On the Internet, as elsewhere, the central marketing challenge is that of building awareness and interesting enough potential buyers to click through to the site. Among those who rely on weblogs (“blogs”) to inform and persuade, one of the more exciting developments is the availability of software, like Bookmarks Demon, that facilitate the task of creating traffic-building links on social bookmarking sites.

The arsenal of awareness-building tools includes traditional media (direct-response or display advertising on print and TV, for instance), paid advertising on targeted or relevant sites, and inventive marketing tactics on the Web (email marketing, viral marketing, affiliate marketing). For sheer cost-efficiency, however, nothing beats search engine marketing (SEM).

As social bookmarking sites became more popular over the last two years, organic SEO excitedly realized that here was a new marketing channel that catered to a common search engine bias toward web sites with more back links from other sites. Get noticed and clicked enough on a social bookmarking site and chances are, search engines would rank one’s blog higher.

The other value of social bookmarking sites lies in the fact that they provide common ground for Web surfers sharing fairly similar interests to keep, categorize, pass along and search bookmarks. Users are effectively relying on a like-minded community to filter the more relevant and helpful links. Hence, those who click through from a social bookmarking site are presumably more interested and, in marketing parlance, “predisposed to buy”.

To accelerate the process of getting listed on social bookmarking sites, one had to engage in “tag and ping”. Since a tag was an adjective or any way to categorize a bookmark, a blogger could choose as many as he thought was relevant. The keyword in “tag and ping” is “relevant” since one wanted targeted traffic.

The next step in “tag and ping” was for the marketing professional to ping the social bookmarking sites and wait an indefinite period until they got around to listing the site.

This deceptively simple two-step process quickly became laborious because there were at least 130 social bookmarking sites at last count, dozens of pinging URL’s were available, one had to do a separate “tag and ping” for every relevant tag chosen, and writing an update meant that the whole “tag and ping” process had to be done all over again.

“Bookmarking Demon” is one software that promises to speed up the process and relieve the tedium of repeated tag and ping just to get targeted traffic backlinks. Since purchasing a copy just before Thanksgiving of 2006, I for one can attest that “Bookmarking Demon” has had a dramatic effect, greatly slashing the time needed to submit updates to the social bookmarking sites.

The first convenience is that “Bookmarking Demon” remembers registration information and automates the job of registering separately with up to 27 social bookmarking sites. Further, “Bookmarking Demon” permits up to 100 log-in names or accounts across all sites.

But the really significant innovation and convenience is that the software spares you the job of typing in the new-blog or update URL’s and tags you want to submit. You can set “Bookmarking Demon” to automatically search your site and generate an extensive list hands-free.

And should you wish to remain anonymous, “Bookmarking Demon” can download a list of proxy sites all on its own and submit through them.

All in all, “Bookmarking Demon” certainly paid for itself many times over in terms of saving time and generating, within days, considerably more traffic than had ever been possible with manual submission to social bookmarking sites.