One of the things that have become rather prevalent on the internet are social bookmarking sites. You may be asking yourself what exactly social bookmarking is. Well, according to this Wikipedia article:
Social Bookmarking is a method for internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the internet with the help of metadata, typically in the form of tags that collectively and/or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, “the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content.”
You can read the rest of the article to get a more in-depth look at exactly what social bookmarking is. Places that you can use social bookmarking are Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and even Technorati can be used as a social bookmarking site, as it allows you to favorite articles and blogs.
If you are using WordPress, plugins such as Sociable by Joost De Valk, can be a great help in allowing you to use social bookmarking. You can choose which sites you want people to be able to submit your posts to. If the content you are providing is something that readers feel others would benefit greatly from, they can just click the icon for the social bookmarking site they want to submit it to.
In the example of Digg, once a post or article is submitted, subsequent users who feel it is useful can click on the little Digg icon to add to the number of people who “dugg” the article. StumpleUpon uses a thumbs-up system. Delicious uses a system that you simply submit your bookmark and others who see your list of bookmarks can then click on it, read it, and if they like it as well, they can submit it to their own stream of bookmarks.
A couple of years ago, I used to see people on a forum I frequented actually posting links to new blog posts asking for Stumbles and Diggs to improve their blog standings. While I am not sure if this was particularly a kosher method of getting recognized on the social bookmarking sites, it was effective for those who did it.
However, I prefer to keep it simple. I use the Sociable plugin and leave it up to my readers whether or not they feel that my posts are worth of Diggs or Stumbles. Whichever method you use, giving your readers the option to click an icon to submit to their favorite social networking site is a good idea. This way, your readers can help promote your blog easily and quickly.
