Social bookmarks

They used to work very well, but due to enormous amounts of spam on the social bookmarking websites the method is not as efficient as it were 2-3 years ago. Promoting a website through the social bookmarking websites has its pros and cons:

1. Pro: SB websites get crawled very frequently - every 2 or 3 hours. This means if you manage to get there you will get your piece of traffic from search engines pretty soon.
2. Pro: Social bookmarks not only help you raise your link strength, but also bring some amont of pure traffic from the bookmarking sites themselves. Depending on the popularity of the article posted on SB the traffic to your website could vary from few grains of sand to a pure avalanche.
3. Con: Unfortunately, you cannot simply bookmark a link to your website and wait for traffic. This could have worked in the first days of social bookmarking, but now it does not. First, the amount of posts (diggs, reddits, stumbles etc) per minute does not leave many chances to each particluar post to get popular. Your bookmark simply may lost between hundreds of thousands others. Second, bookmarking websites often have either moderators or some way for other users to disapprove an inappropriate post or a bookmark. So if you post a bookmark of your own website, the link is deleted and your account is banned. Too bad.
   
   There are some workarounds for this though.
   • The whitehat one. Post an article or some other valuable (do you hear me? I said valuable!) content on your website and wait until someone else links to it. Then you should bookmark that site instead. This won't increase your link popularity or PageRank, but still bring you visitors. Oh, did I forgot to tell that the other linking site could be yours too? So you may have a commercial website with the article and a non-commercial blog where you mention that commercial article. Or even you may have another blog where you mention the blog that mentions the commercial article (in the house that Jack built).
   • The blackhat one. Create as many fake accounts as you need to promote your bookmark on every social bookmark site. Getting tough now since the method has been revealed ages ago and now SB websites are highly loaded with such spam already.
4. Con: One more bad thing about social bookmarks is: they tend to work for a limited period of time. They bring you a splash of traffic in the short term, but then they simply deplete and only give few visits a week. On the other hand, even few visits still's more than no visits at all.
5. Con: And the worst thing about social bookmarking is the quality of the traffic they produce. The traffic of a social bookmarking website is not targeted well, it is based on the impulse of curiosity, not on the intent. This means that you will (or will not - see above) receive a large load of traffic, but if you manage to convert merely 1% of it to customers you can congratulate yourself - you've done a good job! The conversion rate for this type of traffic is extremely low so this recipe only works well for a limited class of websites and products. Though it is still good if you want to build a community or simply need many people on your website for some reason (AdSense and so on).