People who do a lot of social bookmarking to promote their own web writing will almost always focus their efforts on promotion through Digg. While it’s true that Digg is a great tool for driving web traffic to a site, I tend to prefer to focus my efforts on smaller niche social bookmarking sites. These sites are easier to gain a following through and that following tends to be more highly focused on the areas about which I’m writing which means that the traffic that is generated through the site is targeted and tends to create longer-lasting followers of my work.

Three of my favorite smaller social bookmarking sites are Mixx, StumbleUpon and Tip’d. Mixx and StumbleUpon are relatively large for social bookmarking sites. They allow for general posts on a diverse range of topics but they are still considerably smaller than Digg which makes it easier to use them to drive traffic to specific types of articles. Mixx has a really great setup for its groups which helps the community feel smaller than it is (in a positive way). Tip’d is a niche social bookmarking site specifically for finance topics which I find to be useful when promoting those types of articles.

I also used to really like Hugg when it was around – it was a great place for sharing articles on green topics – but apparently it couldn’t stand the test of time and ended up fading away. That’s one risk that you run when you use smaller social bookmarking sites. The same thing seems to have happen with Wordsy which was the only books and writing focused niche social bookmarking site I knew of. Which sites do you use?

Tags: blogs, business, digg, internet, kathryn vercillo, marketing, social bookmarking, websites, writing