Real life celebrity glamor is not that different from that over the Internet. As a Web marketer, you are probably continuously looking for ways to promote your blog to a celebrity-like status. Once it becomes a star, your website rank would spike. But making celebrities is a tough job, isn’t it? You definitely won’t be taking it to Hollywood, of course! It doesn’t work like this in the Web’s universe; we have other dream-come-true medium. Social bookmarking has created new platforms for stars-type posts to shine. Show up at Digg, and you will get a chance.
It is not really as simple as that. Not every submitted article at Digg make it to the first page. Although as Dave Naffziger, CEO of Brand Verity, points out in his analysis of Digg’s submissions that certain criteria make your article more likely to be dugg. Like, for instance, submitting your article on the weekends rather than on a weekday, or talking about Nintendo Wii rather than talking about golf. Putting that aside, we all know that the most essential part of any article remains in its content. The same classical story, you should be model material to make it in Hollywood. In other words, people would not bookmark or share your post if you don’t provide them with an adequate personal value.
After coming up with a decent content, a simple strategy of using a combination of different social bookmarking services would help. Try submitting your post to StumbleUpon and Digg, Twittering about it to spread the word, and then add the ‘Digg it’ button to your post. People would then start to show up and naturally click the ‘digg it’ if they found it interesting enough. The more diggs you get, the more people would want to take shots (add it to their own bookmarks over del.icio.us). Soon, your post would gain a celebrity status. Darren Rowse, a full time professional blogger, attracted 250k visitors over a single night using the same steps.
Then again, one shouldn’t ignore the importance of tags. Tagging has been at the core of social bookmarking. It offers a personal value in helping people to better manage, organise and retrieve their bookmarks when needed. This is the model Del.icio.us was built on in the first place, where personal value precedes network value. Tagging has become equally essential for other people in the network to find relevant information as well. Del.icio.us managed to aggregate the tags generated by the users and create a folksonomy framework. That’s the briliance of their approach and why they deserve the market share they currently hold.
The figure below (taken from Dave Naffziger’s article), illustrates some interesting trend data showing how his NWF Daily News website have gone from nothing to the top 20,000 websites according to Alexa through his impressive use of Digg. Notice the spikes Digg inflicted on their traffic!
To sum up, social bookmarking has changed the face of the Web for regular users, let alone Web marketers. Search engines are no longer the most single source of traffic. I , like many other people, tend to trust people’s verdicts. If you are a celebrity, then there is something worthy about you. Google would be my choice if I know exactly what I am looking for, but I would pick up Del.icio.us to find more relevant information through the connection of its tagging system. The internet navigation nature is changing, I wonder what is coming next?
