Webmaster Forums Biz

I've read a lot about using Digg and Stumbleupon to grow your forum, yet I am missing the point - what is the power of these sites - is there a concise explanation for how it helps you grow and what you have to do to make it work?

These sites are the new search engines. They are faster and more effective than Google for gaining traffic. New stuff is instantly displayed and spread through the web via social engineering. Instead of waiting for Google to rank you based on it's algorithm, the users of the internet vote on a pages popularity. The more popular...the more traffic. The Digg effect can cripple any site/server within minutes of being on the top. Stumbleupon is the same way. Both of these are takes off the old FARK.com style but implemented with web 2.0 style.

So for a forum what do you do - Digg or Stumble a thread and then people vote on it?

Do you have to integrate it into your forum software?

I would highly disagree with the assertion that social bookmarking and networking sites are faster and more effective for gaining traffic than Google.

These sites provide bumps in traffic and exposure - worth having don't get me wrong - but they are not at all a source for regular traffic for most sites. You are far better off concentrating on better search results than getting Dugg.

I think search results offer a far better return for long term traffic.

The SE's also view DIGG and other social bookmarking sites...so a well ranked DIGG can get you indexed in SERPs well too. Often I do searches now and the results are a digg page. I never see DIGG pages that lead to SE results.

Of course one should use well rounded techniques for promoting their sites which includes targeting the search engines for good keywords.

Well that's silly about seeing a DIGG page for search results =P

I'd like to see a search result with a DIGG address that is not a search on a term directly related to DIGG itself.

Chose a niche and search keywords for the niche - I have never seen a DIGG result on the front page of SERPS.

Please understand I am not discounting that social networks have high value to webmasters - I personally get thrilled over the traffic Stumble brings in.

They do work quite well, and you can get a burst of traffic. Its not regular traffic though, which is a down side. With google you will get a regular flow of traffic (if your site is optimized well)

I would estimate that from most traffic you only retain 1% normally. I monitor "bounce rate" on all my sites via Google Analytics. I can see that I get on most sites 20-50% bounce rate. Out of those that don't just hit and leave I think 2-5% return or signup. So let's say you get 1000 uniques in a day...10-50 might sign up depending on the site. At my hackforums.net I get a LOT of signup about 40 a day out of 500+ uniques. Bounce rate is really low with only 24% average. Yet on sites like my old democracyforums.com bounce rate is 50% and uniques are about 600 a day yet only 2-5 signups occur daily.

Sorry if that's all off topic I just wanted to respond about how the traffic isn't retainable. It is up to a point. Also bursts of traffic normally result in some higher income via adsense. Those "bounces" are often revenue clicks.

Thanks for the detailed insight - i never knew bounce rates could be so low (but maybe because my forum is run by me and a group of friends).

I think i'll use google analytics from now on as it gives such detailed statistics.

If you have some people willing to digg/stumbleupon your site then you can get quite a bit of regular traffic from digg. This is why having a blog (with a features that allows people to bookmark posts) is such a good idea. You get some traffic that could stick and join other parts of your site like the forum.