Digg and Stumbleupon are two social bookmarking sites that every blogger should care about. Both the sites allow a visitor to bookmark your site and share the link with other potential visitors. Both, follow a ranking system and getting a good rank on any of the two would ensure a huge surge in traffic. But, the question is how relevant is the traffic ?
I’ll admit that I’m not a social bookmarking fanatic. My favourite bookmarking site is del.icio.us, and I’ve only recently started using digg and stumbleupon. I use del.icio.us as an extension on the bookmarks in my browser. Infact, these days I use del.icio.us as a replacement for the local browser bookmarks and I love their tagging feature.
A lot of web publishers I know have been focusing all their energy on getting to the top page of digg. My opinion is that while digg will definitely get you a lot of visitors for a while, the digg effect doesn’t last long enough to make any significant contribution to your readerbase. Stumbleupon, on the other hand, in my opinion, has a much longer term effect. It is like advertising your property in a local daily vs. taking out an online advertisement on craigslist etc. Well, not really, but you get the drift.
The difference between digg and stumbleupon is that while most digg users rarely venture beyond the homepage, stumbleupon suggests users links based on their interest. Since, the links are based on the readers’ interest, there is a much greater chance of the visitor becoming a regular reader of your blog/website than a user who came via digg.
Of course, the content also is useful, but in my opinion, its much easier to fool *game* digg than stumbleupon.
In the end, if you’re a new web publisher, exploit digg, but also make your way through stumbleupon and continue serving both the communities for a while. The occassional digg traffic is good but the continuous and rewarding stumbleupon traffic is what you should really aim for.
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