startatnothing.com

So, as I go through my daily, “What can I do to get people to read this site?” routine, I found some information about social bookmarking sites, like Digg and del.icio.us.

 

About Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking sites give people a chance to discover and share websites with people that have similar interests. The content is submitted by users. I’ll explain it like this: you’re searching the internet and you land on a blog (for example) that has good information that you like. So, you go to a site like Digg and submit the site that you like, placing it in a specific category. Other people find the website you’ve submitted and they like it, too. So, they vote on it however the website does the voting. Digg, for example, has a little button that says “digg it.” Clicking on this button means you liked the website. The more support a site gets, the more popular it becomes, and moves toward the top of the “Popular Pages.” When a site is on the front page, it has the most exposure which leads to more traffic for that site.

That is my understanding of how they work. If I missed anything, or if I’m way off base, let me know and I’ll change it.

Our early experiences, here at SAN.com

We’re a new blog…a very small fish in a very big pond. More like a minnow in all of the oceans of the world combined. Needless to say, we don’t get a whole lot of traffic, but we’re working on that. We’re experimenting with ways to bring people into the site, and we’ve submitted two of our articles to Digg…5 Reasons Why I think Roger Clemens is Lying and Check This Kid Out, each article has 2 diggs. So far, after 1 day, we’ve had 11 visitors come to our site through Digg. I know what you’re thinking, “Wow, 11 whole people. Stop traffic.” But hey, when your site’s visitor average per day is less than 1, eleven in one day is pretty exciting.

All we want is people to come to our site, at this point. I feel like we have a lot of potential here at SAN.com. I feel like we can provide some good information, I’m confident in how we write, and I KNOW that we’ll get better at what we do. So, at this point, we just want people to come to our site. If you’re in the same situation, we want you to know that going about it this way is an option. So, how do you feel about social bookmarking? Have you tried it and does it work for your site? Have you seen an increase in readership? Like I said, it’s increased our page views for the day, but no one has subscribed to our RSS.

 

Some negatives attributed to social bookmarking

Social bookmarking sites, no doubt, bring readers in to your site. But, once you get past that initial spike of visitors, a lot of people say that it doesn’t do much else for you. One site that has been VERY helpful in the early stages of our blog is ProBlogger by Darren Rowse. He has a post summarizing an article by davak at tech-recipes called Is Digg Traffic All its Cracked up to Be? I’m not going to re-print the list here because you can go to ProBlogger and see it, but I do want to highlight a couple of points on the list. First, Digg users don’t click on ads. So, if you’re trying to make money with your blog, you might want to find another way to make that happen. The other point I want to mention is that Digg traffic doesn’t generate new users, comments, or posts. This point kind of goes against my reasoning for submitting to Digg. But, based on the number of views per day on SAN.com, I’m willing to take my chances. We’ve got nowhere to go but up.

 

What do you think?

Like I mentioned earlier in the post, we want to hear what you have to say. How do you feel about social bookmarking? Do you agree with the points that Darren and davak make about the drawbacks of sites like Digg? Those two have been doing this for a long time, and we’ve been doing this for a couple of months, so they’re more likely to be right than we are. But if there are any success stories out there about turning social bookmarking traffic into readership, we would love to hear it.

 

If you like what you’ve just read, please:

• Subscribe to our RSS Feed
• Leave a comment
• Bookmark this post below

 

Popularity: 59% [?]