Independent Digital

Social Bookmarking Traffic Results
By Allan Burns

The results of the social bookmarking experiment I have been carrying out are materialising. There have been some surprising results and some results that have restored my faith in the browsing public. I have been pondering whether or not to release the results as I do not want the spammers to tarnish something that is still relatively pure. But as you can see I finally decided to go ahead and publish.

I have mentioned before that I have been looking at social bookmarking as a way to drive traffic to websites. The idea behind social bookmarking is that you share your favourite bookmarks with others, the idea being that if you found these links useful then others might too. Some social bookmarking sites also allow visitors to rate the usefulness of your bookmarks, this allows the truly useful bookmarks to become the most popular. So in theory spam should be removed by natural selection.
To carry out my experiment I created three articles. Two of these articles were good well researched pieces, whilst the third was self promotional spam, but not too obvious. I posted these articles to twelve social bookmarking sites and then waited for the results. The results were to be measurable traffic to one of my sites.

It was a week ago I started posting the articles so I am still measuring the results but I am able to give you the results as they all point to one conclusion. That conclusion is that social bookmarking to generate traffic does work as long as you are providing genuine, useful, good quality material. If you post self promotional spam no one will read it and it will disappear into the ether where all spam belongs.

Of the twelve sites I posted to the best performing in terms of traffic was Digg. Over a period of several days my site received hundreds of visitors from the good articles and less than a handful for the spam article I posted. Of the other social bookmarking sites the traffic was minimal, even the famous del.icio.us only managed to send a dozen visitors which I was quite surprised at.

The results seem to conclude that Digg is the out and out performer followed a long way behind by del.icio.us and squik. As yet I have had no traffic from the others, that?s not to say that they are not worthwhile as some of the sites were very new. I am going to continue to experiment and will bring you more results as they come in.

Finally I would like to say a big thank you to the guys at Digg for producing such a great site. Not only for the traffic that it produces but for also providing lots of really useful bookmarks. My only criticism is the lack of categories which means that some suggestions are not always well matched although there is a search facility.

Allan is the webmaster at http://www.blogtonomy.com/ where I will show you how to gain traffic to your site.

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By John Marchle

Generating website traffic and increasing website page rank can lead to big business. The uses of social bookmarking are becoming increasingly popular to aid in this task. The two web applications that are the most used at the present moment are digg.com and del.icio.us.com.

Social Bookmarking

Generating website traffic and increasing website page rank can lead to big business. The uses of social bookmarking are becoming increasingly popular to aid in this task. The two web applications that are the most used at the present moment are digg.com and del.icio.us.com. Both of the sites use the same concept of centralized bookmark management. Lately the main debate seems to be which of the web applications delivers the right type of traffic, which has proven to be the key to a successful blog site. Although Digg and Del.icio.us are similar in many ways they go about presenting the information in a slightly different fashion.

Often referred to as a collection of favorites, del.icio.us is very user friendly and represents simplicity at its best. Basically, del.icio.us is designed to allow you to store and share bookmarks on the web, instead of your browser. The user has the ability to add any favored article as a bookmark to their del.icio.us account, which allows them to access the same bookmarks from anywhere. The website follows a simple to use structure. When many people bookmark the same article, the article makes it to the popular page for millions of viewers to see.

Digg This

On the other hand Digg.com is more of a digital media democracy that places an emphasis on technology and science articles. When an article is submitted to dig.com, other people read the submission and digg what they like the best. Once the article receives enough "diggs", it appears on digg's front page which is similar to del.icio.us's popular page. If the story does not receive enough diggs, or if enough users report a problem with the submission, the story will remain in the .digg all. area, where it will eventually removed. If the article is lame or form of spam, the reader has the chance to bury the article. Digg and del.icio.us are full of interesting material and offer many different dimensions of content available. Both sites can be very beneficial in helping businesses promote themselves through social bookmarking. The key to generating more traffic from digg and del.icio.us is to concentrate on delivering truly useful resources to the readers. If the people value the information in your article, they will be more likely to bookmark or digg what you have to say.

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