Ask Your Site Visitors To Bookmark Your Site

[Vampa]

There are many ways a webmaster can promote their site. One which is hardly ever exploited requesting those who are reading the posts on your site to help you promote the site by bookmarking it.

There's no guarantee that they will but if your content is great then your audience will be quite eager to bookmark your site or share the URL with their social network connections.

Just make sure you call to action is good enough.

There's this one game I played when I was younger. Each time you wanted to exit, you'd get this message on your screen: "wimp out and go home." If I was quitting because I'd lost, this always got me to play the game at least once more.

See how easy it can be to get someone to do something you want?

Write a killer call to action asking your readers to share the article. A few of them will. And you'll get some traffic. It's better than nothing. Do it consistently and you'll see your traffic grow.

All the best!

 

[PenguinManiac]

Simple and nice idea, I like it. Word of mouth is still a really effective marketing technique, and bookmarking a website can be just as helpful as a like on a Facebook page or a follower on a Twitter account.
You can even make it easier for your visitors to share your content by adding social buttons at the end of any article (most themes for popular CMSs like WordPress already do this). If you save them some time and a few clicks, they could be more willing to lend a hand.

 

[Tania]

That's a good idea. If you can persuade users to bookmark the site on their browser or shared bookmarks it does make it more likely that casual visitors will come back, if only to see why they bookmarked the site, so you can turn them into regular visitors.

Social buttons for me were more about using current traffic to reach out to new users than retaining existing ones. If you want to make it very easy for users to share your content, systems like Addthis and AddtoAny don't just make sharing easy, they can also show how many times people have shared that article or page through them. If people see that others have already shared the link, they are more likely to do it. These tools are free so it doesn't cost you anything, although there are premium paid options. You can choose which social networks to show as default, and then if it is shared, the tool shows a count next to the button for that network.

Wordpress has plugins for both of these, but the raw code is available for HTML coders.

 

[fcuco]

I remember when you could allow people to bookmark your site by pressing some button inside your page that could trigger a javscript function to do it automatically, I guess this was abused to the ground since I don't know if that's even possible anymore, at least not with a single, cross browser, javascript solution, I don't know why it is a big deal, as long as the javascript is fired by some user deliberate action I don't see the security risk. I am sure webmaster would love to add their sites to your bookmarks automatically as soon as you visit though

Anyway, I think that today social bookmarks are much more important, save your awesome call to action to convince your users to pin you on pinterest, for example, and you can do that via a button that you can integrate into your page.

 

[pwarbi]

The biggest thing for any site is how many hits it gets, so with that in mind you not only want people to visit your site, you want them to keep coming back also, and getting them to put your site in their bookmarks is one way to do that.

There's lots of ways to get people to visit your site, but you don't just want traffic, you want quality traffic and that's something you get from regular visitors rather than the one hit wonders who visit but then are never to be seen again.