A Quality Article + Social Bookmarking + Social Community/News Site Submissions = Great Results

While the majority of traffic coming to our site is from search engines, which is a good thing because it shows that quality content will rank well with the search engines, the individual articles that have had the most readers and page views all have lots of traffic coming from various Social Bookmarking and Community/News sites such as:
www.propeller.com
www.digg.com
stumbleupon.com
faves.com
del.icio.us
reddit.com

Just like with search engines, the people who participate in these Social sites reward quality content. However, a word of warning is in order because anyone who tries to abuse or manipulate Social Network traffic is taking a huge risk.

It’s just as easy for members of Social sites to penalize poor quality submissions, or even worse report them to the Network moderators as “spammy” and that won’t only hurt the results for the specific submission being reviewed, but will weaken your ability as a member of the Network to share any future submissions due to receiving a bad reputation. And it’s a known fact that members who participate regularly on Social Networks act fast against perceived “spammy” submissions in order to prevent the Networks from being overrun by purely marketing and self-serving users.

Many of these sites use unseen and unknown weighted ranking systems to determine the overall reach of submissions by each user, so if you become suspected of submitting lesser quality or “spammy” material the moderators can lower your ranking which will negatively affect your future submissions.

And if you are reported multiple times there’s a good chance you’ll be banned from the Network completely.

So, while it’s perfectly acceptable and smart to share your best content on Social Networks, just be sure you’re utilizing them as they’re intended and don’t abuse or try to manipulate them in any ways and you should see great traffic and commentary from sharing your articles there.

Technorati Tags: articles, social bookmarking, social news