Update – 7/28/2012: My account at Delicious.com has been deleted or removed, likely for inactivity. I’ve realized that no matter how much people rave about how fun/helpful something is, it’s not going to work for you if you’re not interested in genuinely using the service. Frankly, I just wasn’t into the whole social bookmarking thing, and as I mentioned below, I don’t think I need an account to be bookmarked and shared by others who do use the site.
I signed up for an account on Delicious the other day. I figure it would make sense to have an account especially since I offer a link to the site in all my posts so others can bookmark it. As I understand it, this site is very “Digg-like” in its approach. Instead of “Digging” a post, you bookmark it for the same desired result…popularity and traffic. I’ve read a dozen or more posts about Delicious and how to achieve popularity and all of them said to occasionally bookmark your own posts, but be careful not to abuse the system. Makes sense. Common sense.
Most of the other tips are the same kind of common sense tips that you read on three out of every fourth blog when you’re looking for this kind of information. Write a post people will like, people like these kinds of posts, write them to get popular, etc. Ugh. Yes, the lack of good information out there can be frustrating at times. I don’t pretend to know for one minute how to become a delicious power user, but it seems like it will have to be a trial and error approach like many of the other things I have been trying. Maybe it’s me and I’m discounting the simplicity of it all. Maybe it’s not as difficult and there’s no well guarded secret to building a high traffic website. I hope not because I seem to be ending up with a bunch of tools I have know idea how to utilize to their maximum potential.
Let me take a step back. Most of the information I found boiled down to be about bookmarking posts that are either extremely helpful or extremely entertaining to people. Instead of getting frustrated and worrying about what I might be missing, I’m going to do what I understand….and that’s the simple stuff I found everywhere. Since I primarily post my open source and commercial script finds, I don’t think most of them are incredibly earth shattering in terms of entertaining or helping people, so I am going to stick with only bookmarking my informational posts which I only do once is a great while. This will also prevent me from absentmindedly bookmarking my own content too much since there just isn’t a lot of it to submit.
So far it seems like Delicious is a shot in the dark kind of thing like Digg. It all goes back to writing great content. Unless I understand it incorrectly, it doesn’t matter if I have an account or any bookmarks on Delicious or not. I just have to ensure I write enough compelling content for other people to want to bookmark and share.