To Sphinn or not to sphinn… That is the question. Bookmarking one’s own articles can be frowned upon being compared with mere spamming. And here is my sincere confession: I DO bookmark posts authored by me as social bookmarking is the best way to get to know your audience, to evaluate your own content and to experiment.
| Evaluation method |
Result | What does it mean? |
| Compare traffic and feed subscriptions (e.g. Google analytics and Feedburner stats).  |
Your website experienced the huge traffic boost but there were no feed subscriptions. | 1. The traffic was untargeted (refer to the bounce rate and page views stats of the analytics);2. Your content does not provide any new/ exciting/ useful information.
3. You do not provide any clear way to subscribe to your feed. |
Compare the actual SB traffic and response rate. |
You expected your post to generate a much better response (e.g. in the form of comments). |
1. The visitors from SB are not interested in your niche (Google analytics will help to identify this);2. Your website is not optimized for that (it requires registration, asks for additional details, etc);
3. Your post content is not optimized to generate comments (e.g. you do not encourage people to comment) |
Evaluate the social response. |
Your post was not bookmarked in any other social bookmarking network. | Your post headline is not optimized for SB. |
| Compare the response from a general social bookmarking community and from a niche one. |
Your post is much better responded in a general/ niche directory. | Your writing (style) is universal / very niche specific (nothing bad in either of these, unless your aims are inverse). |
| Compare the expected reaction and the actual readers’ reaction. | You expected your post to do much better in SB. | Well, that’s a great opportunity to assess your own content and writing skills. |
So the most essential stats to look into are:
1. Traffic numbers (Google analytics):
2. Bounce rate (Google analytics);
3. Page views per source (Google analytics);
4. Feed subscription stats (Feedburner.com):
5. Commenting rate;
6. Blog and social bookmarking response rate (Technorati reactions).
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Nice write up. Though I don’t know how valuable I would consider Technorati to be at this point.
And to be honest I submit my own work all the time. If it’s good enough people will follow suit and mark it. If not I’ll be the only one who has done so.
I agree… My message here is not to stop submitting your own articles – it’s about getting more from your bookmarking by experimenting and educating yourself .
I do, but I think it’s futile. I’ve yet to have any success that way – the best was some 20 – 50 odd visitors from Digg on a post of mine that got about a dozen diggs.
Someone stumbled my Carnival of the Capitalists though and I got about 100 some visitors in an hour!
Right you are, Gab. Traffic from SB does not leave a lasting impression. But that’s also very niche specific. While it can be mostly untargeted in SEO niche, it can work magic in Entertainment sphere. And when you are an seo consultant, you need to know best working schemes in multiple niches.
Hi
I am your regular reader You have nice approach.
Would you please review http://www.Tagza.com – it young and funky new Social Bookmarking web site.
Thanks
@Auto Bookmarking: Could you please email me your request with some additional details?
Hi Ann,
Your article is right on the dot for me, I am jsut getting myself to learn how to maximize on the tools to help me build my sites.
I wish I found your site a lot earlier, your articles are very informative and helpful. I’ve subscribed to your posts. I’m new to this and would appreciate some help if you can email me some sites I can read/subscribe to in order to learn more – I do hope you would have the time and maybe we can exchange some ideas 🙂
Thanks.
We’ve had mixed success bookmarking our posts, but do it only periodically. We do not believe social bookmarking your own work to be inappropriate.
Thanks.now I don’t feel guilty Stumbling myself!