Yesterday marked out 80th blog post. We’re proud of that because it really took us quite a while to get the hang of it, but we’re on a roll now. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, then we thank you for sticking with us. If you’re new, then we thank you for helping us grow. Now onto something related to Internet marketing…

Today we’re going to talk about how to use del.icio.us to promote your site. We’re beginning with the assumption that you already have an account and have already installed the tool to bookmark web sites.

When you take the action of bookmarking a web site, you will have the options of typing a title, comments, and tags for the site, separated by a space. The title should incorporate the most popular search phrases people are using to search for your product or service. And it should make the reader really want to click the link. Strong copy writing skills are handy at this step. It is also a good idea to type some comments because others may read your comments before deciding whether or not to visit or bookmark the site.

Then you will type in a list of keywords your customers might use to find your web site. It would probably be a good idea to do some keyword research to find the search phrases people are using to find web sites like yours. Keyword research is a detailed topic unto itself, so we will not discuss general purpose keyword research in this document. But one good way to find keywords searchers are using is to do a search related to your business in the del.icio.us search box, then select one of the top results to inspect it to see what tags people have applied to that web site.

For example, if you search for “log cabins” in del.icio.us, the top result (at the time of this writing) has a header that starts “Log homes & log cabins from scratch –“, which is a link to a builder of log homes. Highlighted in pink next to the listing are the words “saved by 30 people”. Clicking that pink link will show you the comments people have made about the site, as well as the most common tags used for the site (on the right-side of the screen). Clicking “list” in the common tags box shows the exact number of times that each tag was used. In our example, the tag “building” was used 8 times, and the tag “loghomes” was used 5 times. The “cloud” view does the same thing, but visually rather than with numbers (heavier used tags are bigger). The term for displaying tags in this manner is a “tag cloud”. You will also notice that above the search results is a section called “Related tags” which will show you more tags related to your search.

Using the above technique will give you a good idea of the tags other people are using to bookmark web sites in your industry, which is a good way of building a list of tags for your site. We recommend bookmarking one page from your site every day, with a set of tags that apply specifically to that page. If you can get some of your co-workers, friends, employees, etc., to also do this on a regular basis, you expose your site to many more people who, hopefully, will like your site good enough to bookmark it themselves.

For help using social bookmarking sites to promote your web site, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or Info@WorkMedia.net.