Bookmark This! Bookmarkers .. good or bad? I believe that I've been thinking erroneously about bookmarkers for the past few years, rarely thinking about them at all to tell you the truth. Until recently, I reasoned that bookmarkers get so used to your site that they learn how to avoid your sponsors and eventually just end up raising your bandwidth bill without any positive effects. I did some research and found quite a number of webmaster resource sites outlining the same logic. I now believe that I, as well as a number of these sites, have been wrong. This business has become more difficult over the past few years in many ways. For the same traffic type, signup ratios are lower than they once were. The amount of readily accessible free content has certainly contributed to this with TGP's leaving the pack. With many TGP's having links to 1000 galleries averaging 20 pics each, a surfer can easily find links to 20,000 free pics on one free site. If you're playing the high-traffic/low sign up ratio game, such as running a TGP, it probably means that you're reliant on the persistence of a constant flux of traffic. Since most everyone uses trading scripts that work in real-time, any server downtime can result in a serious loss of traffic. One way to decrease this dependence is by increasing your bookmarkers. Imagine having 25,000 people a day coming back to your site each and every day. Your server goes down for two days because of some horrible mishap, killing all your active trades in the process. But as soon as it comes back up, here come your bookmarkers again, maybe 1000 an hour, reactivating your trades. Now more than ever, having a stable source of traffic can give one some insulation against the whims of the Universe. You can keep your bookmarking surfers from being valueless by constantly updating and changing your site, moving the location of your trades. You can also build credibility with your bookmarking surfers and then when you point out a new link to them, like a trade with my site Z Thumbs, for example, they'll trust your judgement, go and check out the site, and you'll get hits back in return. The right balance of these two things, building credibility but keeping a degree of unfamiliarity to your site site can be difficult to attain and may require a lot of time to get it right. Familarity itself builds credibility. If I had top pick the one most important thing on this page to remember it's this: Maintaining the crucial balance of UNfamiliarity and credibility is the key to success with a highly bookmarked site. You'll have to think about what that means to you and what you can get out of it. I think it's an immensely important idea. So how do you GET more bookmarkers? And does having the words "Bookmark this site" on your site actually increase your bookmarkers? I always caution that each site is different. They have in a way, a personality, acting resistant to one idea and accepting another. There can be no replacement for your own experimentation. I will give my results though, so that they might give you a place to start. One site of mine showed a nearly 100% increase in bookmarkers after placing the text "Bookmark this site" on it. I have also experimented with fresh content vs. stale content. On days when the site was updated the day the surfer visited, bookmarking rates were substantially higher. So here are four clues, 1. Tell them to bookmark 2. give them fresh content 3. Tell them it's fresh content, and 4. Tell them it will be updated again soon. Results may vary in accordance with the Laws of Nature. I'll tell you a little known secret that will allow you to estimate your bookmarkers. Look through your access logs for the number of times the favicon.ico image is accessed. In Internet Explorer 5 and above, when someone bookmarks your site, the browser checks to see if there is an image that you have prepared to be placed to the left of the text in your bookmarks. If you want to create this bookmark image, create a 16x16 gif or bmp and use an image converter to change it to the ico format. It is recommended that you use 16 Windows color. You can download Irfan View for free. It has ico support. Anyway, you can use this fact to estimate your bookmarkers. As of July 2001, one source I checked showed that 81% of browsers in use are of version IE 5 or higher. Using that knowledge, you can estimate your total bookmarkers for a day by counting the number of times favicon.ico is accessed and multiplying by 1.23. Note that you don't actually need to have the image there for it to be counted as an access. As long as someone using IE5 + bookmarks your site, it will show up in your access logs. I think an excellent site will have something like a 5-10% bookmark rate. Keep up on browser war numbers here These last two things almost seem too simple to include but they are important. Equivalent to a bookmark is someone that remembers your URL and types it in. Using a simple to remember name will maximize the number of people that WANT TO remember your site that WILL actually remember it. Also, remember the importance of submitting to the major search engines. There are a lot of people that will remember your site name but not use the URL bar. These people sometimes type your site name directly into a search engine box. I know that many webmasters use clever titles with lots of keywords to increase their hits in the search engines. This DOES work, but for a high-content free site such as a TGP aiming at attaining bookmarkers, it is best to have your site name come before the keywords in your title because eventually there will be a lot of people searching for it by name. Get those bookmarkers, you'll be very happy later.