If you are looking for new ways to drive traffic to your blog, it is well worth doing research on the best social bookmarking sites to put your content on.
Wikipedia defines social book marking as "a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online". If you are producing a lot of quality content, then it is relatively easy to drive decent amounts of traffic with social bookmarking.
The key is to be posting regular content that solves people's problems, and to also vote for and share other people's content as well. I have used this combination to build up my profile on websites such as BizSugar.com and StumbleUpon.com.
If you go out of your way to vote for and share other people's content, then you will find that some of these people reciprocate, and will vote for and share your content as well.
And you will also find that when people see that a blog post has become popular, they are immediately much more interested to take a look compared to a post that has no shares, votes or retweets. It is like a snowball effect.
Only six weeks after launching this blog, I managed to get one of my posts to the top of the front page of BizSugar and 30 people voted for me. This caused a massive spike in traffic, and proves that if you can make it to the front page of one of these popular social bookmarking sites you will get a lot of exposure.
And by using OnlyWire to automate the whole proces to send out to 48 of the best social bookmarking sites (at the time of writing this article), you can put this strategy into overdrive very easily. I highly recommend giving the free 30 day trial of OnlyWire a go (what is there to lose?)
I have included below the best social bookmarking sites to bring you traffic in my opinion.
1. StumbleUpon
I am still getting used to StumbleUpon, but in the short amount of time that I have been using it, I have been amazed at the amount of traffic that I am getting from it.
Within seconds of submitting content I see traffic heading to my site, and some of my articles have become very popular on this site.
The most appealing thing about StumbleUpon is that it is highly targeted traffic, because for each site that you stumble upon you are able to either give it the thumbs up or the thumbs down.
StumbeUpon uses this data to filter out the types of websites that you don't like, and in turn shows you types of websites that you have indicated that you do like.
The more sites that you vote positively or negatively about, the more accurate your experience on StumbleUpon becomes and this is how you can be confident that the traffic you get from them is targeted.
Simply brilliant.
2. BizSugar
BizSugar is not as well known as some of the other social bookmarking sites, but it is well worth using. As mentioned above I managed to get one of my blog posts to the number one position on the front page of the website.
The post became hot and went viral on many different social networks.
And even if you don't make it to the front page, all you need is a few votes to start attracting attention. On the sidebar of the homepage they have a section that shows todays most popular stories, and it is not too hard to get featured on there and attract more clicks.
If you have not signed up for BizSugar yet, then do so immediately.
3. Twitter
The main reason I have mentioned Twitter is because I have set up my blog to automatically retweet old posts randomly at a time period that I have specified. At the moment I have set it up to retweet old posts every 6 hours on a random basis – so 4 per day. The wordpress plugin I use for this is called Tweet Old Post.
This means that over time the posts attract a lot of traffic because they are retweeted so often. The key to this though is to make sure that you have plenty of posts to retweet, and also plenty of Twitter followers.
Otherwise it will have the reserve effect and turn people off. For example if you only had 50 followers and 5 blog posts, you would be retweeting the same old posts out all the time to a small number of people.
Also, your blog post need to have useful content that people want to read. If you are continually retweeting spam or pitching products to people, you will find a lot of people will unfollow you.
It is best to sign up with most of the social bookmarking sites that are available to experiment to see which ones work best for you. But if you are serious you will submit to all them and use automated software (such as OnlyWire) to get maximum results and leverage.
There are many to choose from, but in my opinion the three above are the best social bookmarking sites to drive traffic.
