Blogging Tips

Sure, it’s great to get a bunch of hits from Digg or StumbleUpon. There are a couple of catches, however. For one thing, those hits could be a temporary bump that goes away once you disappear from the front page or stop getting stumbled. Also, many theorize visitors from wildly popular social bookmarking sites just bounce right in and out of your site. That’s why it’s a good idea to target niche social bookmarking sites.

There are a few reasons to seek out a niche social bookmarking site, such as:

• You are a bigger fish in a smaller pond. It’s much easier to rise to the top in votes on a site with a few submissions daily than a site with a few hundred.
• You may not get the quantity of traffic, but you do get the quality. If you find niche bookmarking sites that are closely tied to your blog’s topic, the people visiting them are highly interested in the issues you cover.
• You can find a niche social bookmarking site for a wide variety of topics, and they get more niche than you might imagine. There are bookmarking sites for paramedics, parents of babies and those interested in sustainable development. There’s even a bookmarking site just for bloggers to show off their latest posts, Blogging Zoom.com. A good spot to find niche bookmarking sites is at Pligg Sites.com, which is a directory of sites using the open source social bookmarking content management system.

Andy Hagans of the Tropical SEO blog writes in his post, Top 38 Niche Social Media Sites that Actually Send Traffic:

They won’t send you 5,000 uniques in an hour, but the traffic they do send is more likely to subscribe to your RSS feed, because their members have already identified themselves as part of your niche’s tribe.

Aaron Stannard of the Marketing Ninja blog writes in 7 Reasons Why Niche Social Media Outlets are Better Than Digg:

Digg has an immense amount of traffic and getting landed on the front page will send a tsunami of new readers to your blog or website, but getting onto the front page is incredibly difficult. Getting onto the front page of a smaller, more appropriate niche portal, by contrast, is much easier, quicker, and ultimately you get a better return on your time/traffic ratio in the short run.

So you won’t get an onslaught of visitors this way, but you can get a steady light stream of visitors who might actually visit your site a second time.