Who Are Your Visitors And What Do They Want?

Who uses Social Bookmark sites?

It’s important to identify your target audience and consider just who actually uses Social Bookmarking sites. This will give you an idea of just who you’re writing to when you create your articles or web pages which are designed to generate huge traffic from SB sites. By having a target audience in mind you can focus on certain types of recurring information and develop large numbers of articles designed to maximize the chances of going viral.

Generally speaking most SB sites were originally created and promoted by webdesigners, programmers and the likes. This still holds true and although sites like StumbleUpon have a wider userbase, a lot of SB users (myself included) are still stereotypical geeks.

Most SB sites have plugins or toolbars for browsers. Number one on the list is FireFox and therefor we can safely assume that a lot of SB users run FireFox.

Finally, it’s important to note that an increasingly large number of SB users are people like ourselves who are promoting their websites. Niche webmasters commonly utilize SB tactics.

What they want

The typical StumbleUpon user is in channel hop mode. Think about when you’re bored and you flick through the channels on TV, waiting for something to jump out and hook your interest. This is exactly what’s happening with StumbleUpon users. As they Stumble more and more, the program learns their tastes and preferences, and they can specify certain categories which interest them. As such you may have more luck aiming and submitting your articles towards one of the “geekier” categories.

Digg users are slightly different in that they read the title and/or description you post BEFORE clicking through to your site. This means that if they click through to your site then they’re actively seeking to read your article. However, they are just as fickle as SU users and if they get turned off by an ugly site, poor spelling and grammar, or an article that simply isn’t interesting, they’re off in a shot.

Many SB sites are strictly for programmers and webdesigners, some are strictly for news articles, journalists and the likes, and some are specialized in other areas. Typically the specialized sites have more worth because they receive less spam and have higher PR. If you’re articles target one of these specialized SB sites, you may get much better results because people are already looking for the type of information you’re offering. If you were to sell some product on your site or you were in niche marketing, you would convert much better.

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