Inspired by a question from the Thirty Day Challenge forums.

Why is it that Internet marketers who are not huge names in the business seem to think that getting their work socially bookmarked by any means is more important than actually creating something of quality that will be naturally bookmarked by the people interested in their subject?

The “get ranked quick” crew seem to think that getting on the board quickly is the goal. But why? If your product/blog/article is excreta, you have just ensured that your reputation in the eyes of your audience has been tarnished. Same with social bookmarking and aggregators, you will lose anyone who is genuinely interested in what your subject is. And this is most likely to be a permanent thing.

Think about RSS feeds and FriendFeed. Have you ever gone back to somewhere or someone that produced crap and re-subscribed after dropping them? I know I haven’t as yet….if I think you are spouting rubbish then you are gone…. for good. It would take 100x more effort for those people to get back in front of my eyes than if they had written something decent in the beginning.

This is why I am against self-bookmarking*.

There is no better way to see what your audience wants. If you have done something that strikes a chord with your audience and they bookmark all over the place, you should be examining your piece to see what it was they liked. Was it the subject matter, the way you wrote it, the product they really want? Then reproduce it.

There is no reason why quality output will not rank as quickly as self-bookmarked, and the benefits will be million times more valuable than ruining your own reputation by doing it yourself.

Same goes for link begging. Wasting your reputation asking people to bookmark or link to your work is a stupid, short term gain for long term pain. Imagine you are a “normal person” who is using social networking tools as they should be used, and they see something like “Bookmark love please!!!!”. What are they going to think? Certainly they know that you are not writing for them, or  for any reason that would be beneficial for them.  I really dislike seeing people whore themselves out for a link like that… yech!

Create quality for your audience/market as your first priority, always.

* Disclaimer – I have self bookmarked some of my items for various reasons in the past. Mostly for testing or fun (like Ed Dale Mankini ). But 99.99% of the time I leave what I do to the whims of those I am writing/producing for.