You may have noticed a new addition to the InsureMe blogs since yesterday - del.icio.us badges at the end of our posts! You know when you have something on your list of things to do, and you are dreading it because you think it is going to be difficult to do, so you keep putting it off? That is how I was with the del.icio.us badges. But amazingly, adding the tags to all four of our blogs took maybe thirty minutes total. Totally painless. :)

Some of you might be wondering what del.icio.us is anyway, so I'll tell you, and give you a couple of sites to check out for more info. Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking/tagging service that allows users to "tag" webpages with "tags" (keywords). Once sites are tagged, other del.icio.us users can search through everyone's tags and find information that interests them. So imagine that I am a Yahoo! actually purchased del.icio.us a while back and it is one of the crown jewels in Yahoo!'s Web 2.0 portfolio. For more info on del.icio.us, check out the del.icio.us about us page and the Wikipedia entry.

So what is the value of del.icio.us to an affiliate? Well, if you are producing quality content, allowing people to easily add your content to del.icio.us might give you broader exposure on the net - for free. Of course, the content has to be really good for that to happen, but I know a lot of our affiliates are focusing on quality content, so this might be an opportunity to increase traffic. I see adding del.icio.us badges as a must have for our affiliates that operate blogs (good ones, not spammy ones).

The main point is this - if you are spending time creating quality content adding badges like del.icio.us and digg to the end of your content will give your readers a opportunity to expose your content to a wider audience - and who doesn't want that?

If you are interested in using del.icio.us to increase your content's exposure, follow this thread from the Search Engine Watch forums.

If you need help adding del.icio.us badges to your site, feel free to send me an email and we can talk about it.