by kev_hickey_uk

Generate More Visitors To Your MLM Site By Optimizing Social Bookmarking

It is time to catch up with the development of the internet. Social bookmarking is one of the latest revolution on the internet that has everyone buzzing over it. Time has changed and so being a network marketer, you must change according to time too. Now, in this high technology world, the internet has a way to either work for you or work against you. Therefore it is best if you can keep up your skills and learn as much as possible about the changes on the internet.

Social bookmarking is a way where people get to keep, sort, search and even manage their bookmarks while they are surfing the internet. It was once popular to bookmark the sites on your browser but there are disadvantages about that.

You see, things can be messy when you bookmark the sites on your browser as you will need to sort them according to the categories. When you have too many sites bookmarked in your browser, you are very likely to have forgotten about the sites, or forget about the contents of the sites. When you are using a different computer, you are not able to retrieve your bookmarks.

However, if you use social bookmarking, you can easily save your favourite sites URL so that you can remember. You can even share it with everyone else on the internet. You get to choose of course, whether you want it to be view publicly or privately. You can also create different groups to categorize it. Beside this, you can also restrict your bookmark by only letting certain people view it.

Here are a few ways that network marketing reps can make money with social bookmarking:

- Focus on your target niche. It could be the products or services in your network marketing business. When you segregate your niche or your sub-niche, you can easily locate the right target market to come to your website.

- You can form a community by engaging and exchanging ideas with like minded people. By forming a tight community, you can build trust with your prospects and your target market.

- You get to brand yourself through your profile. People respect strength and you must make sure you convey it through your profile that you have it in ample supply – that way you will be branded as a leader and people will trust your recommendations.

- You can sign up with as many bookmarking services as you can. This way, your exposure will increase exponentially

- Always take advantage of viral marketing. Take Digg for example, you want people to ‘Digg’ your blog post so that it becomes very popular.

You can do the same by optimizing the chances of ‘digg’ for your blog posts.

It is important to maintain strong relationships in MLM business. People value you better if provide beneficial information and help them out when they need it.

These are a few of the popular social bookmarking sites you can optimize:

Stumbleupon
Del.icio.us
Technorati
Propeller
Blinklist

Find More Social Bookmarking Articles

My name is Shawn and my wifes name is Erin and we were married March 15th, 1997. This is our story of a struggle to have a child and what we are doing to overcome the struggle to make our dream come true.

The best way to automate your complete process of social bookmarking is available at bookmarking demon. Also – automated social bookmarking is the best way to take your search engine ranking to the highest level in no time at all.While our marrige has been wonderful and God has given us each other, there has always been something missing. This something is a child of our own to love and to care for. Even prior to our being married my wife and I had discussed and dreamed of having a child of our own. Early on we even bought baby name books and had picked out what we liked best after going through the books several times reading every name out loud so we could see how it would sound with our last name. We tried to have a child for the first year we were married. We then seeked medical help. It turns out that my wife can’t get pregnant naturally. The only way she could get pregnant was by the aid of invetro surgery. This procedure cost $20,000 per try with no gurantee of success. My wife was in college and I was are sole support. We had a mortgage, two car loans and other bills to pay. There was no way I could earn enough money for us to have a child at that time and we thought it would be best if we waited until my wife graduated college before starting to save for the invetro surgey procedure.Six months prior to my wife graduating college I was injured at work. I drove a 18 wheeler tank truck at gas drilling rigs in North Texas. I hauled drilling mud, water and other chemicals to and from the rigs. On the day I was injured it had been raining all day and the night prior to that dreadful day. The water was standing knee deep for a good 300 yards all away around the rigs with rain and lightning coming down around me. I called my dspatcher and told him of the conditions at the rigs that I was working on that day. The dispatcher (and his infinite wisdom) told me to keep working. Like the good little worker I was, I stayed and did my job. I had loaded my truck and was walking (wading) back to the cab of the truck when I stepped into a hole around two feet deep that I couldn’t see do to the deep, brown water. My right ankle and foot collapsed to one side and my body fell in the opposite direction tearing the main nerve (almost in two) on the inside of my right ankle. I endured four surgeries to try and correct the problem with no success.It has been five long years since I was injured on the job and after my last foot surgey I have formed what is referred to as CRPS type II (complex regional pain syndrome). It is a very painful disorder that requires me to have a morphine pain pump implant and take oral nerve and pain medications to help control my painful condition so that I can do simple day to day tasks that most people take for granted. However, I’m getting around better than I could prior to having my morphine implant implanted. Erin, my wife who I love with all of my heart and soul finally graduated college as valedictorian. She is so smart. She means the world to me and I very much want for her to have a child because I know she wants one more than anything, as do I.We have a home in North Texas but we have chosen to purchase a fifth wheel trailer so that Erin can work as a traveling nurse. Working as a traveling nurse pays twice as much as it does working at a local hospital back home.It has been almost two years since we hit the road so Erin could work and we still don’t have our fifth wheel paid for so we haven’t been able to save much for our baby fund yet. This is also partially due to our home that we have had for sale for the past year that hasn’t sold. We even lowered the price to what we owe and threw in the riding lawn mower but still haven’t had any luck in selling it. This is costing us around $1,100 per month.Since my injury we have had to file bankruptcy, sell off most that I had worked so hard for over the years.Erin and I would like to have a child some day before it’s too late. Again, the only way we can have a child is invetro surgury. As many people know it doesn’t always work the first time around and one try can cost around $20,000.00 with the meds. Erin and I just don’t have the income to achieve this in enough time for us to have a child. Soon after the foot surguries I realized that I wasn’t ever going to be able to work again so I started teaching myself how to create websites and market them in order to make a living. Thus far I haven’t gotten rich doing it but I have brought in some extra money over the years. During this time I have managed to learn a lot about creating websites and marketing them so I put that information to good use and opened Money2Surf.us. I figured everyone needs to market their website and products in order to bring customers to their sites. Since I had just about every book on the subject and I had experience in marketing my other websites that I could help webmasters bring potential customers to their site and in return they would help Erin and I have the child we have always wanted. Money2Surf advertising is a pixel advertising website that I opened to help see our dreams of having a child come true and with your help Erin and I can finally have the child that we have always longed for and website owners can finally get a steady stream of potential customers to their sites. Some of the proceeds of Money2Surf advertising will be used for us to have a child and to setup a small savings account for our childs education. Any remaining money will go towards a childrens charity such as “Feed The Children” and “St.Judes Childrens Hospital”.If you will notice we will only be keeping enough money for one try at invetro surgey. This is all that we are asking for, one chance to have a child. Time is of the essence! We need to sell pixels as soon as possible. We are hoping to have all of the pixels sold by December 2007 so if you have a website and our struggling with sales then our site can help you! We are also asking you to help us spread the word about our pixel page.When I came up with this idea it was only a few days after I heard about the college student (Alex Tew) that created this script to help pay his way through college. I scraped up just enough money to purchase this script in hopes to fufill Erin and I’s dream of having a child and help the less fortunate children get what they need.Using our pixel site you can advertise your website or your affiliate website. Here are just some examples of what you can advertise on our pixel site: cell phones, ring tones, earn money online opportunities, autosurf websites, paid to read websites, gadgets, electronics, stereos, computers, laptops, software, clothes, apperal, baby products, sports equipment, exercise equipment and just about anything else you can imagine. The only things we don’t allow to be advertised is porn, hate websites or anything not suitable for family viewing. Please check our FAQ’s page. If you have your own website and your trying to sell products on them then this site can help you with those sales.By you purchasing pixels at Money2Surf advertising your traffic will take off for whatever website you advertise and your site will be advertised for at least the next ten years! This site is already located in the search engines. Please know that your proceeds will be going to a very good cause. You will be elping Erin and I have a child of our own and help the less fortunate children in the world. For more information about what pixel advertising can do for your site please visit our site (the link is in the resources box of this article).Thank you all and God Bless!

Use Social Bookmarking To Increase Traffic To Your Site

Did you know that social bookmarking sites can help you generate traffic from all around the Internet? That’s why more and more online businesses than ever before are using social bookmarking to bring in new, qualified prospects to their websites. Now you can’t just do this piecemeal. Mapping out your strategy before you begin is essential to attracting the most targeted traffic.

You also have to determine the results you are aiming for. Are you simply trying to increase your rankings on the search engines? You may think getting to a top spot is not possible, but it really is. If you are ready to get started and want to know how to go about it, this article will help you get started on the road to successful social bookmarking and reap its benefits.

For social bookmarking to provide results, you have to follow several guidelines. First and foremost, your title is important. Your title has to grab attention if you want your readers to go through your content, without which it’ll be of no use. There are many good articles which go unread only because the title wasn’t interesting. If your title catches a persons attention, they will be drawn to continuing to see what the article has to offer. The second thing to consider is your topic. This can make or break your reader loyalty. Your job is not only to get people to your site but to also make them stay. You need the entire article to be full of valuable and useful information.

Include a concise summary that will grab readers and persuade them to read your article. Make sure that the information on your site itself relates back to the headline and the summary you created. Your article must also be supported by the information on your website. That will help increase loyal readership. If it is not of high quality, readers will simply forget your page even exists.

In addition to this, you can take advantage of software applications that have been designed to improve your marketing campaigns. If you are a member of various social media sites, like Twitter, it can be very difficult to build a following of thousands of people, let alone make regular update posts. Applications exist that are both free and paid that can help you increase your customer base through your list of followers. You can also arrange for periodic automatic posting to your site. You can also find other automated features on these software programs, so you have to decide how much of an advantage you will get when you are using them.

Once you begin to work on the idea, you will see that internet marketing success and social media are not the mis-match that many people assume. Social media is a powerful tool that can enhance your business. You can stay one step ahead of your competitors, by successfully utilizing these social sites in conjunction with the appropriate applications to more effectively build your business.

by DavidErickson

And The Top Social Bookmarking Site Is?

Today there are literally hundreds if not thousands of social bookmarking sites on the Internet. It would be virtually impossible to choose the top social bookmarking site because there are too many variables involved. The easy answer to this question is, however the top social bookmarking site is the one that performs the best for you.

Today, you can look at social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Stumbleupon and see how they allow the readers to get involved in the process of voting for your articles. With Digg if they like your article they can Digg. At Stumbleupon if they like it they can Stumble it.

What they are really saying is that they have read your article and they think it adds value to the Internet today. This is much of what Web 2.0 is all about.

It allows the reader to get involved in the process and have a voice about things that they like and dislike. This is why blogging and social bookmarking have become such a great combination.

Social bookmarking is nothing more then telling people about a blog article that you have written. It’s a way to let readers as well as search engines know that you have made an update to your blog.

Depending on the platform that you use to blog, bookmarking a blog post is very easy to do because of plug ins that make it that way. This is especially true with WordPress where all you do is click a button and then choose the corresponding social bookmarking website you want to notify.

The whole point of all of this is as an Internet marketer is to drive traffic and ultimately make sales. Other things such as opt in e-mail subscribers, RSS feed readers, and these sorts of things are made possible by getting the traffic to your blog as well.

Once you get the traffic there you can use these other methods to keep in touch with them. But social bookmarking is what helps get them there to begin with. So for every blog post that you make you should be bookmarking it to your favorite site.

Whether it is Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Propeller, Technorati, or other social posting sites such as Onlywire, you want to be sure and social bookmark every blog post as many different ways as possible. Ultimately your traffic and your future business will thank you all the way to the bank for it!

Related Social Bookmarking Articles

by awirtanen

Drive Massive Traffic to Your Site Using the Power of Social Bookmarking

One of the best ways to succeed in your internet marketing business is to use social bookmarking. I have accounts on Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Classmates,Tagged and ZenZuu. This strategy will be of great help in terms of getting targeted audience, generating more traffic to your website and achieving higher ranking in search engines. When you achieve these, you can be sure to earn more profits.

Social bookmarking is free to use and enables web users to save links to their favorite web pages that they want to visit again and share with other people. Additionally, they can vote, comment and discuss about the sites or blogs and then submit the site and get feed backs from other users. If the users like your site, there’s a chance they will visit it again to obtain information and other updates.

New features have actually been added to these types of sites. These include ratings, comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing bookmarks, web annotation as well as groups or other social network features. Although these bookmarks are public, they can be saved privately and shared only with specific groups of people or networks. People with access to these bookmarks can view them in various ways – by category or tags, chronologically or through a search engine.

Social bookmarking provides several benefits to promote your business. Firstly, web users can easily upload and save their preferred websites for other users to view. This alone is an effective way to improve your site’s traffic. Users are always clicking on banners out of curiosity. I wouldn’t be into Internet Marketing today if I hadn’t clicked on an add promoting MLM.

Users can also organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of using the traditional system of folders. Tag refers to a keyword that describes a particular site and category. By using the appropriate bookmarking tags, search engines will be able to look for your content especially when a user searches for information within your category.

What you can do then is to bookmark your own site and get a suitable tag. Once you obtain the right tag on the social bookmarking site, other people will know about your site and will visit it eventually. So this only means that when you have the proper tag, you drive more traffic to your site.

Another big advantage is for your site to be visited by search engines and indexed. A new website has a chance of being visited by search engine robots within a day of submission to social bookmarking sites. Learning the basics of SEO Optimization is important in driving traffic to your site.

Personal branding is a great benefit as well. In other words, by using social bookmarking sites, you are given the ability to develop your own page on their site. With this page, you can list all your web pages, post links to your websites and publish content on any field of interest. This then allows you to establish yourself as an authority in your own niche.

Many people have been spending money just to ensure a high page rank in search engine results but with social bookmarking, there’s no need for that as it provides a one-way link to promote your site to other web users at no cost at all. This should, however, be coupled with credibility and a good reputation so that people will learn to trust you and your business. People ultimately do not buy into your product because it solely benefits them. They largely buy into it because of you.

by DavidErickson

How To Use Social Bookmarking On Your Plug-in Profit Site

These days, you’re just not “with the program” if you’re not involved with social bookmarking. Recently I have been trying to increase my Plug-in Profit Site’s traffic numbers to a certain daily level, and one way to do that is by getting into one of the newer internet trends – social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking is a neat way of saving websites, articles, and blog posts that you consider your favorites. Then you can easily get back to these posts, share these same sites with others on the web, add other saved sites to your list of saved sites, or subscribe to someone’s blog for example.

Usually we bookmark pages we like on our own computers, but social bookmarking allows us to save them on the web for others to see as well. The way we do this is by creating a title, description, and tags (which are the keywords we are targeting) for the pages we want to save. This should generate some new traffic for you fairly quickly from others who use social bookmarking sites and are looking for articles based on the tags you have chosen.

If you own a Plug-in Profit Site, it’s easy to start using social bookmarking sites. If you do a Google search for “social bookmarking sites” for example, you will find a list of the top social bookmarking sites. One of the most famous ones is called “del.icio.us”, and other popular ones are “Digg”, “Yahoo”, and “Furl”.

It doesn’t take long to set these up. But first you have to go to those social bookmarking sites, and create a free account with a username. Once you’ve done that, you are free to use the service to find topics that interest you, or post your own favorite pages.

When you set up an account, you will likely be given a choice of buttons you can add to your toolbar that you can simply copy and paste. Then when you visit a site you want to bookmark publicly, you can simply click on that button on your toolbar, type in a title, description, and tags for that page, and voila! You have saved a page that others can also access!

On your Plug-in Profit Site, there are a few ways to get more traffic using social bookmarking sites. One way is to write quality, original content on your blog, such as posting your own article. On your social bookmarking service, you should be able to find a piece of code to add to your Plug-in Profit Site’s HTML code which will be like the button on your toolbar for the different services.

For example, on my blog, I have four buttons at the end of each blog post which I added to my blog’s template code. These four buttons would lead a reader who like my post to Digg, Furl, Yahoo, and del.icio.us, where they can add a title, description, and tags to submit my post and bring me more traffic.

The nice thing for Plug-in Profit Sites, or any website for that matter is that it’s okay to do this for your own article posts, as long as you do not spam the social bookmarking services.

You don’t really want to send each and every post you make to your blog to one of these services in the attempt to get more traffic when maybe not all your posts are fantastically written, original content. You want to provide something of value to your readers just as you would do in the discussion forums you frequent, and not over-do it.

Some article directory sites now are allowing you to “Digg” your own articles. Again, if you do it slowly and in moderation, you won’t likely be accused of spamming. Be careful because if you do go overboard, some people have been known to get their websites banned from services like Digg.

Another way to boost your Plug-in Profit Site traffic with social bookmarking sites is to actually get yourself involved with these services and use them the way they are intended to be used – don’t just “Digg” your own posts. Find other posts that you like and add a comment, or save them in your own archived lists.

Last but not least, whenever you write an article or blog post for your Plug-in Profit Site business, be sure to use Technorati or other tags in your author bio-box at the end that link back to your main website. Look up information on “tag and ping” to find out the correct format and you will get more traffic quickly!

Boost the Exposure of Your Site with These Bookmarking Demon Strategies

Bookmarking Demon has been in existence for quite a while. This medium has been pushed to a new level by the growing number of people using the internet. Presently, all sorts of products or services can be marketed online with a good rate of response. You can reach lots of people in a short period of time because the Internet can be accessed from all over the world. Some online marketers have successfully marketed products online and they have made millions of dollars in only a few years. With sufficient devotion and enthusiasm, you too will be able to succeed just like them. You will have to start off with a marketing technique that you feel comfortable with and subsequently employ another. We will discuss Bookmarking Demon techniques in this article that will help you understand the basic concepts of marketing products online.

Content is king when you are marketing online. There are multiple ways you can meet the needs of your target audience, however, there is little that can offer them as much value as quality content. You need to focus on creating useful and unique content, irrespective of the type of content you are crafting, whether videos, articles you are posting on your site, or simply a newsletter. Good content provides more than just one benefit. Firstly, it will establish you as trustworthy in the eyes of your audience and help you build a strong brand. Your site will be respected more by search engines because you are giving your visitors compelling and relevant content. Lastly, the only way you will be able to set yourself apart from your competition is by offering content that is better than anything else that is available. This is a method that cannot fail you if you want to be successful with Bookmarking Demon.

Email marketing is another promotional technique you shouldn’t forget about. Every internet marketer resorts to email marketing to ensure their web business delivers consistent results. When selling products on the internet, email is the best way to communicate with your target audience. There are many ways you can leverage email marketing – you can either build your own email list or joint venture with someone who already has one. Having access to a database of prospective customers will make it easy for you to reach out to them with your offer. One thing you could also try is ezine advertising which is also considered a type of email marketing.

List building is another vital technique that should be part of your Bookmarking Demon strategy. You will find it difficult to generate consistent profits in the long term without a list of laser targeted prospects.

Your main goal with Bookmarking Demon is to acquire customers and then retain them for their lifetime value without being forced to find a new client every time. An excellent method to build your own list is by giving away a free ezine which you can send out to your audience and provide them with great value while starting to build a relationship. Once you establish trust with your audience, you will be able to use an email to drive repeat traffic to your offers.

All in all, Bookmarking Demon can be seen as a growing medium with more and more businesses realizing its potential. Businesses of all sizes are employing online promotion techniques from affiliate marketing to viral marketing. The Internet can reach to the farthest corners of the globe, making it the most effective forms of marketing tools. There are still quite a few people who don’t understand the power of Bookmarking Demon, but they will soon see for themselves how successful it truly is.

Find More Bookmarking Demon Articles

So, I guess you’re finally ready to give up free advertising and pay for highly targeted traffic. That’s okay, although I’m not sure you want to make that step quite yet. Please fist consider the following free ideas:

 

Have you tried writing in popular forums dealing with online business? These are a source of great tips and tricks, and you can promote your website with a default signature there.

 

Have you tried article marketing? Hundreds of article directories allow you to post articles to them for free. You can use these to create tons of back links.

 

Have you considered video marketing? High-quality videos get high traffic on Youtube.

 

Have you advertised your website on free-ad sites? Advertise wherever you can!

 

Have you bookmarked your website to popular spots such as Twitter, and Digg? It can’t hurt, and it is free!

 

Have you used all the methods listed at http://progressyourtraffic.com? Have you used any of the many free guides out there to make quality money and traffic?

 

If you answered yes to all these questions, and still feel that your website does not get great traffic and profit, then it is time to move on. Buying website traffic is a big step. It means you are willing to spend money with the risk of generating less money than spent.

 

When you buy traffic, you hope that you will make more money than you spend. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out that way. Make sure your website is ready to transfer traffic into profit before you buy traffic. You want to take full advantage of your traffic before paying a cent for it. That means you should:

 

Set-up advertisements using Google Adsense. This provides a great way for your customers to view and click ads which earns you profit.

 

Promote products by affiliating. Affiliating is when you tell someone to buy another persons product. If they buy it, the owner of the product will pay you. The easiest way to do this is to use Clickbank, an online program were merchants list their products and affiliates sell them.

 

Set-up an easy way for visitors to become members of your site. You can then have forums and blogs for them to participate in. Advertise on these with Google Adsense for thousands of impressions and clicks. Also, send members news letters and emails promoting products.

 

Get your website properly equipped to receive traffic. That means have a lot of bandwidth to avoid server crashes.

 

Are all of these steps done? Then you are finally ready to buy guaranteed traffic. There are several ways to do this. It all depends on how automatic you want it. Do you want control over where stuff goes? Or do you want traffic to just flood in without you doing a thing? Here are some ways to buy traffic:

 

Use Google Adwords. Google Adwords is probably the most automatic guaranteed system. Google Adwords allows you to post advertisements to your site in Google searches and other sites. It is guaranteed because you pay only when your ad is clicked on.

 

Use automatic article producers. If you like article marketing, but are no good at it, then you can use programs to write and submit articles for you. Its great! The article wizard (see resource box) will write any article for you on almost any topic, regardless of your previous knowledge on that topic. The article mass producer (see resource box) will make thousands of copies of one article, and submit them to several article directories. This is very useful because it not only produces a ton of traffic to your website, but it also gives you a ton of back links, which will increase your page rank. I prefer using these programs over Google Adwords, because these require only a one time payment, where as Adwords requires several payments for more traffic.

 

Use bookmarking robots. Bookmarking robots are extremely useful. They increase your targeted traffic, back links, and page rank. They categorize your bookmarks into different tags to increase targeted traffic. Bookmarking demon (see resource box) is my favorite of all these programs. Bookmarking demon is not a spam tool, is designed for multiple site categories, only requires a one-time payment, and avoids the duplicate content problem. Also, the bookmarking demon is almost completely automatic, you just set it up and watch it go. However, if you find a better one, for a cheaper price, feel free to use that instead.

 

Most other methods for traffic are not guaranteed, but these re definitely not the only traffic methods you can use. Thanks for reading.

by Mike Stopforth

How I Got 70,000 Useless Visitors to My Site in One Day! ( Analysis of Social Bookmark Traffic)

Copyright (c) 2007 Titus Hoskins

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? 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. Just use this simple bookmark to attract these sites.

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. 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 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.

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 must 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.