To Sphinn or not to sphinn… That is the question. Bookmarking one’s own articles can be frowned upon being compared with mere spamming. And here is my sincere confession: I DO bookmark posts authored by me as social bookmarking is the best way to get to know your audience, to evaluate your own content and to experiment.
| Evaluation method |
Result | What does it mean? |
| Compare traffic and feed subscriptions (e.g. Google analytics and Feedburner stats).  |
Your website experienced the huge traffic boost but there were no feed subscriptions. | 1. The traffic was untargeted (refer to the bounce rate and page views stats of the analytics);2. Your content does not provide any new/ exciting/ useful information.
3. You do not provide any clear way to subscribe to your feed. |
Compare the actual SB traffic and response rate. |
You expected your post to generate a much better response (e.g. in the form of comments). |
1. The visitors from SB are not interested in your niche (Google analytics will help to identify this);2. Your website is not optimized for that (it requires registration, asks for additional details, etc);
3. Your post content is not optimized to generate comments (e.g. you do not encourage people to comment) |
Evaluate the social response. |
Your post was not bookmarked in any other social bookmarking network. | Your post headline is not optimized for SB. |
| Compare the response from a general social bookmarking community and from a niche one. |
Your post is much better responded in a general/ niche directory. | Your writing (style) is universal / very niche specific (nothing bad in either of these, unless your aims are inverse). |
| Compare the expected reaction and the actual readers’ reaction. | You expected your post to do much better in SB. | Well, that’s a great opportunity to assess your own content and writing skills. |
So the most essential stats to look into are:
1. Traffic numbers (Google analytics):
2. Bounce rate (Google analytics);
3. Page views per source (Google analytics);
4. Feed subscription stats (Feedburner.com):
5. Commenting rate;
6. Blog and social bookmarking response rate (Technorati reactions).
