Day 17: Social Bookmarking

Welcome to Day 17 of 30 Days to More Traffic!

Your wish is to get hundreds of visitors to your website today. No, thousands. Social bookmarking sites can bring you waves of mind-blowing traffic.

Tech-savvy internet users are actively involved in social bookmarking. That is, they use a social bookmarking site to bookmark and share pages on the net with others. If your page gets submitted and it’s liked (and voted for) by many, that alone can easily bring you thousands of visitors per day.

Although you won’t see the highest quality traffic, if you harness the power of social bookmarking, I guarantee you can get opt-ins to your list, gain incoming links from SU (StumbleUpon) users who choose to link to your post on their own sites, and some pay-per-click bucks. So how do we create content pages we can almost guarantee will be popular?

The social bookmarking world isn’t a lazy man’s (or woman’s) game even though all you need to do for your page to get listed is submit it at the click of a button. Pages that you and others submit to these sites have to be 1) of immense value, or 2) of rare information. Take a look through pages linked at a major social site and you’ll see they are often lengthy and contain info you don’t see everywhere else on the net for free.

What does this say about creating a content page solely for social bookmarking sites? Well, a good rule of thumb is to shoot for publishing pages that are at least 3 times more valuable than the pages already bookmarked at social sites. Put so much value into your page that it would have an actual cash value, being worth as much as a report or e-book. Information should be dense, rare, and interesting. In some cases you can get away with a short, interesting post, but I guarantee it won’t stay popular for long. It will be buried.

What are some good Social Bookmarking Sites?

The two best social bookmarking sites for traffic are generally Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com.

There are numerous other social bookmarking sites and you could spend all day submitting you pages to all of them.

The tool OnlyWire.com allows you to automatically submit to many social bookmarking sites at once.

Milking StumbleUpon

After you register with SU and download the toolbar, you can begin giving the thumbs up for whatever pages you like on the net. These pages will be shared throughout the social bookmarking community. Once you stumble your own page (giving it the thumbs up), you’ll notice a surge of traffic to your site instantly.

That said, it’s against the StumbleUpon Terms of Service to submit your own pages. If you choose to submit your own, do it at your own risk of getting kicked off the social site. If you’ve already stumbled your page, you’re growing an addiction for viral traffic. I know.

Only submit your own valuable content pages to StumbleUpon after 48-hour periods. Otherwise, your site will be banned from SU. So stumble your own content pages and other pages you like on the net every other day around the same time. You’ll want to stumble others’ pages as well and if you wish, take part in stumbling through pages. You might be blow away at what connections you can make with others in your niche just by finding them via StumbleUpon.

It’s a good idea to stumble pages that link to your own.

The Quest for the Front Page of Digg

Getting on the front page of Digg can potentially send tens of thousands of visitors to your content page. The same methods for getting a page stumbled over and over on StumbleUpon apply for Digg. Your page needs to be of supreme value.

What’s nice about getting on the front page of Digg is that Digg users are often also users of other social bookmarking networks like Del.icio.us. What happens is a Digg user likes your page, so he submits it to other social sites. This can send substantial amounts of traffic to your site for weeks.

Case Study:

Jason Parker of atomicguitarist.com has reported generating 10,000+ hits to a guitar lesson page in three days from a combination of StumbleUpon, Digg, and other social bookmarking sites. And for over the course of a week after, he generated no less than 2,000 visitors to his page per day for two weeks after. Last heard, he’s still getting 100s of hits to that page daily.

Parker reported that he purposely created the page for social traffic. The page contained immense value. For one, the lesson was created after researching the needs of guitarists, providing a solution to a problem. Two, the information was dense.

Host an Inner Circle Project for Social Bookmarking

Who’s going to submit your URLs to these sites or “give them their digital blessing?” Possibly no one, especially if your niche is irrelevant to internet-savvy consumers & readers.

With no big name, how are you going to harvest a bounty of traffic from the online social sea?

Note: The following tactic I’m about to teach you can potentially send 1,000 or more visitors to your website pages via viral traffic alone. As you might be thinking, yes, the method is against all of the sites’ TOS. Do it at your own risk. You can get booted off social websites if discovered. Some would call this blackhat.

Gather an inner circle of no more than, say, 5 to 20 internet marketers to begin with (25 to 100 people if you are really serious) and website owners whom you trust. You’re going to submit each other’s pages to social sites for massive waves of viral traffic. You’re also going to give each other the thumbs up on StumbleUpon and a Digg at Digg. As far as I’m concerned, an operation of this scale is no big deal.

There are a few ways to have an inner circle project:

You can make a list of e-mail contacts and send out viral traffic requests.
You can create a forum on a sub-domain at your website and configure it so only users can view requests.
You can install a content management system like Drupal in a sub-domain and also set it to private (so only logged-on members can view information).

The most efficient way to carry-out an inner circle project is to have only one thread or blog post for each day.

That way all submission requests can be found on the same page.

Who wants to dig through 100 different posts each day?

Consider using your inner circle for all content you produce (that links to your website).

For instance, make requests for your ezine articles. Not only will you be amazed at how much traffic your friends send you, but how many other social site users give your articles a big thumbs up.It’s important also that everyone in your inner circle also uses StumbleUpon and Digg for submitting other random pages online.

It’s best if the people are in different places; the last thing you want is all the people to be from the same IP address, state, or even country. Otherwise, it will be easy to detect that your group is only submitting each other’s pages.

Just remember the golden rule: keep your inner circle private, keep it hush hush.

Top 100 Social Media Sites by techgal

I’m sure you all have noticed sites like Blogspot.com, hubpages.com, and Squidoo dominating the front page of Google. “Web 2.0″ properties have enabled this kind of Google domination.

To help everyone start benefiting from these sites, I have compiled a list of the top 100 social media sites that pass page rank.

http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/
http://360.yahoo.com
http://pages.google.com
http://www.wetpaint.com
http://www.blogspot.com
http://www.flickr.com
http://www.livejournal.com
http://www.wordpress.com
http://www.xanga.com
http://www.digg.com
http://www.technorati.com
http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.squidoo.com
http://www.slashdot.org
http://www.reddit.com
http://www.blogsome.com
http://www.propeller.com
http://www.tumblr.com
http://www.sphinn.com
http://www.hubpages.com
http://www.indianpad.com
http://www.furl.net
http://www.killerstartups.com
http://www.dzone.com
http://www.care2.com/news/
http://www.zimbio.com
http://www.clipmarks.com
http://www.activerain.com
http://www.leenks.com
http://www.bumpzee.com
http://www.faves.com
http://www.swik.net
http://ma.gnolia.com
http://www.shoutwire.com
http://www.humsurfer.com
http://www.mister-wong.com
http://www.imnewswatch.com
http://www.thoof.com
http://www.listverse.com
http://www.spicypage.com
http://www.aboutus.org
http://www.plugim.com
http://www.blogmarks.net
http://www.autospies.com
http://www.sk-rt.com
http://www.ballhype.com
http://www.bibsonomy.org
http://www.rateitall.com
http://www.lipstick.com
http://www.yedda.com
http://www.blog.co.uk
http://jackhumphrey.com/imnews/
http://www.listible.com/
http://www.linkedwords.com
http://www.smallbusinessbrief.com/
http://links.hubspot.com/
http://www.searchles.com
http://www.connotea.org
http://www.rawsugar.com
http://www.blogmemes.net
http://www.folkd.com
http://www.plime.com
http://www.clipclip.org
http://www.mixx.com
http://www.work.com
http://www.spotback.com
http://www.trailfire.com
http://www.bloghop.com
http://www.socialogs.com
http://www.kinja.com
http://www.dotnetkicks.com
http://www.blogster.com
http://www.blogowogo.com
http://www.wirefan.com
http://www.hugg.com
http://www.buzzflash.net
http://www.clearblogs.com
http://www.connectedy.com
http://www.bmaccess.net
http://www.onmylist.com/
http://www.tribalwar.com
http://www.aeonity.com
http://www.thoughts.com
http://www.easyjournal.com
http://www.marktd.com
http://www.blogetery.com
http://www.linkatopia.com
http://www.complore.com
http://www.mylinkvault.com
http://www.listafterlist.com
http://www.millionsofgames.com
http://www.fluther.com
http://www.tweako.com
http://www.unalog.com
http://www.protolize.org
http://www.creamaid.com
http://www.realestatevoices.com
http://www.hypediss.com
http://www.pixelgroovy.com
http://www.betamarker.com/