Posted on Wednesday 27th of December 2006 at 04:08 in Make Money Online

Advertising your website - part one - Social bookmarking

Welcome to part one of the advertising your website series of articles - this time I'm discussing using social bookmarking sites to increase the exposure of your site. I'll be looking at what social bookmarking sites are, how they can be used/abused, what you can expect to achieve and whether they're worthwhile.

What is social bookmarking?
For those of you not-in-the-know, social bookmarking is the pinnacle of user-oriented content - where people register and submit links of interest that could be useful to others (or themselves at a later date). In popular places such as Digg or Reddit users vote on the submissions and thus influence the order in which they appear on the site. The theory behind this behaviour is that the users decide for themselves as a collective which submissions are the best/most useful and therefore get promoted into the most visible areas - which provides a massive traffic boost to the site in question.

How you can use them
As stated in the above paragraph, a submission made popular on a social bookmarking site gains a massive boost in traffic. With the right article you could reach the front page of such sites, be blogged about by other users (providing backlinks and improving your PageRank) and sometimes other users will write about the same topic and use your content as a source. All of this helps improve the visibility of your site and sometimes gain some regular readers, but I shall discuss that sometimes more in the next section.

The quality of the traffic
Something that gets debated reasonably frequently is what is the quality of traffic that you get from such social bookmarking sites? Typically you'll receive tech-savvy users and a lot of them, all at once. The most popular article from this website was received rather well on Digg (receiving 2082 Diggs to date) and can be read here and created a one day spike of around 12,000 visitors, a second day flow of around 4-5,000 and then a slow yet gradual decline back to normal levels. However good that sounds it translates fairly poorly to regular readers...

A lot of traffic is a good thing when attempting to increase exposure of your site but unfortunately you're unlikely to get many conversions from social bookmarking sites - the majority of users will only remain on the page for 0-10secs before bouncing away (although easily absorbable information such as graphs, charts etc does help) so the statistics always look more impressive than the benefit your site actually receives. There is a way to win users though...

Winning users from social bookmarking traffic
Thousands of visitors means that some - although not many - will subscribe to your site's RSS feed (provided you have one) for 24hours or below, giving you a small but useful window to publish a secondary article of interest to draw some visitors back in. If you can bring people in more than once you've got a much better chance of converting them to regular readers.

Which social bookmarking sites?
Well there are quite a few these days and traditionally Digg is the biggest and best, but unfortunately it's become a very competitive and fast moving site meaning that an awful lot of users are submitting very good content that just doesn't hit "the tide" right and as a consequence remains buried in the depths of the "upcoming/new" area. So if you can reach the front page you will get a massive surge of traffic - but it is decreasing as the site receives more and more submissions, meaning more material reaches the front page, increasing competition and before you know it, your beloved article is on page 2, 3, then 4 etc. Reddit is quite a good option at the moment - one submission of mine just the other day was on the front page after only 11 positive votes in 4 hours - and while the traffic isn't as monumental as Digg it is easier to reach the front page. My third most popular is StumbleUpon - but it requires it's own section.

StumbleUpon
I like SU, I use it, I receive a lot of traffic from it I just simply don't understand why. Some may write it off because it's a less than conventional system but as an example - it's still my top refer for the month despite having been on the front page of Reddit. So how does it work? Well you download a toolbar for your browser of choice which gives you three main options :
Stumble - takes you to a random site within categories you've selected
I like this - give the page a thumbs-up and review it for other users
I dislike this - give the page a thumbs down.

As I understand it (which I don't claim to do) is that the more people who say they liked your page increases how frequently your page is "stumbled" upon. It's excellent for traffic but because I don't really understand it I don't see how it can be abused/manipulated but it's absolutely worth attempting to get your site included. However the traffic is the same quality you can expect from other social sites - as users are directed to your site through a loose tagging system - so you can't expect them to stay. There is a way to manipulate how StumbleUpon works - but you need to pay (see part two of this series of advertising - being published later today).

The Series of Articles
See below the published articles on the topic:
Introduction
Part One: Social Bookmarking
Part Two: StumbleUpon Advertising
Part Three: Buying Traffic
Part Four: Text-Link-Ads
Part Five: Sharing Traffic
Conclusion

Check back often for updates on the series or subscribe to the RSS feeds (see top right).

 

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