Web Cash

Since Digg broke the scene years ago, website operators have looked to social bookmarking sites for help. They can be a great source of traffic, and they can also be a good source of backlinks for search engine optimization.

For now, let’s stick with the traffic component. Can a social bookmarking site direct significant traffic to your site, and is it worth your trouble to use them?

Case One: Digg

I’ve used a variety of social bookmarking sites while promoting this site - Digg being one of them. Although some people have had tremendous success with Digg, I haven’t. Most of the articles I Digg end up falling off the recently submitted page without too many Diggs.

In the past two months, I’ve had a dozen or so articles go up on Digg and I’ve only gotten 230 visits in return. Most of those articles fall off the page after I’ve gotten a handful of visits.

Two articles were moderately successful. One article I didn’t submit myself - a reader Dugg it and it promptly gained about 20 Diggs. Despite its relative popularity, it didn’t bring in a whole lot of traffic.

Many of my articles are designed to garnish search engine traffic, so that may be why they don’t appeal to users scanning a bookmark list. I did write another article that focused more on an attention grabbing topic and less on search engine juju, and it did ok on Digg (~100 visits).

For whatever reason, Digg hasn’t been tremendously helpful for me. I still leave it on the toolbar at the bottom - so that users can Digg an article they like - but I don’t actively submit many articles hoping for traffic.

Case Two: dZone

While browsing through social bookmarking sites to promote this site, I stumbled on dZone.

At first I was excited. It’s geared towards programmers and web developers, so my technically oriented articles should have done well. Not so much.

Perhaps I haven’t found the right approach to take. Some articles were probably too rudimentary for the savvy audience, while the more advanced articles didn’t have attention grabbing topics.

I’ve gotten a little bit of traffic from dZone - slightly less than from Digg - but it’s nothing to write home about. I continue to use it every now and again to gain some backlinks, but I don’t count on it for traffic either.

Case Three: Stumblupon

Unlike Digg and dZone, Stumble Upon has done a great job.

One day I looked at my Google Analytics data, and I thought the thing had broken. An average day at the time was about 2-300 visits - and this day showed as over 2,000 visits.

I went into the data and found out that one of articles was bringing in a ton of traffic from Stumble Upon. The same article that brought in about 100 visits on Digg brought in over 2000 visits from Stumble Upon.

I wish I knew why it did that well, and how I could repeat it, but it just kind of happened.

Within the last few days, I’ve also noticed another page bringing in a decent amount of Stumble traffic. For the past several days, it’s brought in 50+ visits each day. I’m wondering how long that’ll last before the page gets shuffled out of the index.

Bottom Line

In terms of traffic, social bookmarking sites can be effective but they seem to be out of your own control.

I haven’t had a lot of luck with Digg and dZone, but I have had some good luck with StumbleUpon.

The best performing articles were submitted by other people, though - not me. Maybe those people had fans that followed their bookmarks, leading more traffic to my site. Or maybe it’s just luck of the draw.

My advice would be to leave a selection of “Share This” icons at the end of your article to encourage users to submit it to their favorite bookmarking sites. However, don’t hold your breath and wait for a ton of traffic to come in.

In the meantime, consider the SEO benefits of social bookmarking sites. We’ll come back to that another time.

Tags: backlinks, digg, social bookmarking, stumbleupon, Traffic