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Top 17 Social Bookmarking Sites To Boost Your Blog Traffic

Top 17 Social Bookmarking Sites To Boost Your Blog Traffic

If you have grown up in social media websites era, you might not understand how popular social bookmarking websites were in their golden age before social media websites exist.

You might not understand how important was social bookmarking websites for discovering new content and for sharing content with your friends and other people beyond emails. But what is a social bookmarking website?

What Is a Social Bookmarking Website?

A social bookmarking website allows people to discover content and new information shared by other people. The ideal setup for a social bookmarking website is to allow the user to submit (Bookmark) a link to an article, image or any piece of information. And allows the user to categorize the bookmarked links in lists, boards, subreddit or whatever the website calls it.

Other users will then interact with your links, by vote up or down, comment on them, or by saving them or categorizing them. The most popular content is always shown on top of the front page. Every social bookmarking website has a different way of letting people discover new content based on popularity on the website, based on users interests, based on users community or all of these criterias.

Where Social Bookmarking Websites Stands Today?

As we have said social bookmarking websites were very popular before social media websites exist, you can think of them as social media version 0. A lot of popular social bookmarking websites suffered from the increased popularity of social media websites.

People started to spend more time on social media websites socializing than discovering new content on social bookmarking websites. People who stay on social bookmarking websites are mostly bored and looking for entertainment. Which explains why mostly the topics that become popular on social bookmarking websites related to entertainment or humor.

As a result, some social bookmarking websites have shifted their business model like Digg which changed to a news aggregator, some has been acquired by another social bookmarking website such as Delicious which was acquired by Pinboard which then decided to discontinue its service. Others were not that lucky and went out of business such as Connotea.

There is a social bookmarking website which started somewhere around 2012 called Chim.In which promised to provide a different experience to the social bookmarking website users. What that being said, it doesn’t mean that social bookmarking websites are over. They are still there and popular and can generate a huge traffic to your website.

How to succeed on social bookmarking websites?

Every social bookmarking website has a different way of saving links and sharing it with other users. Also, every site has a different content that might become popular on it.

You might not have the time to use all the social bookmarking websites or even the possibility for your content become popular, the below general tips will give you an insight on how to select the best social bookmarking website for your content and help you get more traffic from it.

  • Title is a Key Factor

For most social bookmarking websites, all that users see is your post title. That will be one of the main reasons why a user would decide to click-through and read your blog posts.

Write a catchy title that would grab the users attention and make them click-through to read your article, it is important for your title to be relevant to your blog post content though. If it is not other users will stop clicking on your post links.

  • Blog Design And Page Speed

Once the user clicks on your link to visit your blog, you need to make sure that your blog will load as fast as possible. Make sure that your blog design is simple and clean.

Also, you need to make your blog post readable and scannable by dividing the big chunk of texts into smaller and more readable pieces of text. Adding relevant engaging images and videos will increase your reader’s engagement and their interest to revisit your blog.

  • Topic is Important

When it comes to the topic of your content, you need to understand that each social bookmarking website has a different potential for the submitted posts based on its user’s interests.

Check what content would normally become popular on the social bookmarking website you intend to use. And if that matches your blog niche then bingo! you might have the right social bookmarking website for you.

For some social bookmarking websites it might be difficult to find out which topics will be popular, but for others such as StumbleUpon its easier to find out. More on StumbleUpon later on this post.

  • Relationship And Friendship is Very Important

The more people you have on your selected social bookmark websites, the highest the possibility that your content will get noticed. In order for your content to receive higher votes and be listed on the front page, which leads to a lot of traffic to your website, you need a lot of vote ups or liked.

A follow on Twitter and a friendship on Facebook is easier than social bookmarking websites. If you have a lot of friends on a specific social bookmarking website then this is a great reason why you should choose this social bookmarking website.

  • Time is Important

When you submit your content to a social bookmarking website, you need to ask your friends to vote up your content as soon as possible and most probably at the same time you submit your content.

This will create a buzz around your content and other users might vote up your content and make it listed on the front page.

A content that has 20 or 30 votes up at the time of submission will have a higher chance to be listed and stay on the front page than a content that receives 100 votes up during the period of two full days.

Top Social Bookmarking Sites

Here is a list of the top 14 social bookmarking sites updated as of April 2018. The sites are listed based on Alexa Global Ranking as of the date of publishing this post.

Top-Social-Bookmarking-sites-Infographic

 

1. Reddit

PageRank 8 Global Alexa Rank 6

Reddit website

Although the website design doesn’t look that fancy, Reddit is not only the most popular social bookmarking website, its one of the most popular websites in general. Ranked the 6th most visited website globally and the 4th most visited website from the USA as per Alexa. Reddit is one of the most engaging social bookmarking websites with over 900M comments and over 12B upvotes last year only. The most upvoted post of the year 2017 received 349K upvotes and over 4650 comments in a year.  (Source: The Best of Reddit in 2017)

Reddit is a classic social bookmarking website that allows users to submit their links and text which then can be voted up and receive comments. You can save your submitted posts to your profile or to what is known a subreddit. A subreddit is a community of Redditors (users on Reddit is called Redditors) who have the same interest, check the different available subreddits with interest similar to your blog niche and subscribe to them.

Check the subreddit rules before posting, some subreddits doesn’t allow link posts, while others might not allow more than a post per day. Don’t be a link dropper, vote up and comments on other posts on the subreddit as much as possible so that you receive the same level of engagement.

Reddit was able to reach this level of engagement by controlling the website and post-submission, by default you can submit another post after a specific time of the first post (I think its 6 minutes if I am not mistaken. Any post is archived after 6 months and not available anymore for upvotes or comments.

Any Engagement or planned votes behavior is totally prohibited according to the website rules.

2. Pinterest

Page Rank: 10 Alexa Traffic Rank: 80

Pinterest Website

Pinterest is another famous social bookmarking websites, it is often classified as a social media website but the core functionality of the website is to discover new content through images submission, making it a modern social bookmarking website.

Pinterest has over 200M active users. it became very popular among girls with 70% of registered users being females, it started to pick up more men as over 50% of new signups are men as the site is being widely used for affiliate marketing and a lot of people (mainly females) are making money with Pinterest.

61% of the Pinterest users have discovered new brands and products through Pinterest. (Source: Pinterest users states). On Pinterest Users can save images on Pinterest or what is known as pinning an image with a link to their blog post, they can categories their pinned images by saving them to different boards that they can create.  Each board can have a different topic.

Users can set their boards to public view where everyone can see it or can set it to private where only the board owner can see it. You can also create a board with a specific topic and then invite people to contribute to your board by allowing them to pin their images with to your board by adding their relevant images to your board.

Pinterest will send its users trending pin based on their interests that they select during signup, this would be a great way for you to know which topics are likely to receive the highest traffic in a specific niche.

You can check the open board for contribution in your blog niche and apply to be a contributor. Read the board rules first and try to be as much engaging as possible to receive the same engagement. You can claim your website on Pinterest which allows you to gain insights into analytics on how your website pins are performing, add your profile logo to all pins from your website and access to try new tools and features.

Pro Tip:

Although you can use royalty free images for your blog posts and pin these images on Pinterest. But it is unlikely that those images will receive high engagement as they are being used by many other people.

The best strategy is to create your own images and pin them to Pinterest. You don’t have to be a graphic designer to create your own images, and you don’t have to create a perfect image. All you need is an easy to use software to create a presentable image.

Check out this list of top free infographic creation tools which can be used for many designs including blog post images. I am using Canva and Visme and find them very easy to use.

3. Pocket

Page Rank: 7 Alexa Traffic Rank: 694

GoPocket

Pocket defines itself as a social bookmarking website for something you want to view later with over 30M registered users and over 2B items saved to pocket to date. Pocket allows you to save the things that you want to read later from your web browser and over 800 apps such as Twitter, Flipboard, and Feedly.

Pocket becomes very handy when you need to view your saved content and web pages while offline as Pocket saves a copy of the saved content or webpage. Pocket offers a premium account with more features. Pocket also introduced a new feature which is a recommended content featuring top content for users based on what they save to their pocket. This would be a great way to know what works on Pocket in your niche.

As a blogger, you won’t be able to share your saved posts with other users. However what you can do is to add a Pocket button to your blog to encourage readers to add your posts to pocket for their later view. Also, you can request access to publisher tools to track your content performance over Pocket.

4. StumbleUpon

Page Rank: 7 Alexa Traffic Rank: 2017

StumbleUpon website

 

Update: StumbleUpon is shut down on 30th June, check the Top 7 StumbleUpon Alternatives To Discover New Content.

StumbleUpon is another popular social bookmarking website that allows you to save a link to your blog posts, add it to an interest and tag your link with Keywords. Once a StumbleUpon user or known as Stumblers clicks on your page from your profile or finds your page by clicking on the stumble button your full page will load instead of seeing only the post title and link.

This is a unique feature for StumbleUpon and will give the users more time to decide if he will continue to read your content based on your title, blog design and content readability instead of just seeing a post title with a number of votes.

However be aware that if your content is not suitable for Stumbleupon it will increase your bounce rate and decrease your users’ average session duration as Stumblers will click on stumble button to few another page too quickly. Although StumbleUpon is popular, it is one of the least talked about social bookmarking website among bloggers, and I feel that I should explore more about StumbleUpon to give you an idea about the potential of StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon can help you drive massive traffic to your blog posts, It can help you as well to discover new content in your niche, which will help you as a blogger to find more ideas on what to write about next.

How to use StumbleUpon

  • Sign up at StumbleUpon
  • Once you signed up with StumbleUpon you need to add your interest. You may select as many interests as you want.

StumbleUpon Interest

 

As you see interests are categories in different tabs and under each tab, you will find many interests. You will notice a number of followers for each interest. This is a great way to get an indication of what works best on StumbleUpon. I have arranged a list of the top 24 interests on StumbleUpon based on the number of followers as of the time of writing this post.

  1. Humor                       356.4K followers.
  2. Bizarre/Oddities        299.2K followers.
  3. Photography             278.9K followers.
  4. Movies                      244.0K followers.
  5. Arts                           241.1K followers.
  6. Music                        240.5K followers.
  7. Self Improvement     233.8K followers.
  8. Nature                      232.7K followers.
  9. Food/Cooking          232.5K followers
  10. Gadgets                    231.1K followers.
  11. Science                     217.1K followers.
  12. Travel                        212.4K followers.
  13. Psychology               208.7K followers.
  14. Fitness                      207.2K followers.
  15. Internet                     206.8K followers.
  16. Technology               203.1K followers
  17. Books                        202.3K followers.
  18. Comedy movies        199.4K followers.
  19. Animals                     199.0K followers.
  20. History                      190.7K followers.
  21. Ancient History         190.0K followers.
  22. Magic/Illusions          181.5K followers.
  23. Design                       180.7K followers.
  24. Electronic device       172.5K followers.

I suggest that you keep a copy of this list as it will become handy on the next step.

  • Add your Page to StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon add page

 

Fill in your page URL, and select the page interest. Since you are allowed to add one interest you need to make sure you are selecting wisely, keeping in mind that you want to reach the greatest amount of audience. If you are writing a blog post about Facebook, you can select Facebook as an interest but Facebook has very few followers (77K) compared to the internet interest (206.8K).

While using Facebook as an interest looks more targeted but internet interest is still very near and will do the job. You need to select the best interest that fits and at the same have the higher number of followers. However, Don’t try to add Humor as an interest for a post on Facebook as this will increase your risk of getting high bounce rate and lower user average session duration in addition to not getting the traffic that you want.

  • Next, click on Stumble button to discover new content

Stumble button

 

This is how Stumblers discovers content on StumbleUpon by clicking the Stumble page. You can select from the drop-down menu to view an article using specific criteria. All Interest, a single interest of yours, People you follow and Trending.

  • Following Stumblers

The more times your page get likes the higher the possibility it will be served to a Stumbler when he selects the same interest of your page. In order to get followers to follow you and like your page I suggest you start following other Stumblers and like their pages.

Once you Stumble an article in your interest, look at the top bar on the right-hand side. You will see a liked by #+ others. Click on it and you will see the person who added the page to StumbleUpon and a list of Stumblers who liked that page.

Those Stumblers are more likely to like your page as it has the same interest. Look into the profiles and follow the accounts that you might feel they are active and Stumble some of their pages.

Some of these Stumblers might like your pages and follow you back. What is interesting is that when these Stumblers who followed you click on Stumble and select People I follow, they will be served with pages from your profile.

5. Scoop.it

Page Rank: 8 Alexa Traffic Rank: 2,770

Scoopit website

 

Scoop.it used to be an all free social bookmarking website with no limitation. Now they have some limitations for free accounts. You can have 1 Topic page and only 50 posts or what is known as a scoop. So you need to post your top content to get the best traffic from Scoop it.

As a free account, you can have only one social media account connected and you can use it to share the scoops you have directly to your social media account. The Scoops can be links to your blog post or content that you create specifically for Scoop.it to show your expertize on the topic you have selected.

Once you add your social media account, you will see all your friends who are using scoop it on my community tab. If you click on suggestions you will see recommended articles based on your selected topics which are a great way to discover new content.

6. WeHeartit

Page Rank: 7 Alexa Traffic Rank: 3,390

WeHeartit website

WeHeartit is very similar to Pinterest, It allows its users to discover content based on images. In addition, it allows the users to publish articles on specific topics.

7.Meneame.net

PageRank 6, Global Alexa Rank 6,203

Meneame website

Meneame is a traditional social bookmarking website just like Reddit. However, The website is in Spanish. It’s very popular in Spanish-speaking countries, according to Alexa; the website has a 142 ranking in Spain.

8. Slashdot.org

PageRank 7, Global Alexa Rank 6,492

Slashdot website

According to the website ” News for Nerds, Stuff that matters ” Slashdot is a social bookmarking website that is focused on Technology and IT stuff, it allows you to submit stories in various categories related to Technology, you can tag your links with your keywords, tops stories on Slashdot are determined by the most commented on stories and not by the most voted stories, there is a version of the website that runs in Japanese as well.

9. Diigo

PageRank 7, Global Alexa Rank 11,678

Diigo website

 

Diigo is a classic Social Bookmarking website that provides a suite of tools that simplify both bookmarking process and retrieval process, this is not the type of social bookmarking websites to use if you want to get traffic as user interactions are very little.

However, you can use Diigo to keep a track of your blog links and probably links to other blogging resources that you can use later as a reference in your writing. Diigo makes it very easy to organize your links and to exports them.

Diigo Allows you to post your bookmarks your blog on a number of supported platforms, also you can automatically save your favorites tweets. Diigo is not completely free, there is a number of advanced features which are available only to  premium users

10. Pearltrees

PageRank 7, Global Alexa Rank 11,923

pearltrees website

 

Pearltress allows you to organize and share everything you are interested in. You can add web pages, images, documents, etc using many ways. You can then share it with others in your network.

Pearltress will allow you to discover other people collection as well. There are some limitations for a free account though. You can check the premium account subscription pricing to unlock extra features such as Ads removal, private collection, and more storage capacity.

11. Paper.li

Page Rank: 7 Alexa Traffic Rank: 21,137

Paperli website

Paper.li is very similar to Scoop.it in the way it functions. You can create a page about a specific topic and the page is called Paper. However, Unlike Scoop.it where you have to add the content to your page you can add up to 10 sources on Paper.li for automatic content curation to your paper or you can add manually your article.

The current support sources are Twitter, Facebook, website RSS, Google+, YouTube, and Paper.li topic Source. If you add Paper.li topic source, the site will automatically add content marked with the same topic to your paper from Paper.li community.

You can refresh the content on your paper 5 times every day, each time you refresh your paper a new edition of your paper will available. For free accounts, your paper is set to be published automatically on a schedule that you can set. Choose frequency, time and day.

There is a Pro version of Paper.li available for 9$ monthly or 99$. With the Pro version, you can have up to 25 sources, Unlimited refresh, set your publishing to draft to be able to edit your paper before it’s being published, and unlock more features such as adding contributors to your paper and many more features.

How to use Paper.li for your blog promotion:

A good idea for using Paper.li for your blog promotion is to set your paper to be published on weekly basis. You can name your paper as your blog name + weekly update. And then share the paper with your email subscribers to let them know your blog updates.

The drawback of using the free account is that paper.li will automatically add content from all your sources and rank them by its own algorithm. With Pro account, you can manually rank your sources and you can edit your paper.li by removing content and adding more content before it’s being published.

12. Pinboard

Page Rank: 6 Alexa Traffic Rank: 44,585

Pinboard website

Pinboard acquired delicious and then decided to shut it down. PinBoard is a subscription based social media bookmarking website cost 11$ per year. I haven’t tested Pinboard yet so I can’t give you a clear picture of it. You can get a full list of its features on their website.

13. BibSonomy.org

PageRank 6, Global Alexa Rank 49,358

BibSonomy

BibSonomy is a niche social bookmarking website, built for scientific publications and bookmarks.

BibSonomy allows you to submit your links and tag them with your own keywords. You can search for popular by links, tags, authors, concepts or discussions. Popular links are determined based on the number of times the same link have been posted in the website.

14. Citeulike.org

PageRank 6, Global Alexa Rank 58,880

Citeulike website

Citeulike is a social bookmarking website that allows you to store websites and references you see online easily on the site to share them later with your friends. You can tag your links with your own keywords.

The website allows you to discover articles and resources without having to search through search engines, it has an automated system to recommend articles to you.

When you search the website for any keyword, you will get a list of results including the people or groups who are interested in these keywords along with the article links tagged with this keyword. This is a great way to find out popular content and people interested in it at the same time.

15. list.ly

PageRank 7, Global Alexa Rank 77,620

Listly Website

If you are a fan of lists & top things, then this is your place. Listly allows you to bookmark and curate a list of top things. You can then share your list with your friends, on social media website and embed the list on your website.

This is NOT a place to submit a link to your top list blog post. If you have a post like this one you can’t just build a list of 1 link back to your post – Technically you can but your list will NOT be indexed by search engines.

What you can do on Listly is to build a list of multiple posts on your blog. For example, You can build a list about 10 ways to make money online and then add 10 links to different blog posts talking about making money online.

To create a list click on make a list and fill the details as per the below image. There are 5 different layouts you can choose from. By default, your list is publicly viewed and you will need to upgrade to Pro account to make it private.

Make a list on Listly

For Free Account only your first 3 lists will have unlimited items. After the first 3 lists, you can add only 1 list per week and you can add 10 items per day. As we mentioned before your list will be public. There is a free WordPress plugin for embedding your lists on your site. Pro Account unlocks all limitation for 4.99$ monthly or 49.99$ Yearly.

What items can you add to your list?

What items you can add to Listly list

If you are seeing what I am seeing, you might be wondering, can I add my Amazon Affiliate links? And the answer is Yes you can.

There is a great way for you to make money online on Listly platform if you have a lot of followers. For example, you can create a list of the top books you have read, add links to the books you have read, and you can write your review about each book. Share this list with your social media followers and embed the list on your website.

Not only Amazon Affiliate links but you can add any type of affiliate links. For example, Top premium WordPress plugins, Top premium online Logo design tools, and many more. Be creative and create your own list.

Once you are done with creating your list, you will see a list rank to the right-hand side of your list as shown in the image below. You will need a minimum of list rank 20 for your list to be indexed by search engines or to be recommended to others on Listly. The higher your rank and the higher your chances of getting more traffic. Below the list rank, you will see a list of tips on how to improve your list rank.

List Rank image

16. Folkd

PageRank 6, Global Alexa Rank 93,599

Folked website

Folkd is a social bookmarking website that includes a combination of Delicious and Digg features, you can bookmark your links and organize them through tags, then you can vote for the best articles.

You can follow your friends to get their latest updates or you can search links that interest you, it is easy to share and recommend your links to your friends on Folked.

17. Wakelet  

PageRank 6, Global Alexa Rank 128,289

Wakelet Website

Wakelet is a social bookmarking and content curation Site that allows you to add your links and arrange them in different collections or what is called stories that are on the same topic.

You can add links, images, tweets or you can write a new test post and include a link within your text. Your stories are set as private by default so you need to change it to public if you would like others to see it.

This website has been added to our list as a contribution by my friend Dexter Roona from Infobunny blog, You can read his full review here Wakelet getting started guide.

Final Thoughts

As we have mentioned success is not guaranteed and you don’t have the time and effort to use all the social bookmarking websites. You need to check all the bookmarking websites and see what topics will generally become popular on these websites.

You have to select 2 to 3 social bookmarking websites based on your discovery and the possible reach of your community and focus on them. If you interested in more ways to increase your blog traffic then check out this post on the top ways to boost your blog traffic.

Do you know any other Social bookmarking website that might be added to this list? Have you been able to generate a huge traffic to your blog boost through any of the mentioned social bookmarking websites?

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