Your chances to make money online have a clear relation with the popularity of your internet presence. To bring the money into your pockets you first have to get people’s attention, and in Internet it can be a little hard if you don’t know where to go.

If you have a website or blog, surely you know about del.icio.us and all the traffic it can bring to your web in a couple of hours. Now, if you want to leverage that power you must somehow get into the del.icio.us popular list, a page with a list of the most bookmarked pages in the last day.

But how can you do that? It’s not easy, I cannot guarantee you can do it, but in this post I present to you a recipe of 5 simple steps that will help you to get into the del.icio.us popular page, and stay there for enough time to increase your daily visitors, subscribers, sales, reputation, etc. If you keep yourself on the del.icio.us popular page for some 20 hours you will easily get more than 3000 extra unique visitors during that time, so it’s worth the effort.

This recipe must be followed in strict order if you want to have success using its techniques, so let’s see:

1. Have something useful to offer

   Yes, the old trick of having something useful to offer. Don’t think you can overcome this step because people can smell idiocy from a loong distance so first things first and do your homework preparing something useful for them. It can be a blog post, a nice web application, a good offer on your online shop, whatever. Just be sure it is worth your visitor’s time.

2. Be sure people can easily bookmark your website on del.icio.us

   PR people know that one way to improve their chances to get featured in a newspaper by sending a press release to a journalist, is by doing as much as possible of the journalist work. In the same way, if you want your visitors to bookmark your website in del.icio.us you have to give them all the tools so they find harder *not* to bookmark it. In blogs this is pretty common and easy thanks to well known plugins, but in websites and online shops this is uncommon so put attention to this detail.

3. Submit your website to a good digg clone

   Search for a good digg clone that covers topics related to the page you want to promote, and submit it. Why using a digg clone and not just digg itself? Well, I want to improve your chances to get on the home page of that digg clone, and although getting in the digg homepage is the biggest prize, it’s also the harder one to achieve. So make yourself a favor and if you are not popular yet, try hitting digg clones because is a lot easier to get something useful out from there.

   But what is this step good for? If you reach the homepage on one of those digg clones you will have very high chances that their users will bookmark your site in del.icio.us which is exactly what you want All those users will give you the most part of your bookmarks so they are fundamental for this recipe.

   Once you have submitted what you are trying to promote, wait to see if you can reach the home page. If it happens and you have “enough” votes (this depends on your digg clone), continue with the following point…

4. Pick 5-10 friends and ask them to bookmark your website on del.icio.us

   This step requires a small doses of luck, but not so much. The del.icio.us popular page is an static page, i.e. it’s generated every 6 or so hours, and it doesn’t reflects what’s happening with bookmarks in real time. To get into the del.icio.us popular page you need at least 10 bookmarks in the last hours, and a total amount of 20 or so bookmarks for the page you are promoting. To help you in this step you can ask 5-10 friends to bookmark your page at the same time once it is featured on the digg clone homepage, when it’s more probable that more people will bookmark the page by themselves. This way you will get at least 10 bookmarks in the last hour and more coming thanks to the digg clone. You have just paved your way up to the del.icio.us popular page ;).

   Maybe you can think you can get on the popular page just by asking your friends to bookmark you. Sure, it may work, but that won’t keep you in the popular page for 20+ hours only thanks to your friends. You can be there for just 6 hours and that will bring you a couple of visitors but not much. In the other hand if you are supported by the visitors from a digg clone you can get hundreds of bookmarks and that can easily keep you in the popular page for a lot of hours.

   And where’s the luck? If your friend’s bookmarks come close to the time the popular page changes, then surely you will be featured there. Otherwise, you risk to don’t make it :(.

5. Show them that you are alive

   OK, so you make into the del.icio.us popular page! Now you are enjoying thousands of new visitors in your website but what to do with this popularity? Show them you are alive!

   Traffic building doesn’t have cheap tricks: this techniques can show you what you can achieve when you reach a good online presence, but at the next day you will return to reality and your stats will go down, and you will return to high stats only by working day-to-day, month-to-month in your website in order to grow your audience.

   The best thing you can do when all this people arrives at your website is to show them that you are working. Write another good post for your blog or make a good offers to help you make some new clients easily. You must show them there’s serious work behind what they saw, that’s the only way you can retain some of those visitors in the next days.

Bonus tips

1. If you reach enough bookmarks, you will be featured on the del.icio.us homepage in the hot list. That will skyrocket your visitors even more. The bad part is that you can’t control the time you are there because that list constantly rotates. In the best case you can expect being there for 5-7 hours.
2. Once you left the popular and the hot list, you will still be in some minor popular pages depending on specific tags users have used to bookmark your page, so you will enjoy del.icio.us visitors for some more time ;).
3. Once you got into the del.icio.us popular page, you will be featured in many more sites that extract content from del.icio.us. One of those sites is popurls.com, that can by itself bring to your site some extra 350 unique visitors

So there it is. Keep in mind that this is just one technique and I encourage you to use it to promote quality content. Don’t try to SPAM digg clones because you will be kicked in your ass as in other social bookmarking site. So use it wisely and for the best good of everybody.

Additional resources

• 7 ways to get to the top of the del.icio.us popular page by Darren Rowse from Problogger.net.
• Making your content delicious by Neil Patel from Pronet Advertising.

Don’t forget that you learned how to get into the del.icio.us popular list thanks to RobertoAlamos.com. And to help you remind this please subscribe by email or RSS ;).

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 12:42 am and is filed under Lists, Promotion, Smart Hacks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.