Social bookmarking and social networking sites can offer a wealth of traffic to your website when utilized correctly. I wrote about this last year, documenting my experience of combining Twitter and StumbleUpon to generate a huge surge in site visitors. Wouldn’t it be great if you could sustain that kind of growth by using a variety of social bookmarking sites?

The trouble with that kind of approach is that it can be terribly time-consuming. Sometimes, it’s just a better idea to pay someone else to do it for you and that serves as the subject of this review. Today, we consider the social bookmarking service being offered by uSocial. It could be the simplest solution you’ve seen to date.

No Accounts, No Interface, Just Email


The philosophy behind this social bookmarking service isn’t new. You’ve surely encountered a few similar services on the Internet that promise all sorts of traffic rewards, telling you about their system of submitting your website to directories and social bookmarking sites.

Typically, these kinds of services will either get you to install some software on your computer or to access some sort of web-based application. From there, you’d enter all of your usernames and passwords for the different social bookmarking sites. Only after all of this could you finally submit a page. This saved time over doing several manual submissions, but it was still time consuming.

With USocial, you just do this:

usocial-email

There is no software to download. There is no user manual to read. Instead, all you do is send an email message containing all the URLs that you would like to see submitted and uSocial takes care of the rest. That’s it. You don’t even need accounts on the various sites, because they will all be submitted using some other account. It really doesn’t get any easier. That said, it is a little unclear how the keywords and descriptions are selected for the URL submission process.

From Digg to Del.icio.us

What social bookmarking and social networking sites are utilized by uSocial’s service? By their last count, uSocial will direct your submissions to nearly 200 social sites around the web. Looking through the list of sites, you’ll find familiar names like Reddit, Mixx, Tumblr, Digg, and Furl. Since there are so many, you’ll also find a lot that you don’t recognize too.

In a highly unscientific study, uSocial found that their service was able to generate sustained results after about 20 days. Scroll about halfway through their sales page to see this shot from Google Analytics.

usocial-analytics

The unnamed site went from about 400 daily visitors to almost 700 daily visitors after about 20 days of using the uSocial bookmarking submission service. Being able to nearly double your traffic in such a short time is pretty good, I’d say. Whether it can sustain that kind of growth remains to be seen. Naturally, you’ll need some good content too.

How Much Does It Cost?

Since you are not purchasing a specialized piece of software or anything like that, you shouldn’t be all that surprised that uSocial’s social bookmarking service is subscription-based. I’m assuming that they keep a database of user emails so some rogue user doesn’t take advantage of the service for free.

While you could certainly go to the regular page and pay the full asking price for uSocial’s service, you’d much rather get a special deal, right? The regular price for uSocial’s service is $47 a month. However, if you go to the special John Chow discount page, you’ll find that you can get in for $37 a month instead. That’s just a touch over a dollar a day for an unlimited number of submissions. Yes, you can submit as many pages as you’d like.

usocial-price

Posted by Problogger Diary at 3:57 AM