Two social bookmarking sites that may get your best articles more traffic
Using online bookmarks seems SO 2007, but they’re still some of the biggest traffic drivers for many large news organizations. For smaller publishers, they can drive a significant spike in traffic on any given day if a random reader decides to submit them to one of the popular online bookmarking sites.
If you want to stay ahead of this, and take control of your own articles on these sites, here are a couple of the sites that have notably given different articles and companies lots of fame lately.
Hacker News – This website is simply a feed of user-submitted articles. The difference between this feed and other feeds is that it’s very highly maintained by its users, so only the most interesting articles show up on the main page.
If you’re considering writing an article that you’ll submit to Hacker News, make sure it has a catchy headline.
Audience: Tech and business-saavy folks.
[text_ad]
StumbleUpon: This bookmarking site makes it easy for you to install a toolbar and “Stumble” a site that you’re looking at. StumbleUpon is pretty neat as a bookmarking tool because you can use the toolbar to just hop from page to page of bookmarks that people have “Stumbled” instead of looking at a list of articles to choose from.
Heavy StumbleUpon users have the toolbar installed, while casual visitors to the website may choose to randomly “Stumble” (aka land on) a webpage, or to use their list format to choose a page that has been given a “thumbs up” many times.
Audience: Anyone and everyone.
Here’s what the toolbar looks like:
And the homepage:
In any case, it’s never a best practice to submit every article that you create and put it into a social bookmark. By adding the best of your best, you’ll be more highly respected in the bookmarking communities, which will get you more “diggs”, “stumbles” and what-nots.
You’ll also make yourself look better by submitting articles that aren’t just your own, but that requires more work on your part—as social media usually does.
