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 Michael Laleye

There are as many ways as there are ideas to get visitors to come to your internet business blog. In this article we’ll focus on social bookmarking and news websites. Let’s look at 3 and see how they work.

OnlyWire.com
By definition OnlyWire is a social bookmarking service that allows you to submit your articles or blog posts to many social bookmarking websites at once. Social bookmarking allows internet users to classify pages they would like to bookmark with tags instead of keeping them in a bookmark folder on their computer. These bookmarks can then be shared by all online users of the social bookmarking website. The theory behind social bookmarking websites is that if you find something interesting or useful on the web then the odds are high that someone else using the bookmarking website will find it interesting as well.

Social bookmarking websites are very popular with the major search engines, so if your blog posts can be found on these social bookmarking sites they will be noticed by the search engines as well. Additionally, as people bookmark resources that they find useful, resources that are of more use are bookmarked by more users. Thus, such a system will “rank” a resource based on its perceived utility. This is arguably a more useful way to get information than other systems which rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it.

When you create an account with OnlyWire you’ll be initially asked to sign up for all of the bookmarking sites that OnlyWire will submit your blog posts to. This initial effort will allow OnlyWire to bookmark you blogs on 10 or more social bookmarking sites all from a button installed on your browser’s tool bar. Once you set up your account and are ready to submit a post you’ll simply need to enter the title of the post, a short description, the main keywords that describe your post(tags), and the category that it fits. Over time you will find more and more of your posts ranking in the search engines.

Stumbleupon.com
StumbleUpon works on the same premise as OnlyWire and is also assigned a button on your browsers tool bar for when you are ready to submit your content. The difference with OnlyWire is that there is also a community component so you can add friends to your account and let them see what you’ve been bookmarking and vice versa. You can form networks of people with similar bookmarking interest, and vote on sites that have been bookmarked.

Digg.com
Submitting your blog posts to Digg.com is a great and fast way for quality traffic. Digg was create for people to share content from anywhere on the web. You can create an account to submit your posts which are then read and rated by it’s users. By submitting informative and helpful items you can create popularity and be promoted to the front page. This can create a stream of traffic that lasts a long time and potentially cause your blog to be seen my millions of users. Another advantage of Digg is that all information is equal when it is submitted and only becomes ranked higher by the people who vote for it. If you have a way of tracking the traffic to your blog you will notice visitors from Digg after every submission from people across the globe.

As you can see, there are many ways to get free traffic to your internet business blog. These methods don’t take much time at all and can have a long lasting effect on your blog traffic. Social bookmarking websites are also significant to the search engines which is where most websites and blog traffic comes from. Becoming consistent at using these sites every time you make a new post is the technique will work to get some good traffic to your internet business blog.

Michael Laleye Is A Plug In Profit Site Member As Well As An Authority On Developing Home Based Internet Businesses. Get more Information On How To Build Your Own Internet Home Business. For Internet Business Opportunities To Make Money Online, Visit: http://www.MyAffiliateStarter.com

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By Jimmy Mcgrath

I know a lot of bloggers around the world seem to think technorati is one of the top or if not the top blogging tool for exposure, but to me it seems like a mostly one sided affair.

Technorati get much more out of your service than you do out of theirs, for example if you use their in-text keyword or linking service - How exactly does this benefit you? To my knowledge few people use technorati as a search engine to actually find blogs or content. It now seems to be dominated by webmasters rather than users. It?s rather the case that people are referred TO technorati from people who use their tools and then those people find other blogs than people going to technorati first hand to find content and blogs.

It could be more of a traffic losing tool than a traffic promoter. Sure you will be listed on their database and keywords will be stored - Wow! that?s it? The probability that you will get traffic from them is very low. The probability that you will send them traffic is very high (especially if you use keywording).

As for SEO I doubt technorati adds anything to your sites popularity, indexing returns nothing on google and other top search engines.

So why do people continue to use what seems like a ?one way? service. I?m afraid the ?name factor? is in effect once again. Similar to other social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, simpy, flurl etc, submitting to these sites is not likely to bring you any traffic and do very little for your websites popularity. The fact is you are doing more for them than they are doing for you. Digg is the exception where their indexing system seems to be much better for search engines and this could do some good, or over-exposure, bad, for your sites popularity.

So why do people continue to submit to these sites? Because everybody else does, it seems. What I like to call a ?web trend myth?, where a service is so hyped and well known (hence the ?name factor?) that bloggers and webmasters think that the service must do something good for their website whereas in reality webmasters and bloggers are doing more for the ?myth? sites.

Jimmy McGrath of Affiliate Programs Cash has been an Internet marketer / advertiser for the last 5 years, working for various companies and now freelance. In the last year he has been researching the advertising and marketing strategies of internet entrepreneurs. He is also a cross-culture educational expert and has lectured at several universities across Canada and the USA.

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