Articles took the internet marketing world by storm in 2004. Blogging and pinging were hot marketing strategies for 2005. Videos set the online business world ablaze in 2006. Now, the question that many NETrepreneurs ask is this: what's the next big thing that will hit the internet marketing world by promising to be highly efficient and wondrously profitable?

The answer?

It's called tagging, and though you may not be familiar with it right now, you will be able to master the same by the end of this article.

What Is Tagging?

Tagging is a new way of categorizing certain topics of your blogs. Now, categorizing blog entries is nothing new. Whether you have been using Blogger's services or Word Press, you should be very familiar with how categorizing works. If your entry has something to do with search engine optimization strategies, for example, chances are, you'd place it under the category of SEO. If your entry has something to do with email marketing techniques, you'd place the same under the category of Email Marketing.

The titles of these categories are very important for tagging.

This is because these titles serve as your tags.

Okay, but why is tagging so important for Internet marketing?

Tagging is an innovative way of categorizing information in the World Wide Web, a fact which we have established earlier. But tagging has a distinct advantage over other categorizing methods currently available.

Users are in control over the proper categories of the information they will share.

Users are no longer dependent on search engines to do the categorizing for them. Now, with tagging, they can simply allocate certain content under certain categories and the tagging system will take care of the rest.

The foremost tagging service available for people on the internet is technorati.com. It is a widely popular website that attracts millions of visitors everyday. It's not really different from the pinging systems that have grown in popularity over a tear ago. The system employed by technorati.com involves the following:

- Users can categorize their latest blog entries according to tags.

- Each category will display the newest entry on top.

- The hottest tags will be displayed on the homepage, available for everyone to see.

Immediately, the businessman in you will see the many benefits you can derive from Technorati's tagging system.

1. You can use it as a market research tool. Simply study the hottest tags, which should correspond to the hottest topics on the internet today. With millions of visitors, such hot tags hold a lot of weight, and whatever you can gain from the same will more or less be determinative.

2. You can use tagging as a new model of pinging, albeit better. Do you have a blog? Categorize each new entry and classify them according to the hottest tags of the moment. You'd be able to expose your URL to a very wide audience.

3. Update your blog regularly, and tag every new entry. You'll almost, always be on top of the category appropriate for the tag. This is a great way to ensure fresh visitors every time you post something new.

Tagging Is The Next Big Thing

Already, tags are being implemented in other popular websites like MySpace and YouTube. It's the wave of the future, a category management system that any online businessman can sure exploit to drive monumental traffic for his of her website.

Tagging is one of the novel methods included in what many veteran internet marketers have labeled as "new age marketing." It's something that the present generation of internet users have come to accept as a standard, and to win their attention, we have to play their game.