Social Bookmarking - Is it Business Worthy?

Social bookmarking sites are sites in which you can apply for a free membership and share web pages, articles and posts with other members. When joining, you are usually allowed to create a profile for yourself in which you can include a bio and links to your own site(s). If you created content or read something that you feel others would benefit from, you mark the site through your social bookmarking site for others to read. You can also browse content saved by other members.

As a blog owner, I immediately joined the top social bookmarking sites. I not only marked my own posts and sites but also others I felt that are providing quality content. I would routinely browse through the latest marks by other members and see what type of content they are saving.

I immediately began to see huge spikes in the traffic to my blog(s). At times, I would often see my first visitor before I was able to switch back to the window I was viewing prior to bookmarking my post. I would check my analytics and see a huge rush of visitors. I was really excited. I began to play around with the titles of my posts in an effort to gain more visitors. I found that if I titled a post like a news story the traffic was very high. I continued to do this for weeks.

I thought that this was great until I dug deeper into my analytics. When I looked deeper, I found extremely high bounce rates. Bounce rates are the percentage of people who exit on the page they landed on (meaning they read what I bookmarked, if that, and did not browse the rest of the content on my blog). I started to look at the referrers and the bounce rates and I found that 85-90% of the visitors from these sites bounced immediately, not good for someone trying to build a blog readership. I began to ask around in forums and found that many agreed with my findings because they experienced it themselves.

This is not to say that social bookmarking does not have its advantages because it does. You can drive hundreds, if not thousands of visitors to your blog, article or site. Maybe you will get some returning visitors or even a subscriber or two. Over time this can add up for you. If you expecting a great amount of "quality" traffic social bookmarking isn't the answer. However I do not suggest ignoring these options for building some long-term subscribers or returning visitors.

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