Social bookmarking is probably the most powerful new tool to become available to affiliate marketers since social networking itself. The basic premise of this kind of bookmarking service, such as Stumble Upon and Reddit, is to share the best links on the internet within a community – basically a social network to share internet content. The most popular website page links are ‘Dugg’ on Digg-It’,'Stumbled Upon’ on Stumble Upon and so on until they reach the top of their respective rankings – those most highly rated sites in turn receive the more traffic from the homepage. Some of the social bookmarking communities now have millions of users and therefore offer a brilliant source of both traffic and backlinks for affiliate websites and blogs. In this way therefore, even the smallest personal blogs can pull in hundreds of visitors in a day if they are picked up by the social bookmarkers to reach the top pages- if you can tap into this remarkable source of viral traffic on a regular basis you can clearly pull in a lot of visitors and make a lot of affiliate sales as a result. This article describes how best to use social bookmarking to maximise your traffic and see your marketing go viral – if you can get it right it can be hugely lucrative.Starting in Social BookmarkingThe best place to begin is to sign up to some of the top social bookmarking websites. These include Stumble Upon, Reddit, Digg-It as already mentioned and I also use Delicious – all these have huge numbers of regular users so should offer viable potential customers for most affiliate niches. It is however a good idea to check the articles already in your niche – this allows to check for a potential audience and also to see which other articles have been highly rated themselves. If you can replicate the best qualities of these articles or blog posts you give yourself a good chance of having similar success.Be UniqueHowever don’t just copy the content of other people – you need to write high quality, relevant and interesting articles if you ever want to get close to the top of the social bookmark portals. This means that avoiding writing sales copy and spamming, and really providing your reader with unique, useful insider information and advice, will benefit you hugely in the long run. Just with article marketing, I recommend spending a few extra minutes, or maybe hours, creating the incredible content with the ability to go viral online. These kinds of articles will also be republished if you post to article directories like Ezine articles so there is even more backlink benefit – content is now king online and the days of writing solely for backlink quantity are over. Nowadays we are all writing for bookmark quality instead!Outsourcing your WritingIf you cannot manage do this yourself then it may be worth outsourcing your article writing to an online service – the only problem with this is that to create the content to be bookmarked you will probably have to pay a lot of money. I preferred to learn from experience myself, and eventually I reached the stage where I was seeing a lot of hits from the social bookmarking sites, especially Stumble Upon, every month without fail.Innovate to Create Interesting Page ContentYou can also use other kinds of pages to see high rankings as well though. For instance I start quizzes and competition which create a buzz and frequently get bookmarked. If the webpage is interactive and people spend a lot of time there then the bookmark potential increases.Giving your Links a Push in the Right DirectionAs with everything else in affiliate marketing, amazing content will only get so far on its own however; fortunately though you can give your pages a helping hand up the bookmarking rankings. The first tip to achieve this is to put the different bookmarking icons alongside your articles – encourage your readers to bookmark these as much as possible so you don’t miss out on any possible bookmarks.Secondly you should create your own account and use the social bookmarks yourself. The real users do not appreciate website owners simply posting links to their own sites so get involved in the communities and you will see the benefit if you really get involved. You may have to sacrifice a few hours linking to others but they will appreciate this and at least check out your pages, if not actually bookmark them. You can also then add other related sites to your own bookmarks so when people look at these your site is instantly related in the background.Thirdly, write detailed and enticing introductions to your own article content and hopefully the quality of your content will then do the work for you. Really promote your articles as soon as they go live and the best way to do this is to post on Twitter – this can drive instant traffic and hence the instant bookmarks to see you whizz up the rankings. I won’t go into any more detail about Twitter but I will say that I believe it is an integral part of a strategy aiming at social bookmarking success. Also tell your friends so they can instantly bookmark your content and give the impression of a swarm of adoring fans jumping on your every move!And finally…To conclude I’d like to emphasise that the benefits of social bookmarking are often staggering and the industry is still growing rapidly. Learn from both your mistakes and successes and eventually you will learn how to write the perfect kind of article. Even then some of these articles will fail (due to timing, content etc.) but overall you will see a helpful influx of visitors coming to your site day in day out.