I'm Just Sharing

Is Social Bookmarking Still Worth It?

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on May 6, 2011

Last week I received an email from Delicious announcing that they’d been bought out by the people who originally created YouTube and that things were going to be changing over within 30 days. If I wanted to keep my account and bookmarks I’d have to go in and change things on my own before that time, otherwise I was going to lose it all.

For me, that was pretty much the last straw, of sorts. I wasn’t angry by any of it; not even close. Instead, I was bored and tired because this seems to be a common occurrence lately. These social bookmarking sites change things around, don’t give much of an explanation of the changes, and we’re supposed to roll with it and be happy and on our way.

I was also irritated 18 months ago when Technorati made its drastic change and suddenly no one had any idea what the numbers meant. I think I’ve been back twice since I learned of it, and I had never used the site to bookmark any posts at all as far as I can remember.

I’m wondering if the heyday of bookmarking sites like these has passed or is about to go away in its present condition. I read where people have major gripes about sites like Digg and StumbleUpon all the time, and it seems to be more prevalent and easier to do to just retweet posts to Twitter, something we’ve talked about a lot here lately. Indeed, it’s even easier to click on the “like” button at the bottom of some posts and share in Facebook because you don’t have to go anywhere else to do it. And let’s face it, Facebook is much bigger than all these other sites at this time.

I had a brief conversation with someone on Twitter about sites like Amplify and FriendFeed as well. I asked why it’s not just as good to post a link to one’s own site directly everywhere instead of going through one of these other sites. His belief was that these sites were much larger and could help get the word out easier. My gripe was that one clicks on a link in Twitter thinking it’s taking you one place, instead it takes you to one of these sites, and then you have to click on another link to actually take you to the article you want to read. I can’t be the only one that thinks that’s irritating. If it’s a news aggregator you happen to be visiting, like Alltop, that’s one thing; but sending out links to another site instead of directly to your own content just seems silly.

But maybe I’m fighting the new way because I’m older; I can’t believe that but it’s possible. What thoughts do you have on this topic?

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

Why Aren’t You Linking Your Posts To Your Blog?

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Mar 28, 2011

There’s something going on these days that I really don’t understand. I’ll be on Twitter and I’ll see someone linking to a post or an article that they want to share. Since I know them, I click on the link to see what I’m going to be reading. However, instead of taking me directly to the article, it takes me someplace else where I now have to click on the link to read the article.

Sharing Dogs by Richard Stine

I must be missing the point about blog directories or social sharing sites. Sites such as StumbleUpon or Digg or Amplify or Ping.FM or any of the others allow people to post links to them, kind of like Delicious. Then those sites help them build up readership or visits or traffic in some way, supposedly, because people are visiting those sites and reading one’s material through them.

Okay, I get that… kind of. I only use Delicious to post some of my articles, but I’ve never gone through a single article I’ve ever seen there. I have a Technorati account more for the tracking of blog performance than anything else, even though I’ve pretty much decided it’s a joke since their numbers don’t make any sense to me anymore. I’ve never known if I get any bounce through those sites or not. According to Google Analytics, almost nothing comes from those sites now, though I can’t say whether it’s always been the case.

However, what I don’t get is why someone would send a post to Twitter through those sites instead of just sending people to their blogs. Maybe for articles that they’ve posted that belong to someone else that aren’t on blogs it makes sense, but otherwise… someone will have to explain this one to me.

It works differently in a few other places. For instance, on both Facebook and LinkedIn you can post a link to your blog post but you’d be irritating everyone is you posted your entire post into either of those sites. As a matter of fact, you wouldn’t want to do it anyway because suddenly you’d have duplicate content; that’s never good. Even so, what good would it do me to post a link to a blog post of mine on Facebook, then go to Twitter or wherever and post the link to my Facebook account so people can only see the headlines there and click on the post so they can come here?

Nope, I’m missing it; I don’t get it. And I know some of you are doing this. So, if you’re not afraid to “out” yourself, can you explain to me how this benefits you?

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

Growth Numbers; Looking Better

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Sep 10, 2008

I’m not really an internet marketer, but I’m working on it. Some people call this passive income, but the reality is that I spend about as much time working on this website and my other websites as I do marketing for my main business, which right now puts most of the money in my pocket, and probably will for another bunch of years or so.

The biggest issue, of course, comes down to traffic, and figuring out ways of driving traffic to one’s site. I haven’t totally gotten that one down, but I have achieved some fairly significant things I suppose.

Google ranks my site as 2 out of 10. I must have taken a hit somewhere along the line because it used to be 3; I must need to throw in more links or something, but this one makes little sense. Alexa ranks me around 371,000, and though I know we all love throwing stones at Alexa, it’s a better ranking than not having one at all, and that’s without the toolbar. The same goes for Compete Rank, which I also pretty much totally dismiss, but it’s got a ranking around 656,000 (and now that I’m mentioning it again, let’s see if it drives up the Russian spam once more).

Throwing out more numbers, Technorati ranks it around 293,000 and gives me an authority rank of 24; I’m not quite sure what that authority figure means, but it’s much higher than my business blog so I’ll take it, though I’m also somewhat insulted at the same time. Then again, the business blog is much more serious than this one is at times; I’d never throw in something like this on my business blog:

Moving on, I haven’t quite figured out how to check rankings on either Feedburner or Delicious, and I’m not even sure if they have rankings, per se, but Feedburner is showing that I have some people subscribing to my feed (once I added the Feedburner Feed Smith WordPress plugin, anyway), and that’s a good thing; here, my business blog is crushing this one.

And the average number of visitors per week is growing as well, though not anything drastic enough for me to start proclaiming I’m the new John Chow. Still, it’s moving forward, and that’s always a good thing. I’m not sure how popular the little links I put at the end of every post are, but some of them are pretty good items, including the one at the end of this one; enjoy the day!