Recently, a page on one of my websites was bookmarked or listed on Digg, a popular social bookmark site. It gave me the perfect opportunity to study and analyze the traffic coming from these social media sites. Read to discover the advantages and disadvantages of social bookmark traffic and how it can be applied to your own online marketing or site.

Is Social BookMark Traffic Useless?

First, we must make the distinction that no traffic is useless. Any visitor to your site is a good thing and should be welcomed. However, all traffic is not created equally, there are great differences in the sources of your traffic. This article takes a close analytical look at social bookmark traffic from an internet marketing perspective.

In case you haven’t noticed, right now social bookmark and media sites are all the rage on the web. Social bookmark traffic comes from such popular sites as Slashdot, Digg, Stumbleupon… basically these sites are driven by their users – that is, users or members pick and bookmark the content they want to view and discuss.

These social bookmark sites are extremely popular; they command the high traffic numbers most ordinary sites can only dream about obtaining.

But is this social bookmark traffic useful?

Is it worth your time? Should you be actively promoting to these social media sites? Is social bookmark traffic of any use to the affiliate marketer? Should you concentrate your online marketing efforts on these types of sites? More importantly, what are the benefits and disadvantages of getting a front page listing on a sites like Digg or Stumbleupon?

As a full-time online marketer I wanted to know the answers to those questions. Moreover, I wanted to discover how or if I could use these sites from an online marketer’s advantage; i.e. how can they help me create more online income.

Recently, the Digg listing gave me a first-hand opportunity to really study these sites.

Of course, nothing happens without a reason… I did actually court these social bookmark sites by placing the free Addthis.com bookmark on all my pages. You can do the same. This simple bookmark lets your visitors bookmark your content for you in all these sites; it only takes a few seconds to place the bookmark code on your webpages.

But be careful; getting your site featured on the front page of these sites can drive 100,000′s of visitors to your site immediately, so much traffic that it may overtax your server and crash it.

So be warned; if you’re actively promoting to these social bookmark sites just make sure your servers or web hosting is up to the demanding task of handling all these sudden visitors.

In my case, it didn’t crash my servers but unfortunately, the page/link in question featured an old poorly written article I did on the history of the Internet. It was just some random facts and things about the web, not really an article at all. Why it was even featured on Digg is a puzzle and beyond me.

But still I am not one to waste an opportunity, so I put my Google Analytics into overdrive and starting analyzing these visitors and social bookmark traffic.

It pointed out some very interesting factors about this social bookmark traffic.

Most of this traffic will:

* simply bounce back
* very few visitors will spend much time on your site
* very few visitors will even venture into your site
* very few will sign-up to your newsletter
* very few will enter your marketing follow-ups/funnels

(The unknown variable here being the content on your site, how good it is? How well does it perform?)

Regardless, one common problem with traffic from these sites, it’s very temporary traffic. The high volume will only last a few days… until your item is moved back from the front page.

These visitors will not stay on your site long and most are gone within seconds, never to be seen again. A few may sign up to your newsletter or venture to other areas of your site but not many.

Social bookmark traffic is very fleeting, like customers in the drive-thru section in a fast food restaurant, they grab the content and surf back to the major linking site very quickly and surf on to the next item.

This traffic will behave very differently than organic traffic from the search engines, or from your newsletter traffic or from traffic in your marketing funnels. Much different.

It was unlike getting one of my articles featured in Addme or SiteProNews, where I can easily get 200 or 300 new subscribers in a day. Plus, these visitors are interested in my information and have been exposed to my content (article) before coming to my site.

So there was no comparison; I would take the traffic from these sites any day over traffic from the social bookmark sites. And I would take free organic traffic from the search engines over any other source of traffic including PPC traffic.

So the question remains – is social bookmark traffic useless?

First, as I mentioned before, you must realize no traffic is useless; any visitors to your site is a good thing. Without traffic your site is worthless, just a few files sitting on a server in the middle of nowhere.

Obtaining visitors is one of your first objectives as a webmaster. You have to get visitors to your site or it’s game over.

The best kind of traffic is traffic coming from organic search, visitors who come from the search engines seeking exactly what you’re offering on your site. These are targeted visitors who will consider your offer, real your information, maybe buy a product or sign-up to your newsletter or follow-up system. They often become repeat visitors to your site. These are your ideal visitors. This is the kind of traffic you want.

Social bookmark/media traffic is different but it does have some saving graces.

Mainly it can help expose your site to millions and help brand your site or business. It can get the word out about your site. Start a buzz.

If you have a site that appeals to the mass market, then these social sites could be an excellent recruiting ground for visitors and traffic.

These social sites are good for another reason; getting your links on all these high traffic, high PR7 and PR8 sites can’t hurt your search engine rankings. Once featured on a site like Digg, your link will appear on many secondary sites around the web, so far 500+ and counting. Monkey see, monkey do. Although it has never been my main ambition to get featured on Fark.com, all these sites do have high PR ranks so from a SEO standpoint it is not necessarily a bad thing.

Since many of these visitors will be using the Firefox browser which has the Alexa toolbar embedded – your site’s traffic rank will increase. Over 50% of the bookmark traffic coming to my site were using the Firefox browser. Alexa’s traffic rankings are not a true picture of the web’s traffic but it’s a good measuring stick, nonetheless.

Google might even consider it when ranking your site. Google basically considers their whole indexing system as a democratic voting structure… sites give a vote by linking to your content; wouldn’t it also be reasonable to assume more traffic means more votes. So wouldn’t getting a lot of traffic or being featured on a site like Digg where the users vote to propel the best content to the front be the ultimate vote.

One strange thing I did notice, for some reason the traffic from Stumbleupon was different. These visitors stayed longer on my site and reacted more like organic traffic. Maybe the Stumbleupon site is of a higher quality and this may have been reflected in the quality of the visitors coming from there. It also reminded me, all traffic from these social media sites can’t be judged with the one brush.

This whole experience also pointed out another important factor; it made me realize how unsuited my content is for the general web surfer or the mainstream web. All my sites and content were planned and organized to first draw in targeted (warmed up) visitors from free organic search and from my online articles.

If I or anyone wanted to take advantage of this social media traffic, you would have to create your site/content to appeal to these surfers and then somehow draw them into your marketing funnels. I don’t know if the majority of the users of these bookmark sites would make good prospects, but my guess is not very likely, the nature of the beast. But it would largely depend on what you’re offering on your site and how well it is suited to these users.

So I am not drawing any conclusions yet.

Hopefully, I will have further chances to study traffic from these social sites and get the long-term effects, especially in regards to my keyword rankings in the search engines before making any final judgments.

For now I will keep an open mind but the jury is still way out whether or not social bookmark traffic is worth the interruption to the daily marketing tasks of your site. Just seems like much ado about nothing.

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The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous websites, including two sites on Internet Marketing. For the latest and most effective web marketing tools try: Internet Marketing Tools (http://www.bizwaremagic.com) Or why not try our Free Marketing Course (http://www.marketingtoolguide.com)

Copyright © 2007 Titus Hoskins. This article may be
freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

Isn’t online marketing by definition, expensive? Not
necessarily. Online businesses are coming to the realization that
in an organic environment like the Internet, organic marketing is
required; paying for traditional or static marketing only gets
you so far before it becomes ineffective. The consumer now
controls your marketing.

What is wrong with the old methods?

Old marketing methods are failing because users are beginning to
wise up (Rise Up) against the old brute force advertising that
tries to win users over through sheer volume, using abrasive
web-page banners, unrelated Adwords displayed on the page, or
repeated newsletters (most being restricted by anti-spam laws).

The old methods no longer work effectively for two key reasons.
One is the fact that they are a “flash in the pan”, directing
users to websites only so long as you continue to pay for the
campaign, the second reason is consumers are now at the stage
where they either ignore them or go out of their way to block
them (with plug-in based browser or email filtering).

Let’s quickly run through some of the “traditional” ways to
market on the web, and their failings.

* Paid Campaigns – (These only work while active) Paid campaigns
may lure people to your site, but they are regularly not your
target market and after arriving they promptly leave (High
“bounce” rate).

* Banner Ads – People hate banner ads. Most of the ads on the
Internet are loathed because they aren’t relevant. Seeing a
banner for a better insurance rate when on a gaming site is a
massive disconnect for the audience and a significant portion of
banner ads are plain abrasive to users. Filling one third of your
page with banner ads will not increase the likelihood anyone will
care.

* Adwords – Adwords (PPC, Pay Per Click) have the same problem
as banner ads, though to a lesser extent. Adwords work by
displaying “sponsored results,” in search engine results.
Adword results are separated from normal search results so not
many people select them and the unknown quality in the users eye
causes distrust (how do I know that a sponsored result is better
than an organic result). Competition is fierce, with prices
spiraling upwards, and returns staying constant. For more
information see our article about Google marketing pitfalls.

* Newsletters – One word: Spam. Because of the spam epidemic,
users are becoming ever more wary signing up to receive mail from
any online source. Legislation and the ever increasing ability of
spam filters mean a continually shrinking audience (Restricting
the ability to send newsletters, and filtering them before they
reach your audience).

The “Old World” marketing relied on one or two large marketing
sources to drive traffic with big budgets and marketing firms.
You have to get people to create the “news” then you pay other
people to distribute the “news”, so you are pulling people into
your “store” to show them what you have (whether they want it
or not).

New methods for marketing

These days having other create and distribute your content for
you is in vogue, this can mean syndicating your articles for
other users to repost, paying users to review or rate your
services, guiding users directly on forums or having users sign
up to receive exclusive information. In every case, the handiwork
of distribution is left to others.

Lets quickly run through some of the new “web 2.0″ ways to
market on the web, and the reason you should try them:

* Blogs – Blogs are a goldmine to both the reader and the
writer. Blogging is less time consuming and considerably cheaper
than traditional marketing. Blogs give you the ability to convey
your personal thoughts on happenings in your industry and your
personal and corporate life, letting you really connect with your
audience. Another positive is the viral marketing component where
you are referenced through various social media websites, search
engines and other blogs, increasing both your credibility and
searchability, making it easier for consumers to find and trust
you.

* Forums – Forums give you an insight into what people are
talking about, letting you get directly into the heads of
potential customers. An easy way to find an appropriate forum is
by asking existing customers what forums they frequent. Join in
conversations, threads, contribute to the community and become a
trusted member, then you can give your professional advice and
mention what you do for a living. You should approach this as a
way to get insight into what people are talking about, with the
side-effect of possibly generating leads. If you approach this as
direct marketing the community will quickly tell and either ban
you, or develop a healthy disdain of you.

* Articles – Articles are a great way to show you are connected
to the issues in your industry and the wider world around you.
You can either submit your articles through a syndication
service, or post it on your blog, even better is a combination of
the two: Choose a topic you enjoy talking about and write an
article (like this one!) with your personal opinion or some
helpful advice. If it is well-written and educates readers, you
will already have an edge on your competition.

The theme of the new marketing methods is tailoring your content
to the audience. The intent is to create something reader want to
read. Marketing is not about trickery or insincerity, it’s about
communicating your ideas with honesty and authenticity. If it is
worthwhile to your users, then they will happily talk about the
content and spread it around, you have to communicate
authentically with your customers and it simply doesn’t happen
using “traditional” online marketing.

A word of caution: if you try any of the above methods but
approach them traditionally (as a direct marketing channel) then
not only will you annoy a great deal of users, you can also
damage your company image. Again I stress the above point, make
the content something people want to read, not just marketing
material.

Old marketing methods that are now approached differently

Benjamin Franklin said insanity is “doing the same thing over
and over again and expecting different results.” This is
increasingly true for some of the more traditional forms of
online marketing. It’s not so much what people are doing, but
more a case of how they are being done.

Let’s take a look at how we should be approaching some of the
old marketing methods today.

* Press Releases – Before we start, I’m sorry to tell you, but
unless you are in the 5% of the market that people pay attention
to, no-one reads your press releases – at least no potential
customers do. A high percentage of companies marketing on the web
use traditional methods of delivery, either in print or on a
section of their website. Consider changing your press release to
positively present your company then send it through a
syndication service for papers and online news sources to pick up
and republish.

* Search Engines – Previously you had to specifically tailor
your site to search engine specifications to ensure you had a
high pagerank and were located at the top of search results. To
put it simply, the important factor was how your site was
presented to the user. These days although page display has an
impact, it is far more important to have the right content on the
site. Search engines now care more about content. Structure your
pages logically and efficiently with appropriate content for each
page, and be sure to link to those pages wherever possible,
especially if you are engaging in blog or forum marketing.

* Mailing Lists and Newsletters – With new anti-spam laws coming
into effect, coupled with users increasingly annoyed at anything
email based, mailing lists and newsletters are becoming far less
effective. Ensure all the users on your mailing lists and
newsletters have agreed to receive them. You don’t need to
re-ask permission from your existing list, but be sure to let
users op-out, and put an optional op-in form link in your
communications.

Old-world communication can still be effective but you need to
ensure it is not your only approach.

The Conclusion?

Reevaluation is the key to a healthy online presence. You need to
be constantly measuring and reevaluating your marketing methods
to ensure you are not wasting money, and can take advantage of
effective new methods.

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Sam Law and Julian Stone – Project, Task & Time
Management specialists for: ProActiveSoftware.com,
http://www.proworkflow.com & Julian101.com
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