Social bookmarking websites like digg, stumbleupon, del.icio.us, propeller and reddit (main ones) can bring killer traffic to your websites instantly when used properly. A site on digg front page for 20 mins results is around 20 - 30K unique hits. But the thing is, its not that easy. Many people are unsuccessful in using social networks to get good traffic, the reason for it is that they forget the basic principles on which social networks work. Here I have compiled a list of some useful points which can help you a lot to get good traffic from social networks -
1. Headlines - People may look at your article and ignore it, if your title is not catchy enough. Just have a look at articles which made to digg homepage and notice their titles. They are such topics which provokes the interest in viewer and compel them to click on it. The title is the offcourse the most important thing when it comes to social bookmarking websites. Here is a excellent article which should help you to frame better titles.
2. The Description - The description which you write must be a short one and should briefly describe the article maximum in a sentence or two. The description is something which also helps to provoke interest in the reader, but the important thing is that never use false facts to provoke interest. Moreover your description must be maximum 50 - 100 words and not more than that. Most people don’t afford to read more than that.
3. Content Is king ! - The first few sentences of the story or say the first paragraph descide whether the user is going to digg or stumble to story and read ahead or close the window. If you have successfully made good headlines and descriptions and make a bad writeup in the first paragraph, your efforts will go useless most of the time. The next thing is your rest of the article.
4. Use bookmarking buttons (must use) - Say a person clicks your link on digg and comes to your website. If he finds your story interesting and wants to digg it, he would less probably go back to digg just to digg it (Though some of them will do it). But to get maximum amount of diggs or stumbles, make sure you have added social bookmarking buttons in your article body. You can see this on my blog as well, I use diggIT plugin to add digg buttons near the first paragraph of my posts.
5. Strength of your profile - Most social bookmarking websites add more values to people who have strong profile. Their submissions and bookmarks are looked up more valuably. For example, if Kevin Rose or Muhammad Saleem diggs your story on digg.com, you will most probably get over many hundred diggs in the next few minutes. Same goes with stumbleupon, if a Powerful stumbleUpon user stumbled your webpage, you are going to get many hits instantly. The first reason for this is that stumbleupon gives more importance to stumbles made by people with strong profiles and the second thing is that, powerful profile pages get heavy traffic too, so a part of that traffic will get diverted to your website.
6. Time of submission - Its useless to submit a story when most of your friends and supporters are sleeping. By the time they wake up, your story would have been buried. It is usually good to submit a story when it is evening in the US, around 3 - 6 P.M. since most people are busy in office in day time and the rest are hooked to television for late night. Evening is seen to be the surfing time of majority of US population.
7. Don’t forget the word “Social” - Build a big network of fellow social bookmarkers. If you manage to get about to 20 - 30 diggs in the first 10 mins of your submissions, it is likely that your story will be noticed by a majority of people and they will also digg it and it will get the ball rolling to the front page. This applies only when your story is really worth front page. It doesn’t mean that you submit some spam and ask your friends to digg it. It will usually hurt your whole network’s reputation and most of the time, other fellow social bookmarkers will notice your gang and bury it. So its useless to submit spam to social bookmarking websites.
8. Check your story body, titles and descriptions for typos and grammatical mistakes.
9. Don’t submit too old news
10. Submit to the most relevant category.
Last but not the least, get a good hosting so that when digg sends killer traffic, your server is well able to cope up with it Nothing is worse that the situation when your story made to digg homepage and your bandwidth exceeded right at the moment (Believe me, it has happened many times in past).
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