Gaining readers from social bookmarking sites

If your blog or Web site has ever been mentioned on Digg, StumbleUpon, or another big social bookmarking site, you know the flood of traffic this can bring. But Internet users are notoriously fickle, and yesterday's hot sites aren't the best sources of traffic.

Last week I conducted a little experiment and posted a link to one of my blog posts to some of the popular social bookmarking sites.

Over the next 48 hours, my blog post received lots of traffic, but nearly all of it came from a single site. Sure, this is a random anecdote. But here are the results, along with my commentary based on watching these sites closely for two years.

Fark.com. 1,806 hits. Fark is on the upswing, though not nearly as popular as Digg. My post was greenlit for the business section within 10 minutes. But if you look at the comments, there's not one serious or thoughtful remark in the whole thread. Does it even matter if you're mentioned here? Compare it to the rigorous discussion that followed a link I posted to Slashdot.

Digg. 2 hits. I think Digg has gotten too popular for its own good; it's been 16 months since I got this post on the front page, which brought 6,000 visitors. Now it's virtually impossible to get noticed on Digg unless you have a network of friends on standby to vote for your story. What about the rest of us, the people who are working for a living?

Reddit. 0 hits. The last couple of links I've submitted to Reddit have gone straight into a black hole. I've heard that submitting links to your own content is now considered impolite on Reddit. Perhaps this is related to Reddit's acquisition by Wired Magazine and its flat performance over the past year.

This time I didn't submit to StumbleUpon; it's a different type of site and can't be compared over a short time frame with those mentioned above. StumbleUpon is already delivering several hundred visitors a day to my domain, and is running a close second to Google keyword searches for bringing new visitors. And StumbleUpon is the only one of the big bookmarking sites that seems to be gaining share:


I didn't include Digg in this graph because its traffic is on a much higher level. Let's hope that eBay, which acquired StumbleUpon several months ago, doesn't screw it up too bad.

The downside with traffic from these social bookmarking sites is that most of the visitors are merely surfing, so the resulting book sales are probably negligible. The average visitor from one of these bookmarking sites spends less than a minute on my domain and looks at an average of 1.3 pages. Overall, visitors spend nearly seven minutes here and view 2.4 pages.

But when it comes to book sales, every little bit helps. Even though 99.8 percent of these social-bookmarking visitors don't engage, the traffic can help your blog break through the glass ceiling. Each big score I've had on these sites has resulted in links from high-PageRank sites, which brings in more qualified traffic over time.
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Steve Weber is author of Plug Your Book! Online Book Marketing for Authors