When It Comes to Social Bookmarking Sites, Let Your Readers Do the Work For You





It can be very tempting to write an article and then submit it to every social bookmarking site out there. I should know, I used to do just that. Write an article and then submit to Digg, Del.icio.us, etc. I did this with very little reward for my efforts. I never had any of my articles get ranked on the first page of Digg, or get Stumbleupon'd, etc. I think this is because I was spending so much time adding sites to social networking sites that was content was suffering, as I was trying to cut corners. Because of this, my content wasn't valuable and useful to people. Why would people Digg an article that they didn't find useful?

A few months ago, I decided to track a new approach. I would strictly focus on creating the best possible content that I could. Content that would jump up and grab people (hopefully). Instead of writing 3-4 articles and then spending all day submitting them to social bookmarking sites, I aimed for one really good article per day. The results were quite staggering. I had two articles that were stumbleupon'd and received tens of thousands of unique visitors and as the result of my increased focus on the content, one of our sites was included into Google News without us asking (not to mention numerous multiple inclusions on various bookmarking sites.) These two events (the Stumbleupon's and the Google News inclusion) had a remarkable impact on the site, and resulted in literally thousands of sites linking to the site in question (not this site). I really believe that the focus on the content and the fact that I didn't submit the sites myself resulted in the positive turn of events. I know that if I see that someone is submitting all of their own content to Digg, I won't Digg an article just to make a point. They don't know what they are missing out on. In my opinion, Digg users are very savvy, and if they see that you wrote a really great article and didn't Digg it yourself, they will reward you for it.

Focus on your content and the readers will come in droves. Just ask Steve Pavlina about that. He has built his blog into a major business by writing a very well thought-out blog posting every 3-4 days or so. I would aim for one really strong posting every day if you don't have much time. You will soon see the results.



Filed under: Making Money Online

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