You may have noticed that it has been a while since my last experiment. Technically this experiment started 12 days ago, but I got sidetracked along the way.
WARNING: The same thing may happen to you if you continue to read this post.
All of my experiments to date had been a lot of fun, but they were all MY ideas of ways to drive traffic to the site and make money. The results hadn't been too stellar so I decided that it was time to seek the advice of others.
There are literally thousands of "Top X ways to increase traffic...." articles on the web and I started reading them to find the topic of my next experiment.
Social bookmarking was a strategy that was regularly mentioned and it sounded interesting. I had heard of sites like digg and del.icio.us, but I hadn't actually used them.
For this experiment, I decided that Reddit would be my Social Bookmarking site of choice.
The concept behind Reddit is simple: The Reddit community is made up of users who are surfing the net. When they come across something interesting, they share it on Reddit. Other users will see their recommendation and can checkout the link (thereby driving traffic to your site).
Reditt users (called Redditors) get to vote on whether they liked the link. When you submit a link, it starts out with a ranking of 1. As other users read it, they can like it or dislike it. This causes your ranking to rise or fall. The higher your ranking, the more easy it is for others to find your post.
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| Sample Reddit post that had 38 people vote on it |
I decided to take my Lady Gaga/Weird Al post and share it on Reddit. Almost as soon as I hit enter on the Reddit site, my Blogger stats started going wild! In the few hours after I shared the link on Reddit, I had received 161 page views from countries all around the world.
I did the same with another post and also got very good results (although not quite as good). Then I started reading through the Reddit FAQ and came across the following...
Feel free to post links to your own content (within reason). But if that's all you ever post, and it always seems to get voted down, take a good hard look in the mirror — you just might be a spammer.
I decided that I had to learn more about Reddit before proceeding. I brushed up on my "Reddiquette" and started sharing links of other sites not related to this experiment.
Each time I went to Reddit, something interesting would catch my eye and the next thing you know 30 minutes had gone by. I can definitely relate to this post made by opposite225...
I consider Experiment #8 to be my most successful experiment to date. There appears to be great value in Social Bookmarking and I will be exploring it further; Reddit is just one of the hundreds of social bookmarking sites out there.
I have also come away from this experiment realizing that in order to use Social Bookmarking, I truly need to have quality content - otherwise I'm just a spammer. Since spamming is not an area I intend to explore, it looks like a large part of my focus will be in creating good, unique content for this site.
Now, if I could only pull myself away from Reddit we might be able to move on to Experiment #9...
