What? Del.icio.us? What kind of url/company name is that? Well, it’s both a company name and a url, and Del.icio.us is one of the more popular social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking is sharing of website links publicly or through your network. Del.icio.us and many other services also allow you to tag the link with keywords and a short description or comment. You can decide per link whether it is shared with others and every keyword has a RSS feed tied to it so people can subscribe to your link feed (and to your del.icio.us profile page). Del.icio.us is valuable as a content provider, link network, research tool, and seo tool.
Content Provider
Del.icio.us is an easy way to add link blogging to your B2B website or blog. Once you add a link to del.icio.us, you can set it up so it automatically appears on your blog (through a script/tag). This is also an easy way to add content to your blog – tagging pages as you come upon them throughout the day. Both Firefox and IE have del.icio.us extensions which easily allow you to add the site you’re looking at to your profile.
Link Network
If your friends or colleagues are on del.icio.us, you can easily send them specific links (and they can send you links). This is a very valuable way of sharing important information or websites and allows others to browse them at their convenience. If they are sharing their links, you can also see what your network (or others) have tagged for various keywords, which is a very valuable way to keep up with what people feel is important online. This can also be valuable way to show your expertise in the B2B marketplace for whatever niche industries you serve.
Research Tool
Need to know what’s going on in your industry? Need to find links for a particular project or client? Searching del.icio.us for content can sometimes be more reliable than search engines (depending on the subject in question). I find it particularly valuable for subjects that search engines and other social bookmarking sites tend to bury because the subjects are not consumer oriented. Even if there are only a few entries for a particular subject, del.icio.us will give you access to all of them in a very easy-to-navigate format.
SEO Tool
Del.icio.us is a very valuable tool for sending traffic to your website, allowing you to submit and tag your content very easily. More importantly, it is not spamming the system, and usually not frowned upon (although it will look better if your link feed includes links other than your own content). It is also important to give your readers a link to del.icio.us on everything you write, to make it easy for them to submit and add your links to the network (add this! is a good product to look at).
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