When launching a new website or blog, you have a variety of outlets to market yourself. The possibilities are endless, but there are common strategies to successfully promote yourself online.  You can add yourself to directories, submit your URL to search engines, start a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign, engage in affiliate marketing, or hire an seo company; there are many online resources to help boost your web real estate.

If you are looking to get an immediate influx of visitors, rss subscriptions or feedback from people online, one of the most efficient methods is through social media networks.  In this post I will be comparing the two of the most popular Social Bookmarking Sites on the web to date: Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com, and analyze the quality of their visitors.  Both networks have become extremely popular in the last 3 years with an estimated 2.7 million registered users on Digg.com and 5 millon registered users on StumbleUpon.com.

Here at Best Rank we’ve released several stories that have become popular on Digg and StumbleUpon.  In this post I’ve included analytic statistics to show you the difference in user characteristics across both social networks.  The following traffic estimations vary for each popular story, and are dependent on the amount of diggs, time on Digg.com’s front page and quality of article.

Below is a screenshot of one our site’s analytics data, showing a traffic spike, from an article hitting the Digg front page.

Digg Positives

• Drive 1,000 – 50,000+ unique referrals within 1 week.
• 2.7 million registered users

Digg Negatives

• Average time on site was only 8 seconds per visit.
• Users only browsed 1.06 pages per visit.
• Bounce rate was very high at 96.76%.
• If you’re story doesn’t become popular relatively soon (around 24 hours) after submission, chances are that your story will never see large traffic volumes.

Below is a screenshot of an article that hit the Buzz.StumbleUpon.com section of StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon Positives:

• Drive 1,000 – 30,000+ unique referrals within 1 week.
• Inbound traffic was more spread out than Digg: not all in one day.
• Average time on site is higher at 1:36 seconds per visit.
• Users read 1.73 pages per visit.
• Bounce rate was lower than Digg’s at 39.41%.
• 5 millon registered users
• If your story never hits the “buzz” section, the article can still become popular and receive large amounts of traffic if users begin to “review” or “thumb up” your content.

StumbleUpon Negatives

• Traffic is fairly generic and not as themed or targeted as places like Digg who seem to revolve around tech and politics.

Conclusion

Digg has been known to send a substantially higher number of visitors in a shorter amount of time per popular story than StumbleUpon, while StumbleUpon’s traffic seems to have a longer attention span than Digg’s.  Recent studies have also shown that the traffic on Digg.com has been steadily decreasing per popular story.  As seen in the screenshot above, StumbleUpon has a higher average time on site, higher number of pages visited per user, and lower bounce rate: these factors point to the conclusion that the quality of traffic can be considered superior on StumbleUpon vs Digg, especially if you’re looking to help build your brand.  As a search marketing consultant I would recommend building your profile on StumbleUpon just as much, if not more so, than Digg because of the potential for higher quality traffic.

Within the last 3 years Social Networks have taken the internet by storm. Startups have created enormous communities bringing millions of people together through user-friendly interfaces and applications. User’s can create profiles and share pictures, music, friends, comments, personal information, favorite sites, and much more. Social Networks like Myspace.com, and Facebook.com have grown at exponential rates and continue to grow.

In the past 10 years traditional forms of advertising have become a little more obsolete, and social networks have become an alternative route for reaching the masses. Large advertising agencies have turned to social networks as new marketing outlets because they have the ability to reach a large user base.

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is a term used to describe a network which gives you the ability to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata. Users can bookmark their favorite articles, websites, online tools, software, and much more at the click of a button. Social bookmarking users can easily share their bookmarks with designated friends and groups, making these networks very powerful. User’s with large numbers of followers can refer hundreds, or even thousands of new visitors to a website.

Social bookmarking sites use ranking systems to sort these bookmarked websites by relevance, placing the most important bookmarks on the front page. If you get your article or bookmark on the front page of the top social bookmarking websites, you could receive significant traffic, anywhere from 100 to 35,000 unique visitors in one day. Get involved with these social bookmarking networks and utilize them as a way to market your business, blog, or website. Social Bookmarking can provide great exposure for your company accross the web, and help you grow to achieve your goals.

Below I have provided a list of the top 10 Social Bookmarking websites listed by relevance. This relevance is determined by the following factors: Alexa ranking, google page rank, number of inbound links, and estimated monthly visitors by Compete.com and Quantcast.com.

Definitions of Terms:

• Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is best known for operating a website that provides information on web traffic to other websites.
• Google PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.
• Inbound links are hyperlinks which transmit domains. Inbound links were originally important (prior to the emergence of search engines) as a primary means of web navigation; today their significance lies in search engine optimization (SEO).
• Monthly visitors refers to the amount of unique visitors a website receives on a global scale within one calender month. The details of your visitors can be tracked by using Google Analytics, which allows you to sort traffic by keywords, demographics, search engine, referring sites, and more. Please contact your webmaster for details on implimenting this system.

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Digg.com | Alexa Rank: 113 | PageRank: 8
11,600,000 - Inbound Links | 23,943,224 - Compete Monthly Visitors
25,833,069 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | Updated 05/09/2008

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Technorati.com | Alexa Rank: 468| PageRank: 8
19,800,000 - Inbound Links | 2,005,153 - Compete Monthly Visitors
3,400,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | Updated 05/09/2008

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Del.icio.us | Alexa Rank: 1141 | PageRank: 8
71,400 - Inbound Links | 1,224,479 - Compete Monthly Visitors
700,714 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | Updated 05/09/2008

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Propeller.com | Alexa Rank: 1095 | PageRank: 7
2,810,000 - Inbound Links | 1,415,960 - Compete Monthly Visitors
3,400,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | Updated 05/09/2008

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StumbleUpon.com | Alexa Rank: 355| PageRank: 8
46,200,000 - Inbound Links | 2,737,810 - Compete Monthly Visitors
3,400,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | Updated 05/09/2008

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Reddit.com | Alexa Rank: 3772 | PageRank: 8
948,000 - Inbound Links | 2,223,023 - Compete Monthly Visitors
997,375 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | Updated 05/09/2008

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Fark.com | Alexa Rank: 1953 | PageRank: 5
1,440,000 - Inbound Links | 293,920 - Compete Monthly Visitors
2,283,674 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | Updated 05/09/2008

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Newsvine.com | Alexa Rank: 8,896 | PageRank: 8
27,800,000 - Inbound Links | 430,234 - Compete Monthly Visitors
1,066,865 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | Updated 05/09/2008

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Slashdot.org | Alexa Rank: 4122 | PageRank: 9
552,000 - Inbound Links | 753,572 - Compete Monthly Visitors
843,653 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | Updated 05/09/2008

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Mybloglog.com | Alexa Rank: 2145 | PageRank: 8
1,850,000 - Inbound Links | 977,714 - Compete Monthly Visitors
123,205 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | Updated 05/09/2008

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I ran across a great little article (link to article below) today written by William Flaiz, the President of SEO over at Avenue A | Razorfish. William very succinctly, and intuitively, wrapped up the hottest trends for 2007 and explained their impact on search marketers. Social Media and Universal Search were huge in 2007 and will continue to grow in popularity, and use, through 2008.

William also touches on a point in his article that is one of my pet-peeves; the insistence by more and more companies to have a flash based website.  I understand that companies want the latest and greatest website and that they want their websites to stand-out from the competition.  But, if you don’t implement proper SEO planning into the DESIGN phase, then you will waste a lot of money on a site that cannot be indexed properly by the search engines.  It really could not be more simple…you have to plan properly, which means implementing an SEO expert early into the design phase to work along side the site designer.

Ok..enough of the rant.  Take a couple of minutes and check out William’s article titled: New Search Engine Trends, Old SEO Troubles in 2007.

Here’s to a great 2008!!!

Social media marketing has been talked about over the last couple of years as the hot new trend in search marketing. Many SEO people utilize social media web sites to push their client site’s content, sometimes called “link bait”, to many thousands of people on the web, which can

• Drive hundreds, if not thousands of people to your site
• Create many hundreds or thousands of back links
• Drive buzz about your topic
• Increase your Organic Search Rankings

We recently had a client article hit the front page of digg that brought in quite a bit of traffic. Before the event,  the site was averaging around 150-200 hits a day (paid and organic). Once the article received roughly 150 diggs, we had pulled in over 5,000 hits that day from digg alone! Below is an analytics photo of the traffic spike:

One important point to note here: traffic from stumble upon over the time period was still significant with around 800 visits, showed a longer time on the site and a lower bounce rate.