Blog Training and How-To Guide for Business Blogging

Socail bookmarking tip courtesy of Dan Smith, Know More Media author and vice president of publishing.

Last week we talked about using the social networks Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com to help network your blog and increase its traffic. In the spirit of this theme, today I’ll focus on Del.icio.us (which is now also found at Delicious.com).

What is del.icio.us?

How does Delicious help a blogger?

While Delicious may not carry the traffic clout it once did, due to the many other popular social networking sites that have since arisen, it is still a valuable resource to any quality blogger and is still one of the most popular social networking sites. As with all social networking sites, the articles and posts you submit and bookmark may get popular in the Delicious community and bring a lot of traffic. Delicious does have public pages, accessible by non-users and user alike, that show the most popular bookmarked posts and the most recent bookmarked posts. Whether your bookmarks make it to these lists depends on the quality of the content of the post or site, as well as your connections within the community.

One of the aspects of Delicious I like the most is that your bookmarks—the posts you save and submit—are stored permanently on Delicious in an organized and accessible fashion. This helps with providing inlinking to the bookmarked sites and it also helps with the long tail effect for networking and promotion, increasing the exposure for whatever sites you bookmark. For a long time to come, other people may find your bookmarks through the topical tags, by browsing your bookmarks, or by saving the same bookmarks you do.

Be part of the Delicious community.

As with all social networking sites, it is absolutely critical that you become a part of community by bookmarking and submitting a variety of articles and posts that are truly interesting and of high quality. If you bookmark too many of your own posts, or too many low quality posts, you will be reviled in the community and del.icio.us will be useless to you.

How to use Delicious.

As I mentioned, there are public “popular” and “recent” pages for anyone to see and use, but in order to submit new posts and bookmark (vote on) existing posts, you need to be a registered user, which is free to do through this link. You can then submit/bookmark posts through this link, or use free easily-placed browser buttons that go in your browser so that when you are reading a post or article you want to submit/bookmark, you simply click on the “post to del.icio.us” button in your browser and enter in the info. Of course, you should use descriptive, catchy titles for the posts you submit, as well as sharp, helpful short descriptions. Remember—you’re trying to stand out from the crowd.

Del.icio.us is still a viable networking resource. They have over 3 million users. Who knows how many of those are actually active, but there is still significant general activity on the site.

What has been your experience with Delicious? Have you found success with it, and how?