One of my clients recently asked me about utilising social bookmarking to help articles and press releases on their site to get more coverage on the web and ultimately gain more traffic.

Sites such as Del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati, Blinklist, Furl, Reddit and many others are springing up which is what is causing this phenomenon.

Social bookmarking, is where users click a button (often in the top part of the browser) and log a web page as something they have enjoyed. These bookmarks are shared amongst the community that they belong too, which may be looked at by other members. The more votes a page gets, the better chance it has of appearing on the home page of the main site, which could in turn lead to an exponential increase in the number of visitors that this generates.

A good example of how to prompt a user to bookmark a page can be found at NME.com, where at the bottom of all of their articles are links that lead a user who may have enjoyed an article to submit it to that site.

I will be implementing a similar system for promoting articles on my clients? site, and will use it more widely if it has the desired effect.

Watch this space for further announcements to find out whether or not this works in this experiment.