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• What to do with the traffic! 

The results of the social bookmarking experiment I have been carrying out are materialising. There have been some surprising results and some results that have restored my faith in the browsing public. I have been pondering whether or not to release the results as I do not want the spammers to tarnish something that is still relatively pure. But as you can see I finally decided to go ahead and publish.

I have mentioned before that I have been looking at social bookmarking as a way to drive traffic to websites. The idea behind social bookmarking is that you share your favourite bookmarks with others, the idea being that if you found these links useful then others might too. Some social bookmarking sites also allow visitors to rate the usefulness of your bookmarks, this allows the truly useful bookmarks to become the most popular. So in theory spam should be removed by natural selection. To carry out my experiment I created three articles. Two of these articles were good well researched pieces, whilst the third was self promotional spam, but not too obvious. I posted these articles to twelve social bookmarking sites and then waited for the results. The results were to be measurable traffic to one of my sites.

It was a week ago I started posting the articles so I am still measuring the results but I am able to give you the results as they all point to one conclusion. That conclusion is that social bookmarking to generate traffic does work as long as you are providing genuine, useful, good quality material. If you post self promotional spam no one will read it and it will disappear into the ether where all spam belongs.

Of the twelve sites I posted to the best performing in terms of traffic was Digg. Over a period of several days my site received hundreds of visitors from the good articles and less than a handful for the spam article I posted. Of the other social bookmarking sites the traffic was minimal, even the famous del.icio.us only managed to send a dozen visitors which I was quite surprised at.

The results seem to conclude that Digg is the out and out performer followed a long way behind by del.icio.us and squik. As yet I have had no traffic from the others, that’s not to say that they are not worthwhile as some of the sites were very new. I am going to continue to experiment and will bring you more results as they come in.

Finally I would like to say a big thank you to the guys at Digg for producing such a great site. Not only for the traffic that it produces but for also providing lots of really useful bookmarks. My only criticism is the lack of categories which means that some suggestions are not always well matched although there is a search facility.

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