YouBundle: Group Your Links...Increase Their Relevancy!

I knew you'd think that :) Yes, it's yet another site where you can drop a button into your browser and bookmark links. However, YouBundle is very promising for one main reason: your links can not only be bookmarked (or imported from your delicious.com account, if you're lazy like me) - but, they can also be categorized into "bundles," or buckets of a particular theme or keyword, which categorizes all of the links within them.

Did I mention that it's also DoFollow? That sweetens the pot quite a bit. So, create a "cars" bucket, and put all of the bookmarks from your car-related sites into it, to strengthen their relevancy to that topic. Just note: YouBundle is no haven for link leeches: it's a community that values education, relevancy, and helpfulness (just like Squidoo). That's the gist of YouBundle!

After visiting YouBundle and creating your account, the Bundle wizard will start you off on the path toward creating your very first bundle:



Above: I think I'll create a new bundle for some of my Wordpress lenses on Squidoo...so, I'll start off with a good enough title. As usual, your title should be somewhat captivating. Simply using a keyword or a keyword string will result in it being flat out boring, and unseen to the YouBundle community. Remember: these bundles will not only be searchable, but will also have their own widget that people can place on their blogs! So, if your bundle is interesting and helpful enough, it just might get placed elsewhere on the net, and we all love free publicity.



Above: The description is the 2nd most prominent thing that people see, beyond the title. Make sure it's not only relevant, but will give people what they're looking for, after clicking the link to your bucket! As with titles, boring descriptions lead to little results. Just look through some of the top results on YouBundle for some clever writing techniques, if you're stumped.



Above: Upload an image -- a self-explanatory step. This thumbnail will represent your bucket in searches. Make sure it's relevant! For now, I'm simply using a screen shot of Wordpress.org, until I can think of something more captivating.



Above: In this important step, you'll be selecting a YouBundle category to put your new bundle into. It's an internal category where your bucket will be located, along with all of the other users on the site. A first step toward the true categorization of your bucket & links! As for me, "World of Internet" should do just fine in this case.



Above: Always my favorite step: choosing tags to associate my content with. If you hadn't already known, the sole purpose of tags is to associate content with "like" content (in other words, your bucket with other people's buckets, within the same topic). Of course, I went for the most relevant ones that I think people would use to find the content within my bucket. Be sure to mix long-tail with broad, to reach the largest audience...it's always good to diversify. Looks like this section is done - now, on to the inner-workings of the bundle!

In this next section, YouBundle starts you off with a little preview of what you've accomplished so far. Note the search engine friendly URL that your bundle gets, at the top:



Above: Not shown in this screen shot are the category and tags I've chosen. You can quickly edit anything here with the given links.



Above: It starts to get a little confusing here. As you can see, this is where you add links to your new bundle. You need to have at least 3 links to be able to publish a bundle. Once you've got them in, the "NEXT -- You may now publish your bundle!" button will un-ghost itself, and you can continue on. Of course, you can always edit or add to your bundle later on!

Above: Success! I'm done...for now. Check out my Wordpress bundle here. This is what you'll see:



On this dashboard, you'll see the ever popular "bump" icons (don't forget to bump yourself), tags, a summary of my links), social bookmarking icons, and a whole bunch of my statistics. Don't forget, anyone can actually embed my bundle on their blog with the provided embed code on that page. Use it to your advantage by encouraging others to embed your code on their page, especially if their blog is in the same category of the links in your bucket!

Well, that's the end of this introduction to YouBundle. Try it out for yourself, it's rather easy to pick up and get started with. YouBundle is a brand new site that is still in beta - it's best to start now and begin bundling while it's early, so that your bundles can begin to age. While you're at it, feel free to friend me on YouBundle! See you there.