Have you ever tried driving traffic from social bookmarking and failed? Ever submitted a page to Digg in the hope of getting a flood of traffic, only to have it buried with barely a murmur?

If that rings a bell then maybe you should try again, but this time target small, more tightly niched bookmarking sites. I’ll be the first to admit, I’ve never looked into the whole social media thing as much as I should, and apart from the occassional stream of traffic from Digg or Stumbleupon after a post that got picked up, I’ve not had a lot of success with it to date. That was until a few days ago when Brian over at Radical Hive mentioned a bookmarking site I’d never heard of before, Design Float, and the fact that he had enjoyed a flood of traffic from it.

Well, with nothing to lose, I decided to give it a try and submitted the article I had just written about using Wordpress as a content management system. I really wasn’t expecting much, but within a couple of hours I started to see a small but steady stream of visitors from this submission. Within 24 hours my submission was at the top of the category page (web design) and 6th on the frong page! Now of course, that’s nothing like the front page of a site like Digg, but over the past 48 hours I’ve had well over 1000 unique visitors sent from Design Float, all for spending 30 seconds submitting an article which wasn’t even highly targetted at this type of site.

Now, 1000 visitors might not seem like much but they are still coming in, and there are a growing number of these smaller bookmarking sites appearing all the time. What if you only got 1000 extra visitors for each submission, and you submitted a page to 5 bookmarking sites each day. That’s an extra 140,000 visitors in a month! What do think that might do to your revenue?

Over the next week I’m going to be taking a closer look at social media in general and sharing some tips on how to gain exposure and leverage through social networking, how to drive traffic with bookmarking and what you can do to help your submissions become popular.