Your own social bookmarking site?I actually asked myself this very question a few weeks ago, which is why I put it on the list of topics I wanted to write about here. Social Monkee, a web site which offers social media backlinks was offering at the time (I assume they still are) to create a custom social bookmarking site for you.
I had looked into the possibility, including coming up with a name for the site and finding an appropriate URL. In the end however, I decided not to do it. Here’s why I chose not to do it and why you may or may not want to run your own social bookmarking site for yourself:

Making Money

Probably the number one reason to own your own social bookmarking site is for the purposes of making money. In theory at least, you can make money from advertising as well as from premium memberships in the service.

The Catch

There’s a catch of course and that is that a generic social bookmarking site will be one of thousands that are out there on the web and if you go with Social Monkee’s service, I’m just not sure how much they’re going to offer in terms of being unique. I mean, let’s face it – there simply is no value in being just another me too site unless you have a unique spin on it.

You Can Come Up With a Niche

Now that’s not to say that you can’t possibly create your own social networking site with its own particular niche – it’s entirely possible you could find a specific niche which isn’t being served. The thing is, I’m not convinced that there is enough business for a social bookmarking site devoted to one particular niche to make money off of such a thing.

But Will it Make Money?

I mean, imagine that you were to create a social bookmarking site which deals with SEO. Yes, there is a use for such a thing, but can you get noticed in the crowd of sites devoted to SEO when all you really do is have people drop by only to leave again to another website?

Spam

The other big issue with owning a social bookmarking site is spam. Running a blog, I deal with spam constantly and I can only imagine that a social bookmarking site would become an even bigger spam target. Keeping the spammers out while allowing in legitimate visitors would be a massive job which I’m not sure anyone would want to undertake.

The Reason to Do It

The only reason I could think of to create a social bookmarking site is if you own a network of sites of your own and you’d like an extra way to promote them. In other words, if you have 100 sites, you might want to use your own social networking site to offer your customers a kind of “one stop shop” to find information about a variety of issues. You could then choose whether to make it open to the public as far as bookmarking just anything…