Promote yourself with StumbleUpon and Delicious

Our friend Denise McGill, author of the "Writing Tips for Small Business Owners" booklet, asked about using social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Delicious to promote her works online. Here's a very quick introduction.

StumbleUpon aims to help people discover neat things online that they otherwise might not. Delicious allows you to bookmark favorite items online, and share those bookmarks with friends.

StumbleUpon
Stumble Upon has been good at bringing spurts of visitors on occasion. I sometimes use their "su.pr" URL shortening service to share links on Twitter and Facebook. (Thanks, Chris Cree for sharing it.) You get two bonuses when you use su.pr to shorten a web address: you get statistics on the number of clicks, and you get exposure to other StumbleUpon users. For small businesses, those click through numbers are an extremely valuable measurement.

Small biz example: For Allen's Liquors, I wrote a reference post with the number of ounces in the different liquor bottle sizes. Because it was the kind of thing that is useful for lots of people, I used su.pr to shorten the link and share it on Facebook and Twitter.

Delicious
Delicious has brought me some excellent traffic in the past, though not as much as previously. So, maybe it is less popular than before. Or maybe I haven't hit the right combination to get attention lately!

Small businesses can use Delicious to share links to any resources customers might use. We use it for Tourism Currents, to share all the great tourism promotion and tech examples that Sheila Scarborough finds. (Sheila turns up an insane amount of great content.) You can see it here: http://delicious.com/tourismcurrents

Rex Hammock uses Delicious to share small business news items: http://delicious.com/smallbusiness


The trick is to make sure you show customers that you have created this resource. At Tourism Currents, we have a link right on the home page to the Delicious links. We also mention it in newsletters, in our lessons, at in-person events, and in anything else we can think of.

In use
Because these are my two favorite bookmarking sites, I offer an easy way to share any of our posts with them. At the end of each post, you'll see "Stumble It! • Add to del.icio.us" links. If you like what we write, feel free to give it a promotional nudge on those sites.

Everyone has their own favorites. What are yours?

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