How To: Delicious Bookmarking and Social Media Sites

Some of you are very experienced in using a variety of web tools, while some, like me, are probably on a learning curve. For those who are on a learning curve relative to using bookmarking tools and making use of social apps, this article shares a couple of tips that may be of interest to you.

While I have been using the web for many years, I really did not know anything about bookmarking tools, like del.ic.ious, until about 6 months ago. I would really have benefited from knowing about it much, much sooner. It’s a tool I use almost everyday now, and I suspect you could get a lot of benefit from it, too.

Right now I have about 11 pages of bookmarks organized on my delicious page. One friend of mine has 168 pages! In addition to having all this information stored in one place, it is organized by topics that are meaningful to me. The bookmarks are organized by tags ranging from 7 habits to web design and writing. Most of the bookmarks have more than one tag, because, in most cases, more than one tag makes sense. For example, I may tag an article from Stephen Covey’s blog with 7 habits and with productivity, and possibly with leadership (depending on the article).

Setting up an account at del.ic.ious is easy, and adding bookmarks to your account is easy as well. I use a Firefox extension that lets me add any article I am browsing to my del.ic.ious bookmarks. For example, in viewing a Matt Cutts article recently, I clicked the toolbar item added by this extension, and it took me to my del.ic.ious account and opened a window for me to label the article with tags and notes:

After adding tags, I saved it and now it is always available for me to find again later (either through my tags, or by using a search feature on delicious).

Hence, you can see that this is a superb way to accumulate and organize useful how-to information.

There is another feature that I whited out in the figure above: the ability to share the link with people in your “del.ic.ious network.” There are two people in my network, and sometimes I share a link with them (if I know they would be interested) and sometimes they share one with me. But, in respect of their privacy, I whited out their names in the above figure.

A lot of sites make it easy for you to bookmark their articles, whether you have a Firefox toolbar for it or not. For example, I typically provide one of the following bookmarking/sharing tools at the end of each article:

When you click on one of these, it gives you a quick way to bookmark the item on del.ic.ious (among other bookmarking sites) or to share it on social sites like Facebook and MySpace and StumbleUpon and Digg and so on. So, to illustrate, here is a snapshot of part of the screen you would see by clicking the “Bookmark” icon at the bottom of this article:

• Note for fellow bloggers:
• I am currently using the AddThis Bookmarking/Sharing tool rather than Alex King’s ShareThis tool because Michael Arrington of TechCrunch is using the AddThis tool. Arrington impresses me as someone who really thinks through everything he does on his site, so I assume he has a good reason for choosing AddThis. Both tools seem like good ones to me, though, and I am not personally aware of any advantage of one over the other.

Most bloggers, myself included, like to use these tools in hopes that users will bookmark or share the bloggers’ articles, thereby generating more traffic to the site. I haven’t had much success with this myself, in that only a relatively small number of my articles have been bookmarked and I have only had a couple of surges of traffic from sites like StumbleUpon. One of these came from me mentioning one of my articles to Leo Babauta and he submitted it to StumbleUpon, resulting a significant traffic increase to my site for a few days. A nice, pleasant surprise. My only real disappointment is that my article on how I retired did not get shared via StumbleUpon or Digg: that is one article I believe should be shared widely. I even submitted it to StumbleUpon myself, but it did not really go anywhere.

Oh well, back to the point: Hopefully this short introduction to bookmarking and sharing tools gives you enough of a how-to for you to try it out yourself. The best way to learn how to use these tools is, of course, to dive into using them. I am comfortable now using del.ic.ious but am still a bit of a noob to sharing via Facebook and StumbleUpon and Digg. I submitted my retirement article to Facebook on Sunday, so maybe a few of my Facebook friends may benefit from it. But, like I mentioned, I really need to get more active in this area and become better at sharing articles I think are of interest.

As I noted earlier, I wish I had started using these tools much sooner, especially del.ic.ious. There is a ton of information that I could have saved into a format that I could easily retrieve today.

For those of you who have been doing this longer than me, please feel free to chime with your tips and insights.