Multiply Your Online Presence with Chiclets

No, I'm not talking about the gum! In the online marketing world, a chiclet refers to a small, square icon that usually indicates and RSS feed or another way to share or bookmark the content on a webpage. As I was building our website, http://www.tuscaloosaonlinemarketing.com/, I knew that I wanted my visitors to be able to subscribe to my blog, but I also wanted them to be able to bookmark the content and share it on their favorite social networks. This way, my visitors themselves would be helping to promote my content for me.

Not only is this a great way to build buzz, or word-of-mouth, it's a great way to increase your search engine rankings! Why? Because every bookmark on del.icio.us and every share on Facebook and every tweet on Twitter is SEARCHABLE. When Google sees these bookmarks and shares, it say, "Wow! Real people think this content is valuable enough to share with their friends." In essence, your users "vote" for your website's content, and Google takes that into consideration in the future when people search for content like yours. Which means more people find you, and hopefully "vote" for you, etc., etc., etc.! You can see how this could potentially become a huge snowball effect - assuming you've got content worth sharing!

So, ok - back to chiclets. Chiclets make it easy for your visitors to share your content with one easy click. But how do you add all the possible chiclets without making your page look like a stamp collection? That's where http://www.addthis.com/ comes in. They make a quick and easy solution that includes literally DOZENS of possible chiclets in one small, attractive piece of code that is SUPER easy to install. You'll find add this links on many major websites like http://www.ew.com/. So, there's a good chance that your visitors have already seen add this widgets on other pages and already know what to do with them on your page!

Chiclets are just one small piece of the online marketing puzzle, but they can make an enormous difference! What are your thoughts? Comment below...