Social Bookmarking sites like DIGG, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and many similar sites are the life blood of many websites.  They can create a new influx of visitors, an exciting surge in traffic, and make you feel like you are achieving new levels with your site.  There are certain things you have to remember when dealing with these sites in order to gain something from them without wasting your time.   This took me time to learn and when I did I noticed great returns.

 1. Remain Focused

With so many social bookmarking sites on the web try and find the ones that will fit your niche best.  Don’t haphazardly submit your links to a hundred random sites hoping you will see a return. Staying focused on a few sites will work out better for you in the long run. 

2. Make Friends and Build a Reputation

You have to remember that most of these sites are like high school.  If you aren’t hanging with he right crowd you will have a lousy time. Make an effort to find users submitting similar stories in your niche and drop them a line.  Make friends with other members of the community in order to build some backers for your submissions.  Make sure you stay active on sites by commenting, voting, and helping other members get their stories seen.  This will take a little time, but is critical if you want to see results.

3. DIGG can be fickle

DIGG was once the greatest site in the world for me to gain massive traffic overnight, but the site has changed  a bit.  Certain niches no longer have an easy time gaining popularity and making it to the front page or the front page of a specific category.  I find DIGG takes the most effort to obtain traffic from for my sites, but it is worth trying since it can result in a huge influx of visits.  With DIGG you have to make friends and share your stories - no more than 200 though or you can’t shout your stories all at once. Make sure you reach out to people before adding them as a friend or you end up with wasted spots.

4. Be ready for the traffic

The biggest issues most small sites face once they have a story that gains popularity on a social bookmarking site is their sites aren’t capable of handling the traffic.  Most web hosts grant you nearly unlimited bandwidth, but what is important is blogs use server resources that are tightly monitored.  Look into plugins such as WP-Cache or WP-SuperCache for wordpress to help alleviate server load.

5. Real World Example

Well you heard me talk about Social Bookmarking, but that doesn’t mean I can put it into practice myself. Today I submitted a story to Reddit and after it was voted up it reached the first page.  The first page of Reddit can can generate a huge fast influx of visitors.  Today’s burst lasted for a few hours and since my site is hosted on a dedicated server running WP-Supercache it handled the added traffic without a blip.  Looking at the graph below you can see the traffic spike and slow fade as the story drifted off the first page.

 

Social Bookmarking should be looked on as a tool to generate additional traffic, but try to avoid having it be your sole source.  The key source should be search engine traffic, link exchanges, and direct hits.  In order for your site to be self sufficient those point are key, but there is nothing wrong with helping it along with some self promotion. 

Filed under: Blogging strategies, Blogging tips