I have found out that bookmarking your own blog posts can help you a great deal in getting your content to more eyeballs. This might not be an ideal tactic for many as some bloggers, for some reasons, resent promoting their own blog posts, but it’s proven to work.
Now, instead of focusing your energy on thousands of social sites today, why not considering Pareto’s 80/20 Law? Let’s just focus to the top 20% traffic referrers that will deliver 80% of your blog traffic, and eliminate or sparingly use the other 80% traffic referrers that deliver 20% of your traffic.
If you are wondering who’s who in the top 20%, here’s one analysis result you might want to follow: According to Woopra that monitors over 100,000 websites, the Top 3 for referral traffic is Facebook, StumbleUpon and YouTube.
Facebook is the king of kings in social network referrers. According to the analysis, Facebook is responsible for delivering 68% of web traffic from social networks.
Twitter? Much hype, less substance – it is only delivering 25%, while LinkedIn is in the 3rd place with a mere 4%.
StumbleUpon
In social bookmark category, StumbleUpon tops all social bookmarking sites with 51%, surprisingly surpassed what seemingly THE social bookmarking site, Digg (30%.) Again, just like Twitter, Digg seems to be hyped a bit too much as the major source for social bookmarking traffic.
Ycombinator.com’s Hacker News – honestly, I just knew that it exists as I write this article – surprisingly ranked third with 12%.
YouTube
YouTube is the number one media referrers with a whopping 84% – a total domination; I need to seriously consider promoting my sites on YouTube, I reckon.
Flickr follows as the second best source for media traffic with 9%, while Last.fm is on the third place with 3%.
What you need to do now?
If you are not focusing your small business blog’s traffic generation effort to Facebook, StumbleUpon and YouTube, you should highly consider to do so today – you are missing out the traffic that could be your next business clients and contacts.
Here are some suggestions you might want to consider:
- Creating a Facebook business page is a good start in your effort to tap for your blog traffic; create a video post and publish it on YouTube; post pictures on Flickr; anything to get that precious targeted traffic.
- Instead of 100s if not 1,000s of social sites, you should focus your effort on the big 3 of each category, giving you 9 social sites to focus on: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, Ycombinator, YouTube, Flickr, and Last.fm.
- If you haven’t, promote your own blog posts and articles to social sites; if you didn’t love your own content, who would?
Do you have any other suggestions? Please share yours by commenting on this article.
Ivan Widjaya
Top social traffic referrers