Below I’ll be placing these social networks in the order of traffic I received from them after a period of about 2 weeks. I figure two weeks should be enough time for the news to get voted on and looked at. Obviously, if some of these give more of a long-term benefit then it’s harder to judge.

What long-term benefit could these social bookmarking sites bring?

It’s possible that some of these social bookmarking service sites have nofollow and some have dofollow. This is HUGE when it comes to the assistance these sites may give you when it comes to Google ranking. Perhaps a site doesn’t bring much traffic but due to a high pagerank boosts your popularity in google. I’ll call this “indirect traffic”. “Direct traffic” is when the social bookmarking/tagging site directly brings you traffic due to the links on the page. Of course, if the site does both well, well then that’s a winner!

Grand total of traffic from each site

stumbleupon – 67
digg – 24
delicious – 18
reddit – 16
webride – 5*
slashdot – 2
netscape – 2
blogmemes – 1
bluedot – 1
furl – 1
newsvine – 1
indianpad – 1

Analysis of social bookmarking traffic data

There’s a reason why I placed an asterisk (*) next to the webride total. I never submitted my sites to them. Say what?

I registered but I never activated my account. I finally activated (I thought the site was just busted – I didn’t realize I needed to activate) and I submitted both sites today. Let’s see if that brings us some success!

What does this mean?

Obviously Stumbleupon is a huge winner here.. look at the traffic it’s brought compared to the other sites! Although digg brought slightly more traffic than delicious, I prefer delicious traffic to digg traffic. Here’s a great explanation by Brian Clark:

1. Bookmarks are Enduring. While it’s true that sometimes someone will bookmark a page simply to come back when they have more time, more often than not the Delicious user views your page as a resource that they might return to again and again. A Digg is simply a one-time vote that may or may not result in big one-time traffic. A Digg is short-term event, while a bookmark endures.

2. Bookmarks Show Commitment. Related to the idea above, a Delicious user has made a commitment to your resource by adding it to their collection of links, most likely because it provides a benefit to them. Other Delicious users notice that commitment, and therefore your resource gains in credibility thanks to that bit of social proof, which often leads to more bookmarks. I believe this is one of the key reasons why a big day on Delicious translates into subscribers and return readers, while the same exposure on Digg often doesn’t.

3. Each Bookmark is a Targeted Link. Here’s the real power of social bookmarks. Each bookmark you receive is a separate link on a separate web page. Moreover, those links are classified by tags which define their overall relevance, much like normal link anchor text does. Not only does this help you in the search engines, it makes Delicious itself a search engine. Tagging will no doubt play a big role in the evolution of web search, and Digg’s model misses the boat here.

I’ve constantly heard stories of how digg traffic brought minimal income via ad clicks but completely dropped their servers to the ground due to the intense traffic of a front-page digg story. Truth: Digg users don’t click ads:

The link aggregation sites have, arguably, the most tech-savvy demographics on the web. These users DO NOT click ads. Less than 10% (from our metrics) stay on the site longer than 90 seconds (even if the article would take a normal person 3 minutes to read). Digg, in particular, has brought the lowest rate of RSS subscriptions per visitor group of any link we’ve ever had – under 1/10th of 1 percent. These statistics hold true for every site owner I’ve ever spoken to that has made it to the top of Digg or the other services. These users simply don’t participate/contribute/stick around/click.

Now apply those statistics to advertising – the results are dismal. The page views are extremely low, meaning those banner ads you serve on an impression basis are barely pulling their weight. Factor in the high number of Diggers who use ad blockers in their browsers and you’re barely covering bandwidth costs. Clickthroughs on AdSense or other contextual programs are equally miserable – I’ve heard others indicate that a day atop Digg brought fewer ad clicks than 100 visitors from Google – no surprise there. If earning revenue is your goal, you need to create fantastic content that gets legitimately featured – the real earnings come when you get traffic via the engines and the other sites that link to you, not from the initial surge of uniques.

How to get the maximum traffic possible from del.icio.us

We’ll go over this in detail in other blog posts but there’s some important points to be said about delicious.

1.Tag well. Make sure to use basic tags that others may use to find your social bookmark. For a food site, use tags such as food, cooking, culinary. Don’t use obscure social bookmarking tags like chinese-waffling-chefs.

2.Bookmark and tag all of your top posts. Do you have those great posts on your blog that you really feel would help or entertain others? Don’t be shy about bookmarking and tagging them! Remember, you’re doing others a disservice by not letting them know about your great writing!

Conclusion

So we’ll go back to this in some time and see how these sites are doing in my social bookmarking campaign. I’ll also be submitting them to socializer sites and see how those do too!