Choosing The Best Social Voting Site For Bloggers
By Matt Jones on Aug 29, 2007 in Blog Marketing
The day after I was banned from digg I stated that I was glad that it happened because it had given me the freedom to explore more blogging-related communities which could potentially be more beneficial to Blogging Figners. Since then, I have done some exploring and research. This is what I found:
Technorati WTF
Technorati WTF is extremely easy to get to page 1 on, I did it with just 3 votes in the space of 5 minutes. However, staying there requires more consistent voting, which I did not get and so I dropped off after about 20mins. Despite being on page 1, traffic was minimal, with around 20 unique visitors being sent.
Spninn
Sphinn was a site I was really interested in, however on all three times I tried to make a submission the site said there was a fatal error, which caused me to lose some faith in it. Most of the sites on page 1 have about 15 votes and I have been informed that a page 1 submission can bring roughly 300-500 unique visitors. The main good thing about Sphinn is that they do encourage you to submit your own blog posts (provided they are of a high standard). I will keep investigating Sphinn in the hope of it actually working so I can make a more reasoned analysis.
Netscape
Netscape was a total failure. I have over 100 friends there added and a number of IM contacts (matt608freemoney) gave me a helping hand but page 1 was never reached. Netscape has human moderators who chose what makes it to page 1 out of the most popular submissions. Netscape does not having a blogging category and not very well suited for bloggers.
Digg
Digg surprisingly I have had the most success with. A Blogging Fingers post about a month back made it to page 1 for a very short and glorious 10 minuets, which still resulted in over 800 unique visitors visiting. What I previously said about digg is true, that for meta-bloggers (bloggers who blog about blogging) it can be rare to have a suitable post. However I believe that with blogging the stars are the limit, and getting on page 1 of sites like Technorati and Sphinn are useful, but to really rocket your blog to success something on the scale of a digg is needed. Or even better, several diggs in a row. This is how John Chow got big and for me the more mundane sites are just not enough.
Conclusion
Look at it this way; it only takes 2 or 3 times the number of votes to get on page 1 of digg as it does Sphinn, yet the traffic sent can literally be 100 times greater. If you are on a new blog or are still building up a network of contacts then the smaller sites are ok, but once you are more established there is no reason to aim higher and draw massive amounts of traffic from digg.
I am of the belief that at the moment bloggers are fragmented across the networks. If all bloggers were to ditch the other sites and use Sphinn or Technorati WTF then I would definiitly favour them over digg.
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Technorati Tags: Technorati, WTF, Spninn, Netscape, Digg, traffic
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Netscape is surely not the one in which we can get to the front page easily. And if you hit the front page of Digg, then you will have some loss like server crash. If you ask me, Sphinn is very good. The 300 readers that come from Sphinn are well targeted. Many of them might subscribe to your blog, make a comment and do note-worthy action. My favorite is StumbleUpon. You can get to the buzz page with less hard work. Else you can at least reach the buzz page for a special tag. The traffic SU sends is good. It is very much better than Digg. Good post.
It depends on your webhost and how much bandwidth you pay for. Some will handle it, some will not. I am making sure right now that Blogging Figners will be able to handle it.
No mention of Stumbleupon? That’s my favorite so far.
Stumbleupon is my opinion the best source of traffic. You get relevant traffic and they’re more likely to stay. Somebody stumbled fair-review.co.uk, and I must’ve got 4 or 5 referrals from it.
Digg IMO is good at the time, but you need to capture the imagination of the Diggers (or just slag off Microsoft :))
I didn’t include Stumbleupon because although it does work by users voting, there is no ‘front page traffic surge’ to analyse. However, I agree with that it’s a great traffic source. The traffic is very easy to attain. With Blogging Fingers Stumblers tend to stay for a good amount of time, but rarely subscribe.
I just started messing with Sphinn and haven’t had big results yet, but I like the idea of it the best considering the targeted traffic.
I’ll be writing more about Netscape. I’ve made it to page1 there since writing this and they were surprisingly good.
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Reddit is another waste of time for bloggers.
Agree that Digg has most potential.