Yesterday I mentioned a post at Thirty Stories Up by the name of 7 Mistakes for your First Week of Blogging as part of the 31 Days project – it’s a worthwhile article to read but I want to mention it again not because of what it says but because of the response that it had.
There are over 40 comments on the past now which is pretty cool – Kurt the author of the blog writes in comments that the reason for the response is that the post got picked up and ranked highly by Digg which led to 8000 or so page views in just a 24 hour period – not bad for a blog that has been going for just 20 days! At the time of writing this the post in question is ranked the 11th most ‘dugg’ post for the week so far.
It just goes to show the power of social bookmarking sites like Digg which have the ability to push vast quantities of visitors around the web at the drop of a hat. Having been ‘dugg’ numerous times myself it’s quite an amazing experience. Similarly del.icio.us is another example of a site that has been known to lift the profile of my posts (in fact at present my 31 Days project HQ is ranking well on their popular links page). Furl is yet another example (although from what I can tell it’s less popular than it once was) as is Linkfilter, another smaller social bookmarking sit. The great thing for bloggers is that each of these services allows you to submit/suggest posts to them and all of them accept every submission (unless you spam them) – unlike other sites like Slashdot who strongly moderate submissions.
The site’s I’ve mentioned above as examples of social bookmarking sites are just a small number of the many sites out there that you can explore that are doing similar things. For a more comprehensive list you might like to take a look at those listed at Wikipedia’s Social bookmarking page.
While I don’t recommend spamming social bookmarking sites I would recommend being aware of them and submitting your best posts from time to time. In this way you put your posts out there for others to find. They may or may not take off so don’t think it’s a guarantee that you’ll get visitors – but you’re at least giving them a chance. If they do get popular the traffic doesn’t last long – but in the process you just might retain some extra new readers and perhaps just as importantly often after being ‘dugg’ you find that other bloggers link to you – giving you all important incoming links to your post which will help with Search Engine Optimization.
Let me reinforce that you don’t spam social bookmarking sites – you’ll just end up making people angry and decrease the effectiveness of your submissions (remember ‘the boy who cried wolf’) but used at the right time and with a bit of luck (it’s amazing how some posts do well and others don’t) these sorts of tools can really effectively lift the profile of your best work.
Tell us about a time that you got a deluge of visitors – what other sites do you use in this way? What tips do you have to share on getting visitors to your blog?
Further reading on Social Bookmarking:
• Social bookmarking Tools – A General Review
• Social bookmarking – Wikipedia
• Social Bookmarking Tool Comparison
