Social Bookmarking – Essential Traffic Generating Tips

There has been written many many words on how to increase traffic on websites using social bookmarking but in this article tripwire magazine puts it all together and provides a list of very essential Traffic Generating tips that we really find useful for getting your website or blog surfaced from the masses and made accessible to the potential visitors that your concept and content target.

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What do you need to attract visitors to your website or blog? Unfortunately it is not enough to create a appealing and user friendly look and feel and add unique and highly relevant content. Of couse these elements should be part of the concept to make sure your visitors become loyal users or followers that come back on a regular basis. To get your website or blog on potential visitors radar screen requires either luck or hard work and a fundamental understanding of the mechanisms that can lead traffic on your site.

There are many different ways that visitors can find your site but the competition is very hard. According to Netcrafts January 2009 survey they managed to get responses from 185,497,213 sites. This is a lot of websites but the number of potential visitors for your site is really quite high as well – estimated to 1,463,632,361 for Q2 2008 by Internet World Stats.

Referrals is an important source to traffic and you can actually do quite a lot yourself to influence it using social bookmarking websites. In general it is easier to get traffic from referrals compared to search engines. This is especially true in the beginning where it can be hard even to get google to visit your site. Getting a decent page rank that will put your site on some of the first result pages takes time and is really hard to control.Try some of the tips below and see if it works for you.

1. StubmbleUpon

StumbleUpon is another very popular website where you can rank a perticular website based on your interest and preference. Stumbling your blog post or website page will return you good solid traffic. Social bookmarking websites such as Digg and Del.ico.us are an excellent method of gaining large quantities of traffic in a short space of time but the concept of StumbleUpon is slightly different. StumbleUpon has over a million users and generally refers a lower (but still significant) amount of traffic at a more consistent rate, whereas sites like Digg can send thousands of hits in the space of a few days for promoted stories which have made the frontpage.

• Get involved in the community and rate some of the websites you visit will help your website to appear for StumbleUpon users who have similar interests to my own. This may inspire others to stumble your articles.
• By adding friends you will increase the amount of users who will see your newly added webpages, making them more likely to give your site the thumbs up.
• Once I have created a new article or blog post make sure that you submit the URL to StumbleUpon. Consider using the toolbar as it will save you some time.
• Add multiple tags. By using multiple tags you can help to attract a wide range of users and by keeping these as relevant to the content as possible will help to keep the traffic targeted.
• Leverage your existing blog or website traffic by placing stumble buttons in easily recognizable places. Really adding a StubmbleUpon button is a must!

Resources

• The Idiot’s Guide to StumbleUpon
• How to Write Posts that Set StumbleUpon on Fire
• 28 Tips to Make You a StumbleUpon Superstar
• Internet Marketer’s Guide to StumbleUpon
• StumbleUpon Networking: How to Easily Share Content and
• How to Become a Top StumbleUpon User (or Why You Shouldn’t Really Bother)
• How to Use StumbleUpon for Your Business: The Definitive Guide Build Relationships
• Writing for StumbleUpon: High Impact Content “Above the Scroll” in Four Easy Steps
• Run a StumbleUpon Advertising Campaign for Your Blog
• 65 Must Read StumbleUpon Articles
• StumbleUpon Phenomenon: An In-Depth Look at a Social Networking Giant
• StumbleUpon – A Blogger’s Best Friend
• For Photographers: How to Optimize StumbleUpon for Photo-Blogging Traffic
• StumbleUpon Mathematics for Stumblers
• 7 Ways to Use StumbleUpon as a Discovery Tool

2. MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog is a Yahoo community service that let you register and share your blog and websites by creating a new community. You can add your blog or website RSS feed. When your blog will update, latest postes will be visible to the people in your MyBlogLog community.

A few tips on generating traffic through MyBlogLog. Make sure you are logged into your MyBlogLog account when you use thier services. When you visit communities and blogs and are not logged in, you will not show up in their visitor widgets.

• Start surfing the blogs of community members. Each blog that you visit will display your name and a link to your MyBlogLog profile. The more blogs you visit the better exposure you will receive.
• Add Friends. MyBlogLog allows you to add 15 new contacts each day ,as well as 15 communities. Use the search box found at the top of your MyBlogLog profile window to search using specific keywords for members who are interested in the topics you write about.
• Use the splash screen that shows new members. By adding the most recent members, you will likely receive visits to your blog from these new users.
• Join communities. Whenever you join a community as a new member, your profile will be featured on the top of that communities main profile page.
• Leave comments on users profiles and on their website community profile. Post reasonable messages, instead of just one-liners.Also, when you receive comments on your blog, be sure to respond to them promptly and thank them for their message.

It is likely that you will begin to notice traffic to your blog almost instantly, but you will need to put in an ongoing effort to continuously receive traffic from MyBlogLog by keep doing the steps above.

resources

• Is MyBlogLog a source of quality traffic or not?
• How to Use MyBlogLog to Succesfully Build Massive Blog or Website Traffic
• Getting More Traffic By Taking Advantage of MyBlogLog

3. Reddit

Reddit is another popular social bookmarking service. It has fewer registered users than digg or delicious but still it is potentially a good souce for traffic. Actually the fact that reddit receives less posts of articles may turn out to be an advantage as your post or article is much more likely to be located close enough to the top of the list to be seen. One of the best thing about Reddit is the democratic voting system that allows the average blogger or webmaster a significantly better chance of hitting the Reddit homepage as opposed to sites like Digg and others.

The key to success for gaining votes on Reddit is having a compelling, click-through worthy headline. Be creative and analyze what works for you.

A few tips on generating traffic through reddit.

• Use Reddit regularly to build up your reputation. Being active in the community, submitting links, and general networking with other can make you look more reputable than a one-shot vote. Once you have an established voting and submission history in your profile, people will be more likely vote your links up.
• Create your own Reddit voting club. This is a highly effective way to get more votes. By teaming up with people you regularly network with, or even direct competitors, you can form your own voting group and routinely vote each others submissions
• Leverage your existing blog or website traffic by placing voting button in easily recognizable places.

Resources

• Reddit: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About It
• Reddit Tips from the Top Dog on Reddit
• Five Ways to Leverage Traffic from Reddit
• 6 Things that Work Right Now on Reddit

4. Digg

Digg is a very popular social bookmarking and ranking service which has millions of users. If youre lucky to get on the frontpage of digg this will bring huge traffic to your blog or website but still if youre not making it to the front page being digged will bring you moderate traffic. Adding a digg button to you pages is highly recommended.

Is it OK to digg your own articles? It’s important to note that even though submitting your own content is allowed in Digg, there is an unspoken taboo against it (on Digg). Many Digg users seams to dislike self-digging and they call it blogspam.Really good and unique articles is never spam but be selective and only digg content that you beleive your readers will like.

If others digg your posts or articles it is possible and recommended to visit thier profile to see if they have listed thier onw blogs or websites. Consider giving them a visit and a digg if you like what you see. Also consider requesting friendship. You can see who dugg you articles by visiting the digg page for you post or article.

Resources

• How to Level the Playing Field with Digg
• How I Became a Digg Power User with a 75% Popular Ratio
• How to Become a Digg Top User Without Doing Anything Shady
• It’s the (Other) Algorithm, Stupid: Understanding DiggRank
• To Shout or Not to Shout: The Digg Dilemma

5. Delicious

Delicious is a very popular social bookmaring service that ranks the websites based on the number og bookmarks they have. Getting bookmarked on delicious is very important and it is a good souce for traffic. If youre site gets a high bookmark rating it will be heavily exposed to the many delicous users.

Delicious has very good tools for integration into browsers and most people using this service will use the browser plugin-buttons to bookmark. Still it is recommended to add a save to delicious button to remind your visitors that this would be a good idea.

Resources

• 6 Ways to Make Life Easier with delicious
• How to Analyze Your Site with Delicious
• Become a del.icio.us Power User

6. Technorati

Technorati is a blog showcase platform that requres you to create an account and claim your blog. Technorati gives ranking to your blog or website based on the authority. The more authorities you have, the more your blog will be popular and rank high. Technorati authority is a system in wich points are assigned to blogs based on the number of other blogs that link to it.

• Technorati rely heavily on tags so make sure that your posts or articles are tagged. Technorati tags are labels that writers assign to articles in order to tell Technorati what the article is about. Use the parameter rel=”tag” to make the tags stand out as tags.
  <a class=”cp_tag“ rel=”tag“ href=”…“>[tag name]</a>
• Once you are registered with Technorati, you can request the service to ping your blog. Do this whenever you have made updates.
• Make friends with similar interests, favorite their blogs. This will make it more likely that others favorite yours
• Add Technorati Favorite button to your blog
• Link to other Technorati blogs. Technorati will give you back traffic.

Resources

• How to get traffic from Technorati
• How to use Technorati WTF to generate traffic
  
• 3 Steps To Getting Technorati Traffic – If You Want It
• Technorati Tags And Authority – Increase Your Blogs Traffic

7. FriendFeed

FriendsFeed is a very simple but still powerfull service with excelent search capabilities. FriendFeed may seam obvious for microblogging and it is but really it is more of an aggregation service than a direct microblogging site. FriendsFeed sucks in all your activities across different socialmedia services. People can then see what you’re up to online through these collected services and decide if they subscribe and follow your feed.

Main reason why FriendFeed is powerful is that when you post a comment to an article or clicks on “like” it gets shared with all of your friends and appears in the top of their feeds as well as yours. Your friends then have the potential to comment or click “like” on the article, and share with their friends, and it goes on and on like a chain reaction.

A few tips on generating traffic through Friendfeed.

• You should make sure that your own posts or articles are added to you Friendfeed. Once your account has been created you can add your feed under services to make this happen automatically.
• Add yourself to “Rooms” that your blog or website relate to and post your articles in these rooms
• Enable the other services you use to allow these to deliver information to you feed (digg, facebook, delicious etc.)
• Add the “Share on FriendFeed” Link or button
• You need to have an active feed so that you won’t get “buried”. It’s often not difficult to get a constantly active feed since your activities from other sites, such as twitter or digg, will count inside friendfeed too.

Resources

• 10 Reasons Why FriendFeed Will Beat Out the Competition
• Pull Your Blog Into FriendFeed and Increase Exposure
• FriendFeed Can Disrupt Search and Reshape Advertising
• 25 Different Uses for FriendFeed
• HOW TO: Get the Most Out of FriendFeed

8. Facebook

Facebook is a great and extremely popular social community!. You can meet new friends and find old friends, share pictures, memories etc. But what you might not be aware of is that you also can use your personal FaceBook profile to help promote your blog or website.

A few tips on generating traffic through Facebook.

• Add your RSS feed to Facebook using Notes app to import the blog feed.
• Another possiblity is to use the app Flogblog.
  
• Funwall is another great tool to broadcast any content you want to share
• There is a function in Facebook known as Facebook Group. You can create a group that relate to the content you provide on your blog or website. Invite all your friends to join the group and try to find and invite opinion leaders in your area – fx. top bloggers.
• If you use twitter add your feed to Facebook. (Also do this by searching “Twitter” in Facebook’s search field and click on the first result)

Resources

• How to Add a Blog or RSS Feed to Facebook
• Simple Facebook Adjustements to Get Traffic
• Facebook Insider’s Guide to Viral Marketing
• The 25 Most Popular Pages on Facebook
• Facebook Pages and Local Search Engine Optimization
• Facebook vs. LinkedIn: Which is Better for Business?
• 5 Reasons Why Whole Foods Gets Facebook
• Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Facebook
• Facebook Ads 101: How to Set Up and Track Facebook Ads
• 5 Tips for Promoting Your Business Page on Facebook
• Facebook for Those Over 40
• 3 New Ways to Target Your Audience with Facebook Pages
• The Updated Unofficial Smartass Facebook Guide
• 10 Ways to Use Facebook to Promote Your Business for Free
• Facebook Ads: Will They Work for You?
• The Facebook Marketing Bible: 24 Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook
• 9 Reasons You Should be Using and Watching Facebook
• 12 Ways to Use Facebook Professionally
• Facebook Flyers Pro Taking Off

9. Twitter

It’s only until recently that Internet marketers all over started realizing the traffic generating power of the social networking or micro-blogging tool we know as Twitter. Make no mistake, Twitter is a great tool to get loads of traffic.

• Create a twitterfeed to be included automatically into your twitter account.
• Consider using tweetlater to get more control on what and when you publish to twitter
• Use Twitter Search to search on some keywords related to your targeted niche. GEt an understanding of what keywords you may use for your blog or website
• Check ongoing discussions and select Twitter followers who are already discussing relevant keywords.
• Follow as many of them as possible, but be selective. Follow the ones which may add value to you and your blog or website
• Start communicating with them. Respond their Twitter updates by putting @ before their Twitter usernames.
• You may want to automate your thank you message at TweetLater by typing your thank you message including links to your blog, and wait for them to follow you!
• Subscribe to twitter feeds related to very popular websites fx. twitter.com/smashingmag if you blog about design and web development. This will add their feed into your twitter and may help you gain followers.

Resources

• How to use twitter to get web traffic (BlogCatalog)
• How to Use Twitter to Build Brand Integrity
• Why Twitter Matters
• Getting Intimate (with Customers) on Twitter
• Twitter Goes Mainstream
• Twitter Wrote his Column For Me
• 7 Tips for New Twitter Users
• 17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers, and Business Owners
• How to Get Customer Service via Twitter
• 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business
• The Evolution of Brands on Twitter
• How to Use Twitter to Grow Your Business
• How to Build Community on Twitter
• How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter
• Building an Effective Business Profile on Twitter
• Newbies Guide to Twitter
• The Big Juicy Twitter Guide
• Twitter Tools for Community and Communications Professionals
• How to Become a Twitter Rockstar

Sources and further reading

• 83 Social News Sites – Categorized By Niche
• Top 38 Niche Social Media Sites
• 50 Steps to Establishing a Consistent Social Media Practice
• Social Media Will Change Your Business
• Top 10 Reasons Why SEOs Fail on Social Media
• The Limitations of Social Media
• The ABCs of Social Media
• Best Social Media Advice from this Site
• Towards a More Social Organization
• Social Media Marketing: How to Win Friends and Influence People
• A Sample Social Media Toolkit
• Big Brand Social Media Interview
• How to Measure Social Media ROI for Business
• Social Media ROI
• A List of Social Media Marketing Examples
• Social Media and Business Marketing Links
• Biggest Mistakes Made by Social Media Gurus
• How Does a Company Dip its Toes in the Conversation?
• 7 Videos About Social Media You Need to Watch
• What I Want a Social Media Expert to Know
• Will the Real Social Media Expert Please Stand Up?
• Intel Social Media Guidelines
• Starting a Social Media Strategy
• 50 Ways to Use Social Media
• What is the ROI for Social Media?
• Scared of Social Media? You May Already be Pro!
• Online Communities and Their Impact on Business
• A Social Media Guide
• How to Measure Success in Your Social Media Marketing
• Social Media Marketing Guide
• How to Change the World Using Social Media
• Involve, Create, Discuss, Promote, Measure
• How to Champion Social Media at Work
• The Big Boys of Social Bookmarking: The Top 20 Sites, 10e20.com
• 24 Do-Follow Social Bookmarking Sites that Actually Work, caroline-middlebrook.com
  
• Social Networking: Ages 20-60 and Up, muhammadsaleem.com
• Online Networkng and the Professions that Use It, muhammadsaleem.com
• Top 29 Niche Social Media Sites (That Actually Send Traffic), tropicalseo.com
• 83 Social News Sites – Categorized by Niche, squareoak.com
• 101 Web Marketing Ideas and Tips, SEOpedia
• 25 Tips for Marketing Your Blog, Online Marketing Blog
• 10 Remarkably Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic, SEOMoz
• 8 Reasons Why Lists Are Good for Getting Traffic to Your Blog,Problogger
• 7 Ways to Get to the Top of the del.ico.us Popular Page, Problogger
• 3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic, Performancing
• How to Get Traffic For Your Blog, Seth Godin
• The Art of Linkbaiting, Performancing
• The Art of Blog, SEO Black Hat
• What is Linkbaiting?, Modern Life is Rubbish
• SEO Advice: Linkbait and Linkbaiting, Matt Cutts of Google
• Problogger Link Baiting Series, Problogger
• Secrets to Beating the Sandbox 2.0 Revealed, Link Building Blog
• What Makes a Site Link-Worthy?, Eric Ward
• Using Digg to Attract Hits, Slate
• Using Digg and Netscape to Get Traffic, Pronet Advertising
• Social Bookmarking for Traffic, SiteProNews
• The Sandbox and Delicious, Graywolf’s SEO Blog
• Unleashing the IdeaVirus, Seth Godin
• Viral Copy, Copyblogger
• Building Traffic to Build Your Fan Club, Copyblogger
• Trust Rank and Your Domain, Link Building Blog
• Generating Buzz With Link Baiting and Viral Campaigns, Search Engine Watch
• Linkbaiting for Fun & Profit, Search Engine Journal
• Link Building Guide, Jim Westergren
• Link Baiting & Effective Link Building, Search Engine Journal
• Link Baiting and Viral Search Success, Search Engine Roundtable
• How Much is Link Bait Worth?, Cartoon Barry
• Link Baiting (How Nick Wilson Created SEO Even Seth Godin Could Love), Stuntdubl
• Link Baiting Case Study from Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Journal
• Link Bait, SEO Book
• The 8 Free Things Every Site Should Do, Seth Godin at Squidoo
• Building Traffic With Article Marketing, Copyblogger
• Link Building Blog, Text Link Ads
• Link Building Wiki, Text Link Brokers
• Advanced Link Building Tactics, SEOMoz

Tagged as: Traffic Generation