When I first found a social bookmarking site I was very skeptical about this idea. Why should I use such a service?
- OK, I can save my favourite links. But I can do this using “Add to favourites” option of my browser.
- OK, I can access them wherever I am – this seems a step ahead, since it happened to me many times, during my travels, to try hard to remember a favourite link I wanted to access, with no success, wasting then time to perform a search and finally get to the desired place.
- OK, I can share my links with friends and with other people out there, which makes communication easier.
So far, so good, but yesterday I discovered another edge of social bookmarking, speaking from the webmaster’s perspective. No further than March this year, I launched a website of a Romanian scientific journal, written in Romanian language only, therefore with limited traffic potential. Over the past 4 months, working on this project about one hour per day, I managed to direct a certain amount of traffic to this site.
Yesterday I submitted some of the posts in this blog to Digg, Reddit and Netscape, and I was amazed: I got in four hours more traffic than I got for the other site in four months. Even if my posts did not become Digg popular stories, I still enjoyed a nice traffic boost, followed by a level of regular traffic higher than I got before submitting to social bookmarking sites.
I imagine what amount of traffic you can drive to your site when submitting a really interesting story, which gets a lot of diggs and goes on the front page. I’ll write about this when it happens!
