Everyone wants to make money. We create web sites, launch businesses, and sell products online to make money. But without the traffic, your web site's success is limited. There are several sure-fire ways to attract more visitors to your web site, including SEO optimization of your pages, submitting to search engines, submitting to article directories, submitting RSS feeds, and most recently, submitting your links as social bookmarks.

With the ever-growing number of web sites emerging each day, the major search engines are becoming more and more cluttered with sites. This has lead to the rise of social bookmark sites, where users vote up or down content they like, boosting highly ranked links to the top. Some examples of these sites include Furl, Delicious, Faves, Twitter, Reddit, Digg, and many more. The social bookmark search engines can deliver an incredible amount of traffic in a matter of minutes to those lucky enough to be voted to the top. Targetted traffic or not, the enormous number of users that can flow to a web site from a social bookmark can be quite impressive. However, if you're not submitting your links as social bookmarks, you're really missing out.

Let's dig down into preparing your content for the social networks, submitting your links to the social bookmark sites, and making more money.

The first step to using social bookmarks is to prepare your content for submission. While almost any type of content can be submitting as a social bookmark, the formats that work best include blog posts, articles, and news. Even if you own a static web site, selling a product, you can create a news or blog post based upon the product to ready it for submission.

Be sure to create an interesting and content-rich post, specifically with a snappy and catchy title. This is what will attract the most votes from users. Remember, users get to vote your links up or down, and getting to the top of the social network sites is what drives the most traffic back to your own site.

Submitting to the social bookmark search engines can be a time-intensive process. Each social bookmark site requires a login, and each has their own format for submitting links. Therefore, you'll need to create a login account on each site you plan to submit to. While it may be time consuming to create these accounts, you only have to do this once, and the results are far worth the setup time. Try to use the same login account and password for each site in order to simplify the submission process.

With your content ready and your login accounts created, it's time to submit. While you could visit each social bookmarking site and manually submit your links, you can help speed the process along by using one of the available software solutions for promoting social bookmarks, such as SocialSpeed (which not only submits, but speeds up the process for initially creating your login accounts too). With just a few clicks, your social bookmarks should be on their way into thousands of potential web site visitors. A word of caution, with the power of automatic submission, it's easy to go overboard. Be couteous to the users of the social networks and take your time.

With any luck, your links will be voted higher in rank, spidered by the major search engines, bookmarked by hundreds of users, and shared throughout the social web. It might be a good idea to mention that your web server should be prepared for a possible surge of traffic.

Social bookmarking is a powerful method of promoting your web content and spreading your links in a way that users can share. By submitting to the social bookmark directories, you can dramatically increase your web traffic, jumping higher in not just the social networks, but the major search engines as well.