If you’re an online blog owner or advertiser, and you’re looking to leverage social media at no additional cost other than a bit of elbow grease, how about giving these 9 ideas a try? FYI, a ContextWeb presence on any of these sites is linked where possible…

1. StumbleUpon - At first glance, one might think this is just another spammy toolbar application, but after you play with it for a while, Garrett Camp’s StumbleUpon can honorably waste hours of your time. After signing up, customize your StumbleUpon experience according to your interests. ‘Stumbles’ (effectively bookmarks registered through the toolbar) can potentially send a relatively large amount of traffic (hundreds of unique visitors at a time) to a site - including yours. Again, it’s important to always add value to SU, so take care to provide links that reflect new, compelling content. A great study of the StumbleUpon system is available here from 10e20.

2. Yahoo! Answers - A wildly successful service, Yahoo! launched this in 2005 in answer to Google Answers (payment required) and saw its popularity quickly rise. Online marketers can leverage this tool by answering questions that relate to their own business and, at times, offer links to their own website as long as they are relevant. The Yahoo! Answers system rewards points for those users who are either ‘extra’ helpful and answer a lot of questions, or are asking questions and then managing them. Even Hilary Clinton uses Yahoo! Answers.

3. MyBlogLog - A great way to leave your mark on any blog since everytime you visit a MyBlogLog enabled site - and you’re registered on MBL - you’ll see your face with a link to your MyBlogLog profile - such as ContextWeb’s profile. The WordPress widget on the right side of our home page shows MyBlogLog in action. Just click it to learn how to join. Congratulations to Scott Rafer for creating it - and then selling it to Yahoo! in under 6 months.

4. MySpace - Hey, only kids hang out here, right? It’s just for music lovers, right? Wrong. Everybody’s here. MySpace founder Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson surely know the truth on MySpace demographics: there are a large number of moms and dads, and grandmas and grandpas - and online marketers - hanging out here in addition to everyone’s kids.

5. Eurekster’s Swicki - Eurekster CEO Steve Marder appears at many tech events - and well he should. The swicki - short for ’search wiki’ - is very popular and allows swicki users to customize search results through voting and promoting. Swicki owners can let the search engine give results for any number of sites related to one’s interests similar to our Contextual Advertising swicki. It doesn’t hurt that the swicki search results get indexed by search engines and help boost site traffic. But, that may change according to Danny Sullivan and Matt Cutts.

6. Technorati - This is the granddaddy of blog news aggregation which is quickly being overtaken by Google’s own blog search. Blog owners can go here to claim their blog on David Sifry’s Technorati and learn about other blogs. Links are tracked along with all around link popularity for each blog. ContextWeb is here, too.

7. Digg - Technology is the most popular section of this social voting site. The community may pale in comparison of unique users to behemoths such as MySpace and Facebook, but Digg’s zealous ‘diggers’ rank with the most ardent of online social media users. Visitors to Digg can vote for their favorite stories and establish a reputation as they bring new stories to the community. The higher their reputation in the site’s scoring system, the higher.. well, the higher they go in the top diggers list. Higher in the list = more influence. Who cares? Diggers - and probably Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose (co-founder), too.

8. Del.icio.us - This Web 2.0 classic provides social bookmarking and several other useful features… registered users bookmark their favorite sites and blog posts, and track links to sites according to their associated keywords. And, if you can’t remember how to spell out the del.icio.us URL, just put in delicious.com - that works, too.

9. Reddit - Another social news site that has some distant similarities to StumbleUpon in that it allows visitors to either offer the Reddit community a web page or site to visit, or it allows visitors to vote on a ’story.’ Reputation for all visitors is earned steadily as new links are suggested and accepted (or not) by the Reddit community. Reddit was purchased by Conde Nast in 2006.

Tags: conde nast, technorati, contextweb, stumbleupon, garrett camp, scott rafer, kevin rose, jay adelson, steven marder

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