Profits With Chris

Social bookmarking can be a powerful source of traffic to your websites.

First of all, what is social bookmarking? It’s a number of the latest sites to have spawned in the last couple of years such as Digg and Stumbleupon.

These sites allow you and I to bookmark our favourite sites so that we can find them again at a later date. But when you look at the collective bookmarking of thousands of people, they also act as a kind of popularity vote for a website.

For instance, Digg records the number of times that a website has been “dugg” and these sites rise high in the rankings.

How To Get Traffic

It’s not too difficult to get traffic from these sites. At the basic level, you should just submit your new pages to these sites.

If you’re lucky then you will get some good traffic. Sometimes the traffic is zero, sometimes you get a trickle which quickly disappears. If you’re lucky then you can get some momentum and receive thousands of hits per day. It’s well known that if your site does well on Digg then even sometimes your server can crash or your host will take down your site because so much bandwidth is being used! This is quite rare though and can be avoided by using cache plugins, particularly if you a running a Wordpress blog.

Sure, many people say that social bookmarking traffic does not convert very well. But if you factor in the sheer volume of hits then you can see that even low converting traffic is worth getting.

One easy way of submitting your pages to multiple social bookmarking sites at once is to use a service like onlywire.com You still need to open your own accounts at the individual social bookmarking sites but thereafter you can just use onlywire to mass submit each of your new posts.

How To Create Social Bookmarking Bait

You can improve your chances of getting a lot of good traffic by creating pages that will be “bookmarking bait”. This means to create posts that surfers will like and bookmark. The best posts are long, quirky and fun. Quite often, these posts will be a “top 20 types of…” type post. Just have a look at these sites to get an idea for what surfers like.

Social bookmarking may be lower converting traffic than, say, article marketing but if done well, it can beat many other forms of traffic in terms of cost per sale.