No matter what your blog is about, one of your biggest goals must be to gain visibility if your blog is to be successful. Social networking sites are perhaps the most common and most effective way of marketing your blog. Social networking sites that specialize in promoting popular blog pages of interest are called social bookmarking sites. Such sites include Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Spurl, Reddit, BackFlip, SocialMatic, and Diigo, among others. Social bookmarking sites can be a great tool in your blog marketing bag of tricks. Here are five reasons to use social bookmarking to promote your blog.

Reach. Social bookmarking sites are used by people all over the world to access articles in any and every area of interest. That means that when you submit your blog pages to social bookmarking sites, you are exponentially increasing the reach of your blog to people who might’ve never before had the opportunity to come across it.

Linking and networking. When you submit to and use social bookmarking sites, you automatically connect yourself to like-minded bloggers. This provides you with the opportunity to create symbiotic relationships with other blogs so that you can add to your blog’s blogroll, write and post guest blog posts, and create new linkbacks to your blog all over the Internet.

Finding new blog content. When you promote your blog on social bookmarking sites, you connect with similar blogs. This gives you the opportunity to discover what the newest, hottest topics are relating to your blog niche, which can be a great source of ideas for you to write about.

Ratings. When your blog content is tagged on social bookmarking sites, the site community has a chance to rate your material. This means you get real feedback on the quality and content of your blog, which can better you as a blogger and ultimately lead to more readers.

One-way backlinks. Every time you tag one of your blog articles in a social bookmarking site, you are in effect creating a one-way backlink to your site. This type of link carries a lot of weight with search engines, which will rank your blog site higher the more backlinks you have. In this way, social bookmarking goes a long way in increasing your site’s search engine optimization.

Make the most of your blog by submitting its content to all the social bookmarking sites you can. If you don’t feel you have the time, use a social bookmarking submission service like SubmitEdge.com or SocialMaximizer.com to submit to a number of sites all at once. The time and energy you put into social bookmarking is well worth it, as it will help your blog grow by leaps and bounds.