DailySkew

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When I first began my journey as a webmaster in 2001 I was very disappointed that the original DailySkew site only got 0-2 hits at first before becoming a cyberspace superpower. It's a shame, really, because back then search engines were ripe to ravage like a freshly showered virgin.

Web 2.0 is all about socializing online and, in effect people volunteer via pack mentality-like crowdsourcing to share cool articles, videos, music via links and word of mouth. Everybody does free promotion in one way or the other without even realizing it.

Social bookmarking sites are extremely popular, with millions of daily visitors. These sites are great ways to capitalize on this word of mouth by submitting links to them AND enabling your readers to easily submit to them. It's one of the reasons I made the WordPress jump on my other blogs- you can easily install social bookmarking buttons in every one of your posts. Blogger.com software? Groan.

Anyway, I spent all day submitting articles from various sources into popular social bookmarking sites.

Delicious: Delicious was time-consuming to enter in around 100 articles because I had to manually enter keyword tags, title, and notes. However it was worth it- I got on Delicious' front page and am still getting tons of hits on a NEW blog that hasn't even been fully crawled yet. Also, Delicious does not discriminate- they take any link you submit. Delicious was easy to sign up, and if you use Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer, you can add articles via a Delicious toolbar add-on. Google Chrome users (like myself) are out of luck when it comes to toolbars. Delicious is linked to Twitter so you can tweet when you submit.

Click here to sign up and bookmark this on Delicious

Digg- I dig Digg. It's connected to Facebook so you can 1) Use your FB login instead of signing up from scratch and 2) Keep your FB friends informed about whatever you submitted. In effect your article will get visibility on both sites, especially if you can have open profile on Facebook. When you consider Facebook has a search engine that competes with Google, this gives you the best of both worlds. Digg will auto generate the article title and description if the article had metatags written well, which saves a lot of time. It's also linked to Twitter, so if you have a lot of followers you can capitalize on this.

Digg has toolbars that you can install to IE and Firefox, although I didn't test that. Digg is unique in that it has a voting system, so if different people submit the same article it gets votes and pushed to the first page. Obviously this takes a LOT of time although I somehow got Digg hits today.

StumbleUpon: In truth social bookmarking is a roll of the dice- you can submit thousands of articles and only see a moderate increase in traffic. Conversely, you can submit one article and get 15,000 hits in one day. There is no better example than StumbleUpon. It seems totally random- and it is. You submit a webpage, choose a category, and it automatically becomes available for StumbleUpon users to...stumble upon it when they click "Stumble" in their Firefox or IE toolbar.

I actually have been using this tool for a couple of years. Some articles get "hot" and a bunch of traffic, and others never get seen. In terms of downloading and installing the toolbar, it is not intuitive on their site- I always wind up just typing "install stumbleupon toolbar" in Google and get the Firefox Add-on. There were glitches all day when I was submitting sites- I got the white screen of death in Firefox and I was never able to bookmark all of my 100 articles. A final word: there is no filtering- you can submit any webpage. Stumble this blog.

Mixx: Like Digg, Mixx is linked to Facebook and Twitter, but you can also log in with any Open ID like Yahoo. Mixx has a recommend ranking. There is a toolbar, but it looked spammy since it has a partnership with MashLogic. I have some issues with Mixx- they reject certain URLs for no reason, such as Blogspot. They also block EZineArticles and GoArticles, two major magazine article sites, which is a major bummer to bum marketing. Additionally, Mixx rejects URLs with certain keywords in the URL, even if it's on Squidoo. Lame. On the plus side, Mixx is very popular. So far results have been nonexistent for the first day, although I know that these things usually take 5-10 days to show light activity especially if you use a free ping service like I do.

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IN CONCLUSION: These social bookmarking sites DON'T HURT you. The key is to submit RELEVANT content that people will read and rate. If you are selling Viagra from Russia, you just don't understand what real internet marketing is about. If you haven't submitted your blog posts or webpages into these sites, it will take you a few days or a week to backtrack depending on how many posts you have. Your best bet is to submit any new post you write on the Net to these 5 social bookmarking websites.

You will be investing time with no guarantee of real reward, but you are certain to generate some influx of new traffic over time. It's a way to reach out to new readers with no money down, so if you have time to spare, do it. Just don't expect 10,000 hits right after you do it. You think I'm joking but I know a lot of people in real life who expect instant results. My rule of thumb is that anything you do consistently do to generate traffic takes 1-3 months.

If you don't want to spend the time to submit your articles, yet still want to complain about not getting hits, go ahead and spend $200 a month on Google AdWords and let me know how that goes.

And a final note- I haven't discussed other ways to get articles and sites crawled or how to ping. So it is likely even if you submit you will not get the traffic that will satisfy you. Nor have I discussed the proper way to write an article so it becomes search engine optimized. You can join me at Wealthy Affiliate to learn all about free article marketing, email marketing, pay per click (PPC) with good Google AdWords, full SEO courses, webhosting, and web development with no HTML skills needed for more info. See you there- my user name is HospitalD.