• Consider creating your own bookmarking network, made up of friends who will bookmark each others sites. Don’t get too large or advertise, for obvious reasons. After all, this is what friends are for. This is why you been developing following on all these social sites, right?
• Consider outsourcing your social media marketing. This definitely keeps it at arm’s length!
• Focus on a select  few of the bookmarking sites, taking into account their relative value to your niche. One of the things that will get you ejected is aggressively bookmarking your dating site on a hard news site. Doesn’t fit. Find appropriate venues.
• At least glance at the site’s terms of service. That way, you’ll know where you’re treading on thin ice!
• Don’t rush out and bookmark every blessed post you make. Be selective, show your best!
• Be an active part of the community on the bookmarking site if there is one, (and there usually is) as active contributors who are giving into the mix do very well, and create followers of their own.

The bottom line here as you may have guessed is to use a healthy dose of common sense, and not to treat these sites like a spammer. You may very find that you can translate this to a healthy dose of unique visitors to your sites.

~Keith

 If you’ve looked at the size of the task and weren’t inebriated at the time, then outsourcing your social media marketing, or at least portions of it, is really the only sane solution to cover the numerous items that need to be performed on a regular basis.

Whether you choose to outsource it to your staff, freelancers or a social media marketing services firm, you need to be very clear with all concerned as to just what you want from this, to avoid wasting time and money.

Let’s take a quick inventory of all the things you may want to have outsourced, and the best way to go about it.

Content – If you have articles, blog posts, social posts or any other type of market-specific content written, you’ll want to be very careful as to who produces it and how well. If they are writing for you main site, obviously you need this to be top-notch. One popular way to do that these days is to have “guest bloggers”; others you have developed relationship with in your field whom you trust and are satisfied with the caliber of their writing, and you trade services, or in exchange for links.

If the writing is for a feeder site, blog, or for some other microblogging platform, then it may not be as crucial, particularly if your name is not on it. Still, it’s a best practice not to scrimp on your content writers as they represent your site, products and you to the world! You can outsource this type of work outside the US very cheaply, but you’re likely to notice, as will your visitors.

Site Building – If you have someone building web properties for you such as Squidoo lenses, Hubpages, Blogs this can be done fairly easily by posting your needs in places like Elance, Sitepoint or any of the other webmaster hangouts. Make sure you get what you want; for instance if you want certain keywords to appear as titles, URLs, links etc., make sure they are diligent about doing this. Also, if you are having them construct an interlinked network for you, do yourself a favor and make sure they know how to do that as you want it.

Link Building – Outsourcing having someone build links for you is one of the best uses of outsourcing, as it will have a direct positive effect on your site. If it’s done correctly, that is! Whether you task someone to do blog comments, social posts, social bookmarking or networking or article submissions, make sure they not only know how to code your links correctly for the sites that require HTML, but also that they understand how to vary your anchor text, collect RSS feeds, and ping your pages.

Social Bookmarking & Networking – These require special attention, as you not only don’t want to be accused of spamming any of these sites; you want to make it as effective as possible. Making sure not to overdo, collect RSS feeds, link-dropping where appropriate, trying to hold coherent conversations within your niche if called for; these are just some of the things you’ll want your outsourcer to pay attention to.

RSS Feeds and Videos – These are great areas to outsource as they take so much of your valuable time. There is software available out there that will greatly speed things up, and you can provide this to your staff or outsourcer.

Hiring A Social Media Marketing Services Firm - If you don’t have the time to manage this all yourself and you’d just like to get it done, then this may be your best option. Typically they will have all the pieces in place, and you won’t have to do much except provide them with the site or sites you like promoted, and a few other pertinent pieces of information, such as keywords, social accounts you may already have, and preferences etc. A good social media marketing service can save you scads of time and work, and put your site on the map.

However you end up doing it, outsourcing your social media marketing just makes sense!