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Are focused, niche bookmarking websites the future of the Web?

Several weeks ago, I bumped into http://sphinn.com/ a self-described, “Internet Marketing & Discussion Forum.” Unlike Digg, Furl, Reddit, Technorati and others, Sphinn accepts links for a relatively narrow group of subjects. Topics related search marketing (SEO, PPC etc.), online marketing and social media will make it onto Sphinn.

I was immediately hooked. Sphinn is nirvana to someone like me who is interested in online marketing. It gives me exactly what I want. I don’t have to dig through a bunch of posts on topics that I don’t like, I don’t have to search some huge website for the most relevant tags or categories. By definition, Sphinn contains the most relevant topics for me.

And from what I can tell it is a professional network. The people who post seem to be knowledgeable about their topics, I haven’t seen any flame wars or nasty attacks (I haven’t been using the network for a few weeks, so perhaps, I just haven’t found the flame wars?)

**Update: Ok, I was being a little naive. There does seem some name calling and flaming, here and there on Sphinn.

I can’t help but wonder if smaller networks like Sphinn are the future of social bookmarking. Don’t many people want to quickly and easily find targeted information on the subjects they are interested in? Don’t you?

And, of course, for times when not in the mood, you can always take a nice random walk down stumbleupon.

Many people are of the opinion that making comments on other people’s blog posts is a good tool for gaining traffic and incoming links to your own websites. There are dissenting opinions of course, including those that mention the dreaded “nofollow” tag that many blogging platforms add to URLs in comments. Regardless, if you do track and measure your traffic via Google Analytics or some other tool, you will find that making blog comments can drive a certain amount of traffic to your websites.

Not convinced? Try it for two weeks. Every day for the next 14 days, do a Google search for blog topics related to your website. Go to the blog, read the post and make a thoughtful, intelligent comment, making sure to fill in your website URL in the comment form. Do not add a direct link within the text of your comment as you are likely to get banned and your comment will not show up.

Wait another two weeks or so and check your analytics traffic. Depending on the popularity of the blog on which you posted and the popularity of your comment, you should see some incoming traffic. People will click on the link associated with your comment and come take a look at your website.

You may also want to use a tool like Yahoo’s free site explorer to see if the incoming links are listed: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/