Suppose that thanks to following the best social bookmarking strategy your great content has been noticed on Digg, Delicious or Reddit and you suddenly find your traffic has increased tenfold. You now face the problem: what do I do with this traffic? Traffic needs control, and failing to do so can lead to big problems. But first let's go back to the beginning. What do I need lots of traffic for?
In a world where it seems that everyone is fighting to get thousands of visitors, it sounds counter-intuitive to say that the best social bookmarking practice is not to let your traffic grow too much, but too much traffic will, in fact, affect the quality of your site in certain ways. For example, if a limited amount of users have created a good and interesting community, you may find that too many additions at once completely topple the environment that you - or your users - have worked so hard at creating. Frustration will ensue, and you may find that some of your most loyal followers abandon you.
More complex actions, such as conversions or any CTR-type strategy, will also not be helped by this sort of uncontrolled increase in traffic, which despite our obsession over it, really has only two kinds of positive influences. On the one hand, anything to do with search engine rankings, and on the other, publicity for your site - attention, branding and influence. But again, this can blow up in your face: if you don't have a plan for your traffic, feedback may be negative.
Suppose that you don't have a great plan, but you just want more traffic in order to get your site to work and are not sure how to manage it. My general advice would be to make your site more 'closed', that is, harder to participate in. An extreme example of this would be to close the comment section or any possibility of participating, but it doesn't have to be that extreme, specially if your business thrives on user interaction. You could just make it harder to comment and participate, by placing filters and making your site, again counter-intuitively, a little bit less user friendly. That way you will be sure that only people who are really interested in your product or content will participate. And although you might be losing some of the less tech-oriented people who are nonetheless knowledgeable and worthy contributors to the discussion, it just might be worth it. Keep an open channel of communication, such as an email or contact form so that those kinds of users can find out how to participate.
Sometimes the best social bookmarking practices come from our own website. Displaying your work is just a small step of the process.
