Here’s an interesting question to ask yourself: would you share your bookmarks with a friend? How about 100 friends? How about 1000?

If the answer is no then don’t worry. It doesn’t make you a bad person. There are some good reasons why it can happen so read on…

Social bookmarking sites such as Digg, del.icio.us and stumbleupon allow internet users to vote on their favorite sites. You can even start your own based on Pligg. If these bookmarked sites get lots of votes (or tags, or diggs, or whatever you want to call them) they will make it to the top and get noticed. This is web2.0 in action.

How do you share your bookmarks? It’s very easy to do this. On most of these sites you have a profile page which stores all of the tags that you have created. Sharing or promoting your bookmarks is just a case of sending people to this page with a link.

So what would 100 people think of your bookmarks? Would they think you are a good Digger or a great citizen on StumbleUpon? Are you consistently tagging interesting sites that are relevant to the category that you choose? If so then the answer to the first question should be yes!

If the answer is no, it might be that:

1. You are bookmarking for the sake of it
2. You just Stumble your own stuff to get traffic. If you do, and it’s good stuff, then this seems OK to me. It can look a little self-centered though
3. You are bookmarking to try to raise your profile

Here’s an easier question: if you don’t feel happy sharing all your bookmarks with friends then how about sharing a subset of your bookmarks? Maybe they are tagged with the word “proud”, or “worth sharing”. Many of the bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us, allow you to use tags.

If you can consistently show that you are finding interesting pages that are relevant to your group of online friends then you will get a good reputation and people will start to look at what you are up to. This leads to more visitors and more traffic to your own sites. That’s a good thing, and means you can say yes to the original question.

If you can avoid making any references to other blogs then should be able to limit the chances of:

1. Anyone else finding out about you
2. Learning about other interesting topics to blog about
3. Your Google Ranking ever increasing
4. Helping out your visitors by referring them to other useful information

You don’t want anybody to find you anyway, right? If you don’t need links to other blogs then this avoids the need to read other blogs, so this will save you a ton of time. Also don’t forget that Google values pages that link out to other relevant pages. You don’t want Google to think you are valuable, do you?

Finally, your blog is just for you anyway, isn’t it? Why should you help your visitors when they do find you?

It’s a great place for building focussed content and promoting it. Squidoo rates pretty high in Google and your pages can appear high up in search results.

It’s pretty easy to set up a lens and build some content, but making it successful and getting a good lens rank is a little bit harder. You can make some money if visitors click on the AdSense links which feature on your lens. This is what happened today!

I do know a Giant Squid and you can check out some of her lenses at EverythingMouse on Squidoo. A Giant Squid award is given by the folks at Squidoo to someone who creates top notch lenses (and lots of them). I’ll be following her lead as I develop more lenses and get started on promoting them.

Part of the answer is to check in with your affiliate (or their provider) and look at your impressions, clicks and sales. But this is only part of the answer.

To get the complete picture you need to use your web analytics tool to track some key things on your site:

1. Page views on the pages with the affiliate links
2. How visitors navigated to these pages
3. Clicks on the links through to the affiliate sites

Why do you need to check these too? I knew you’d ask.

Page views should be approximately the same as the impressions reported by your affiliate. Hopefully your affiliate will report a higher number of impressions as visitors return to their site with the same cookie set. It certainly should not be less – this could be a sign that your tracking code is wrong

Navigation to these pages is useful to know because you want to know where visitors come from and which referrers are working for you. Your web analytics tool should be able to show which is the most successful, whether it’s organic search (Google etc) or direct referrers.

It’s good to start tracking the clicks out of your site. If you don’t track them they will just be reported as exits by your web analytics system. This will give you a terrible click through rate and make your efforts seem worthless! You can add tracking to your outbound links using Javascript onclick functions, or you can insert your own gateway pages that have their own tracking code.

If you can get started with these metrics then you can start to really understand your traffic and what it is doing for you.

Otherwise you’re just working in the dark…