Del.icio.us is the most popular bookmarking service on the web. By getting on the Del.icio.us popular or hotlist page you could get thousands of visitors coming to your website within minutes.
Here are some ways that I have found that can help your content get on these pages.
Know your audience
Just like any other social site, Del.icio.us users prefer specific topics compared to others.
The tag cloud feature can help you understand what users like and what they dislike:
- The larger the font size, the more items that users bookmark related to that subject.
- You can drill down into specific tags and look at the current popular stories and the past popular stories for that tag.
- One of the best things you can do is learn from the mistakes of others so that you decrease your chances of making them in the future. Dig deep into the stories and find out what is not hot so that you do not write on similar things.
The greatest story is only great if everyone sees it
Knowing your audience is only half the battle. If you want to get on the popular or hotlist page you have to make sure that everyone bookmarks your story and the easiest way to do this is to make it very easy for your website visitors.
Embed “add to del.icio.us” buttons within your RSS feed and on your website. This way your website visitors can easily add the stories they like to their Del.icio.us bookmarks. Who knows, 30 of them might bookmark a story within a short period of time which might be enough to get on the popular page.
You don’t necessarily have to embed these links into your RSS feed or website, but each bookmark adds up. It could be the difference of being towards the bottom of the popular and hotlist page compared to the top. The difference between being at the top compared to the bottom can be thousands of visitors.
Conclusion
Getting on the Del.icio.us popular or hotlist page is not the easiest thing to accomplish, but with a little elbow grease anything is possible. By creating valuable content that Del.icio.us users are into and by leveraging your website traffic you can potentially get on the popular or hotlist page. Just keep in mind that if it does not work out the first time, learn from your experience and try again.
Tag:
Add to 
Bookmark Murdok:
Neil Patel is an Internet marketing consultant for ACS where he has lead Internet marketing strategies for companies such as Hewlett Packard and Samsung. Currently Neil blogs about his marketing experiences at Pronet Advertising.
