Nowadays, besides the good old search-engine traffic, social bookmarking sites seem to appear more and more on site analytics software as a very important source of traffic. Taking advantage from both types of sources is a must, since it seems that they really complete each other. I have tried to analyze both with “pros” and “cons”, and as you can see, the results show that a weakness from one is directly covered by a strength of the other.
Search engine traffic:
CONs:
It takes time:
In order to make your content popular among search engines, you need to have a decent amount of inbound (that generate page rank) and most importantly anchored links. The link strength that you will actually need depends on the competition of your niche. By the time you accomplish that, there is a slight chance that your content is obsolete; or even worse, you may never be able to rank in top 20 if the competition is really strong, so you work, write good quality content, and hope that you will be mentioned in a “history book” (just kidding, but you get the idea).
Faster results cost money
If you want to rank high in the SERPS as soon as possible, you will need to buy links from other high PR websites.
You have to know SEO
Either you spend your time learning about search engine optimization and be up to date with the latest news and trends in this area or pay a specialist to take care of that for you. One way or the other, you MUST have your site optimized.
PROs
Best results on the long run
However, within a longer period of time, if you manage to get it right, you can benefit from your work time, and time again.
Higher earnings with contextual advertising programs
Visitors originated from search engines are 99% new to your site so if you use contextual advertising (such as Adsense, Ypn, bidvertiser, etc.) you will notice that this type of traffic generates the best results.
Social Bookmarking sites traffic
PROs
Important amount of traffic very quickly
Social Bookmarking sites, are all about the quality of the content. The major advantage that they have over search engines is that when you submit a story, it appears under the “new stories” section, so if you have an intriguing title and description, lots of people will click on it and you will get instant traffic.
A chance to get TONS of traffic withing a few days
Depending on the quality of your content, people may enjoy it and vote.
If you have significant number of votes your story will appear on the front page of that site and you will receive an important amount of traffic…
A chance to increase your link popularity
The good news don’t stop here; if you managed to take your story to the front page of an important social bookmarking site, you will receive most probably receive one way links from other webmasters that have visited your website which in the end will lead to a greater page rank.
In the end, even though these type of traffic sources are different, the seem to complete each other very well
CONs
High traffic from this type of sources doesn’t always mean higher earnings
Even if you make it to the front page of a social bookmarking site, you won’t experience a noticeable increase in earnings with contextual advertising programs .People that are using Digg and other similar sites are generally web-savy and don’t click on the ads so it will result in a lower CTR.
Technorati Tags: Contextual Advertising, Social Bookmarking Sites, Traffic Sources, Traffic, Search Engines
