Yesterday I wrote a bit on the questionable value for bloggers of getting posted on digg.com and it got me thinking last night about what is out there that does bring value to a blogger.

During that time one of my posts made it to Robert Scoble’s shared link feed and I saw a nice increase in traffic from it and as I looked through the referrer logs I noticed something interesting.

You see, unlike digg shared link feeds replicate the original post and since I provide a full text feed there would be no reason for folks to come to the blog itself but here they were. Not only were they coming in on the original link these readers; unlike folks coming in from digg or StumbleUpon, are reading more than just the one post. Then as an added bonus there was even a couple of comments made on different posts I have made by these same folks.

Right off the bat it was easy to see that the quality of incoming readers was much better from the shared link feeds than from digg. Granted the numbers - especially for a better known blog - might favor digg by shear volume but the quality is definitely on the side of shared link feeds which for me is more important than volume.

While there are experts out there who say go for the digg effect I would now counter with go for the shared link feed effect - it has a better return on your time investment. Additionally because of the nature of RSS feeds you won’t get that huge spike as you do from getting dugg which besides being easier on your hosting also won’t set off the AdSense gaming alarms.

At this point I only have two shared link feeds; Robert Scoble (rss) and Nick Bradbury (rss), but I can tell I’ll be keeping my eye out for some more of the good ones that are out there and hopefully find more of my posts making my way into them. I think also I’ll hunt up Nick’s post on setting up a FeedDemon shared link feed and see if I can help share the wealth.

If you know of any really good tech related shared link feeds please share them in the comments

Conversation Tags: Robert Scoble, Nick Bradbury, shared link feeds, return on time invested, digg