Anyone know much about this. I think it is worthy of some discussion, looks like their might be some merit in the idea. Yahoo launched My Web 2.0, a public bookmarking service, along with acquiring Del.icio.us, a well-established public bookmarking service. Here is part of an article I read on the subject. Del.icio.us works well because it relies on thousands of people deciding which websites are important rather than relying on one person's (or one algorithm's) opinion. When enough votes are tallied, the general public will decide which websites are important to specific topics, and which websites are not worth taking the time to bookmark. Search engines provide a very simple service: they unite web users with a website that matches their current interest. It just so happens, however, that services like My Web 2.0 and Del.icio.us (public bookmarking services) have the ability to do the exact same thing - and possibly in a more effective and timely manner. The information at a public bookmarking service is not necessarily always going to be the most complete, but it is the information that web users, as a collective unit, have determined to be worth visiting. In this way, public bookmarking services are more effective than search engines in filtering out which content is important, and which content is not worth reading (or even outright spam). Everyone knows that you should optimize your website for the search engines, but how many people take the time to optimize their websites for bookmarking services? Not very many people consider trying to work their way up to the top of these websites, but they are actually missing out on a significant source of traffïc. One person said he saw 8,000 visitors in one day from front page exposure and garnered a number of external links from it as well. Imagine just how much traffïc a website could receive by constantly being near the top on a website like Del.ico.us. Unlike SEO, getting to the top of a public bookmarking service is truly a viral way of marketing your website. Not only will you receive the benefit of being exposed in a very public place, but those who have put you there will talk about your website on their sites, and grow your business virally. Who knows - public bookmarking may just overtake traditional search as a source for your traffïc.
I've used Furl and have had some pretty good results, I've still got a few PR 5 links and get hits daily after my site was picked up a couple months ago. I didn't ever hit the front page and I can trace several thousand visits to it.
I like Furl also. I have the "Furl!!" button in Firefox and it is very convenient. My favorite is StumbleUpon ( www.stumbleupon.com ), which I have been using since - golly - a long time... A bit different than Furl.
You can get a lot of traffic from these sites (you also might want to add Digg here.) The problem is its not nearly as targetted as traffic from a search engine. That makes it harder to get conversions and make money from this traffic.
Thats the dilemma, the days are gone when I would do anything for traffic, thinking the more traffic the better. Now I just want traffic that is coming to my site because they are interested in the product and hopefully they will buy. I was hoping that these public bookmarking sites would have topics listed something like a directory. If it's just a mish mash then their would be no point. Even if you make the front page the traffic you receive would probably be just surfing and not looking for anything in particular.
I have a question: I just started using de.licio.us - I signed up, made a couple of bookmarks, and now I am sitting here sratchin' my head. I am dumb, how do I get more traffic from it to my site? Or how do you do it using any of the above sites?
Tell your visitors to add your site to their profile if they like your site. Its amazing what kind of things loyal visitors will do.
There are also clubs that "Cheat". That is how I got my results with furl. about 20 people from the club added me to their profile. That got me visable enough that others seen my site and added me to their profile. I'm only on 26 but it gave me pretty good results. If you do what dsm56 suggested your results sould be more consistant and in the long run probably much better. Each time someone puts you in thier profile you get put on the front page for a few minutes, often others will see you and check out your site. Maybe Yahoo will make this a little more useful than it is. (going along with Cutter and Cyclops thread). As it is right now, besides people looking for high PR links, I don't see a lot of use for it.
To get traffic, Digg is probably the better way to go, as it seems to be where the majority of del.icio.us popular site come from. But getting Dugg to the top is also very difficult. Cheating is probabbly the best way to do it, if you're alright with that. Personally I just use del.icio.us as it was intended - for bookmarking. I see some traffic, because I have tagged pages so that they show up in tagrolls. More important is the future of integrating folksonomy (tagging) into both search and advertising. For an example of what tagging + search looks like check out wink.com - basically it gets rid of all your SEO efforts in favor of popular opinion.
dsm56 - thanks for the advice. so what do you do to ask people tgo add you to their del.icio.us? I mean, do you just ask them to add or is there some kind of special way?
I agree with this as well. Tagging is where you will see your targeted traffic coming from. From my personal experience: I picked up some small exposure from Digg and Furl. From there I got added here and there to Del.icio.us. Traffic picked up a bit more. One day I got a request for an interview at a high profile site. Once the interview got published I got a lot of short term traffic and a request for info from a BBC reporter. That lead to a BBC article that quoted me and linked to me as well. Another bust of traffic and now I am starting to see some consistent SE traffic to the original article. (It is not a site/topic that makes money aside from some small adsense income but it was a fun experience) I have played with StumbleUpon and it looks promising. I didn't quite get the idea of it at the time, so I got very tiny traffic from it but found a lot of very interesting web sites.
Blog Marketing Tactics has a list of nearly sixty social bookmarking sites. You'll have to copy and paste the address as i'm not allowed post links (hmphh): http://www.blogmarketingtactics.com/social-bookmarking/social-bookmarking-top-links.html There's some javascript for adding delicious, furl and spurl buttons on your site at: http://www.blifaloo.com/info/bookmarks.php I put these on my site but no one has added my site to their bookmarks yet! I did however add my own sites to my own bookmarks and this resulted in a number of high pr links (6s and 7s) for a short time from either furl or spurl. Not going to be worthwhile for long term pr but might get you into the search engine indices quickly if you're not already in - it seemed to work that way for me anyway.