In the thirty day challenge last month a lot of the strategy was based on social bookmarking, using sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Stumble Upon and Mag.nolia to gain a ranking, but many people missed the point of these sites completely.

These sites work as long as you participate in their community which is one of the reasons that many of the people who participated in the 30 day challenge have now come up against their accounts being blocked, disabled and in some cases deleted. Participate, take part, join in social media is all about the first work SOCIAL! I have an account on Facebook where I can see what some of the people on the challenge are putting onto StumbleUpon and I am not surprised in the slightest that they have been blocked!

If I see a site I like, a blog post that gets my interest or a funny video that catches my eye I spend the few minutes that it takes to add it to social bookmarking sites. I add comments, if I don’t like something and I think it has just been added to get a step ahead, and lets face it there are a lot of them at the moment, I remove it or give it negative love.

So why is just giving your sites love bad? You are not taking part and it is all about taking part. You need to build a brand and that brand is YOU what you look at what you tell others about is very important because it reflects on you!

If you don’t want to involve your personal online experiences online then create yourself a sudoname that will allow you ro create a second personality, but be aware that the second personality has to take part as well as your own personality. Don’t and I repeat in big bold font DON’T create hundreds of accounts to push your sites through, social media sites are not stupid they know that you are doing it and will delete them as quick as you create them.

If someone offers you software that will do it all for you forget it! This is SPAM do not spam these sites they are not there to have trash put up on them they are there for you to share what you are reading and every now and again post something that you have written or a site you have designed.

Socialize add comments (and not idiotic comments like “First”) have something interesting to say don’t just add rubbish as it will be removed as SPAM. Add friends to your accounts real ones not the kind that you create in your own little world.

Social Bookmarking and Social Networking (sites like MySpace and Facebook) are a great way to generate links and traffic but SPAM is a massive NO, not taking part is considered criminal and to build up a reputation is something that should be top of the list.