5 Ways to get to the top of the Popular Page on del.icio.us

The reason why I choose to talk about del.icio.us is because it’s a great source of content ideas and links and is a highly trafficked page that indeed has the potential of sending out large masses of visitors very quickly . It is very interesting to study the type of links that get on the popular page of del.icio.us , people that try to game networks like del.icio.us and actually succeed in doing so use something that resembles to a pattern . Here are the 5 most popular patterns I have seen amongst these posts :

1. Lists : Lists dominate this one too , just by browsing the topics I was able to notice that about half ( somewhere around 45% ) of the links are actually lists : “5 ways to..” , “10 tendencies to .. ” , “7 things to not do..” and so on . Numbering your list is also very important , it seems that numbers in lists actually work like magic . Maybe it’s because the fact that when they people think of that certain topic , they can not find as many reasons , trends , tendencies and so on as you did , this arouses their curiosity most of the time .

2.Guides , Tutorials , How to : These work very good to , taking a percentage of about 22% ( or even more ) of the total links . Walking your readers through a process that teaches them how to achieve a certain goal , makes your site a bookmarking potential one . Numbers can occur in these as well and they actually seem to work good enough .

3.Concentrate on the title : It looks like the people on del.icio.us are actually relying upon the title of the link to get people to click on it . As a result , the way titles are conceived have a lot to do with converting clicks into possible readers .

4.Pay attention to the audience you’re writing to : It seems that on del.icio.us , the audience is quite tech savvy , writing on a tech subject might get their attention and tickle their tech curiosity . Articles on Linux , Word , Excel , FireFox , AJAX , CSS and so on tend to act pretty good .

5.Appeal their sense of humor : How many times haven’t you found yourselves in the position where you were reading a tech article and the writer was describing it so funny that some of the phrases within that article you just couldn’t get off of your head . Try to do the same , people have the sense of humor and they like reading funny articles , why make their lives harder when you can put a smile on their faces .