Originally I was going to write from a different angle and entitle this post something like How To Gain Useless Visitors but after giving it some thought I’m not sure that would have been so fitting.
like most serious blogger’s I am making use of google analytics to track website visitors and always interested to see from what sources they are coming and lately I’ve noticed an increase in traffic from Social Bookmark sites like Reddit, Del.icio.us and Stumbleupon. Gaining more visitors to your website can be a time consuming process and it has to be spent on which methods work best. How much time should be spent on gaining traffic from Social Bookmark sites?
Firstly, it must be said that a visitor to your site is a good thing no matter where they came from. If you’re getting no visitors to your website then your site is nothing more than a couple of files floating around on a server somewhere, on the other hand it may not be that useful spending your precious hours trying to attract your visitors from these Social Bookmarking websites.
What if someday you landed one of your mind blowing articles on the front page of one of these sites? You could suddenly be facing a hundred thousand visitors almost immediately. Something like this may very well overtax your server and even worse end up crashing it! Is your web hosting up to handling a sudden massive increase in visitors like that?
Visitors from Social Bookmark sites will behave very differently from organic traffic coming from the major search engines.
This is my opinion:
1: Traffic from Social Bookmark sites will often simply bounce.
2: Very few visitors will spend much time on your site.
3: Hardly any of these visitors will sign up to your RSS feed.
4: Very few visitors will venture deeper into your site.
The fact is this sudden increase in visitors is temporary. If your article is on a Social Bookmark site like Reddit, that will only last for a couple of days until your item is moved back from the front page.
Would love to get your comments on this, so:
Is Social Bookmark traffic useless?