Digg, Stumbleupon etc

[JazyLcan]

I notice that a lot of sites including this one has links on their content enabling users to bookmark them using Digg, Stumbleupon etc and was curious as to what are the not so obvious benefits of using this strategy. I'm sure there is some traffic benefit to this, however, I have read in a few spots that the traffic that these produce isnt usually the best. I havent tried it but I love the concept of Digg but would really like to get the meat and potatoes on why people do it.

JL

[BigAlReturns]

Hi JazyLcan, welcome to the forums

You've pretty much hit the nail on the head with your reasoning - Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Fark, or whatever other social bookmarking site has one purpose to most webmasters, which is to send them traffic. Hitting the front page, or getting popular on these can send you a lot of traffic. I've never had a Digg frontpage, but I had a few pages get pretty popular on SU, and was getting ~4000 uniques/day from them!
Unfortunately you also point out the massive downside - the traffic is of exceedingly poor quality. I measured conversions from my SU traffic in terms of membership sign ups, and I think I had 2 or 3 total - it would hurt too much to work out the %age! Ad CTRs are likely to be similarly low. The reason for this is, in my opinion, that the visitors you get are generally very web savvy, so they recognise adverts and ignore them, consciously or even sub-consciously! Personally when I browse Digg/Reddit then I click the link, read the page then close the tab. It has to be a page of serious interest/quality to make me click through to another page.
So you might ask what is the point of getting this traffic? Well I can see two points:
1) Getting lots of traffic from webby types means many potential people who could link to you. Obviously this is great from an SEO point of view.
2) Artificially inflating traffic pre-sale. Now I most definitely do not advocate this, but it certainly goes on. That's why it's so important to look at what the traffic is, as well as how much when evaluating a site for sale.

[JazyLcan]

That goes along the lines of what I have been reading. This topic is particularly interesting to me as it seems that you can grow traffic significantly doing this even though some of it may be poor, more traffic is more traffic and the good ones out of the not so good ones could be worth it.

I feel as if there is more to the equation though. Something buried deep in the background. I will let you know if I come up with anything but thanks for your feedback. Hopefully something will turn up. If anyone has any inside info on this do share.

(takes out magnifying glass and puts on trench coat)

Thanks,
JL

[ryanhellyer]

I haven't had any luck with Stumbleupon unfortunately, but it's definitely a good way to get lots of steady traffic rapidly. And as BigAl touched on, it's also a good way to get lots of inbound links too as the techy type of people who use Stumbleupon are the type of people likely to link to you.

I recently placed some small links to FaceBook and StumbleUpon on one of my sites. I don't think the StumbleUpon one will be of much help, but the FaceBook one will definitely drive some good traffic to my site as many of my users will want to share some of the articles with their friends and hopefully those friends will come visit the site - or at least that's the theory.

[knupNET]

I use stumbleupon for a number of my sites. I make it a habbit to submit any new article to SU if it's worthy. I get nice spikes in traffic from that - but is it quality traffic? Not sure on that. I need to put some goal tracking in place to see what traffic converts the best. Just need to find the time!