Digg
Digg isn't your typical bookmarking site, although it is user-fuelled. On the homepage you'll see a bunch of recent stories that have been submitted by a member, and then 'dug' by other members.It's a simple concept: people 'digg' stories and articles that they like and 'bury' those that they don't. This means that anyone who wants to find the latest and most interesting publications just has to look at the articles with a high number of diggs and they can be pretty sure that they'll click through to something intriguing and up-to-the-minute.
You'll find Digg buttons on Squidoo lenses and blogs all over the web and now you know why — this is a heavily trafficked site and having your article dug by users is a great way to brand yourself and drive traffic to your site.
If we take a look at an article from the front page of Digg, we'll find that there are links at the bottom to social networking sites, making it easy for people to add it to their site of choice.
You can find instructions for adding the Digg button to your own website here:http://about.digg.com/downloads/button/smart.
But a word of warning: don't dig junk advertising or you will be marked as a spammer. Digg users can be particularly venomous when they smell someone doing anything commercial. One poor guy had Diggers unearthing his phone number and prank-calling his house after he placed a comment with his business URL in the footer. So please: only use social bookmarking sites to bookmark quality articles from your site and other webpages.
What about SEO?
Unfortunately Digg places a no-follow tag on all outbound links, so it is worthless as an SEO tool — at least for top search engines like Google.However, that aside, it is still very, very useful in terms of driving traffic to your site. In fact, so many web servers have been brought to their knees by the onslaught of Digg-referred traffic, that it's been dubbed the 'Digg Effect'!
Del.icio.us
Del.icio.us is one of the more well-known social bookmarking sites and shot to stardom in December 2005 when it was acquired by Yahoo. The acquisition is a pretty big hint that search engines place at least some importance on the results of this site.Del.icio.us allows you to search and subscribe to other people's bookmarks, either individually or as a group.
For bloggers and website owners, Del.icio.us is useful primarily because bookmarks are taggable. So rather than storing a link about increasing interest rates in a single folder, you can tag it with a number of different descriptive words like: 'mortgage', 'finance', 'news', and 'economy'. The advantage of tagging is that it makes it very easy for other people who are also interested in those topics to locate your blog posts and your other tagged information and immediately see why it is relevant to them.
Additionally, Del.icio.us bookmarks are searchable. For instance, a search for 'chocolate' will turn up results based on keywords in tags, descriptions and titles.
Two other features worth a mention for the value they add to blogs are linkrolls and tag clouds. Linkrolls allow you to display your bookmarks on the sidebar of your blog, which means it's easy to draw attention to the sites you wish to promote, or that readers might find useful. Del.icio.us tag clouds display your popular tags to other people and they also look fantastic on blogs.
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon helps you discover new sites based on your predefined interests. When you click the Stumble button, the site retrieves a page that matches your preferences.You can then use the 'thumbs up', 'thumbs down' voting system to add the sites you like to your bookmarks and help StumbleUpon continually improve the sites they match you with. If you stumble enough good and interesting stuff, then other people will check out your profile and become 'fans'.
At the most basic level, you can 'discover' your own websites and add them to StumbleUpon to start getting some traffic. However, StumbleUpon blocks URLs that are submitted from the same domain name 15 times or more, so it's best to only Stumble your finest content, and if possible, what's even better is to Stumble content articles from other sites that mention you.
For StumbleUpon to work well, you need to use it regularly and Stumble a lot of good sites apart from your own. One vote doesn't carry that much weight, so it's important you get a good group of fans who also find your bookmarks, like them, and give them the 'Thumbs up' too!
In a nutshell then: the more sites you stumble, and the more you participate, the more traffic you get.
OnlyWire
Only Wire is rather special because it allows you to bookmark your page on a number of different bookmarking sites (19 to be exact) using the one, single interface. Quite a few of the 19 sites are very well-known portals and for that reason we recommend joining up with Only Wire.One thing to note: Don't be surprised if some of the sites you try to join through Only Wire are down — just skip them and move onto the next one. The odd site on the list seems to go down on occasion — possibly because they are growing so rapidly. You will still have to enter a username in the field for each site (down or not), so if you find one that is offline, just enter a generic username and keep going.
Technorati
If you only manage to do one thing, start your own Wordpress blog on your own domain name and then use Technorati.At a very basic level, Technorati is an RSS directory, but it is also one of the most powerful sites on the web for driving targeted traffic back to your blog. Many Internet users search Technorati for blogs on particular topics they are interested in. A lot of people who use Technorati are bloggers themselves.
When another user comes across your blog, they can link to it, subscribe to your RSS feed or add it to their favorites. These three things alone will generate a substantial amount of free, highly targeted traffic to your blog.
Once you register with Technorati (it's free by the way), you should immediately 'claim your blogs'. This is Technorati-speak for adding your blogs to Technorati's search and RSS directory.
You'll be able to give each blog a title and enter tags and categories. Each time you make a post on your blog from this point on, a keyword optimized link to your post will appear on the Technorati site.
It's not a mystery why we love this site.
To be blunt: if you own a blog and don't use Technorati, you're missing out big time. And if you don't own a blog then what have you been doing with yourself all this time? If this is the case, you need to correct it immediately!
