Once you set up a free Retaggr account, you can add a photo, include your status that can be easily linked to your Twitter account to show recent tweets, and link to your blog and include the RSS feed to pull up the most recent posts in your card.

You can also include your brief bio or profile and an email icon and your contact number on your card. Again, think of this as your business card, but don’t worry – your email address is protected.

To really enhance your card, you’ll want to add in all of your sites, blogs, microblogs, bookmarketing, social network pages, and more and Retaggr will link to them. The card customization process also includes a Facebook badge and a way to add other widgets you’ve created. If you’ve got a FriendFeed account, that will actually speed up your customization process.

You’ll be amazed at not only how many links you can create in your Retaggr card to all the publishing, communications and networking tools you use (lots and lots of them), but also how Retaggr displays everything in a very clean and compact format. (See my retaggr profile card at the bottom of this post or visit my retaggr page.)

Your card is easily embedded through the code the site provides to you or via one of those tiny buttons that represents your card and leads to it when clicked on. What I love about retaggr is that it gives people a hub point for connection to you and also displays the breadth of your presence and participation on the Web. What I was a little confused about was that on the home page of retaggr, it says that it is compatible with WordPress, but I was not able to embed my card into this post (WordPress stripped out the code every time).

On the social networking side of retaggr, you can tag people you know in images anywhere on the Web when a site is retaggr-enabled, including your own. First, you can make your own site retaggr-enabled. Once you do this, any image you see on your site will have a little “tag” icon next to it. Click on it to draw a box around any person in the photo to tag them. This means that other people who have photos of you on their sites can tag them with your name. If someone tags a photo on their site with your name, retaggr notifies you and provides you with a copy and link to the image.

Your retaggr card can follow you around to any retaggr-enabled site so if you leave a comment, anyone can find you through your profile card. You can also save other people’s cards in your account and create your own contact database of cards.

If you’re looking for a neat way to display your credentials and links to your sites and networks, retaggr makes it easy. The more people who use retaggr, the more pervasive the connections and the greater its value as an introduction tool that integrates and shares more than just your name, title, phone number and email address. Old-fashioned business cards have nothing on retaggr.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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The Web-based marketing tools I’ve been using lately really blow me away with their simplicity and even more impressive – their integration capabilities, that is, the way they pull in a number of my pages on numerous social networking sites and produce a widget bringing them all together in one place. Magic!

Since self-promotion is key to any Web workers work, especially if we’re working solo and isolated from home and rely heavily on our social networks and blogs to reach out, I thought I’d share what I’m using these days.

Lijit.com

I learned about Lijit.com a few weeks ago from my own Web developer (yes, I’ve hired a Web designer to revamp my professional web site – first time ever). Their tagline is “Revolutionary search tools and stats for your blog,” and I’m still discovering everything the site including accessing my stats for the first time this week.

Lijit.com combines links to my social networking pages including bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and ClipMarks, photo sites like flickr, video sites like YouTube and blog pages. On top of that, it also adds a search feature that allows people to search all your pages and keeps stats about the top referrers, top searches and where those searches originate (geographically speaking).

I think I’ve just seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of Lijit.com can do for my blogs – so the jury is still out on how useful it becomes.

AddThis.com

Just discovered this blatantly straightforward and convenient tool for adding the “Add Me” feature on my blogs and social networks. Their slogan “One button. Your Content Everywhere” hits home for me, especially because my Web content is flung all over the Internet. Their site lists the benefits of an AddThis button on your Web pages:

• Easy Bookmarking & Sharing
• Spreads Your Content
• Removes Clutter
• Fast and Reliable
• Easily Customizable
• For Websites and Blogs
• Completely Free

As usual, I love the emphasis on “free” and “easy” because as you are beginning to gather from my blog posts, I’m cheap and overloaded. In the never-ending quest to increase my blog readership, any tool that installs a button or widget without forcing me to copy and paste the code (for Typepad, Blogger, WordPress, and MySpace, for example) is great in my book. This obviously doesn’t just benefit my e-marketing efforts but helps me streamline work as my clients add blogs and social networking pages to their campaigns.

MyBlogLog

I’ll always admit when I’m using a Web tool and don’t yet know what all it does, and that is the case with MyBlogLog since they’re under new ownership (Yahoo), and I seem to recall an email updating me on their latest features that I didn’t have time to read. So how do I use it to promote my Web work?

Since we’re on the topic of blogs as an essential part of my work and my marketing efforts, MyBlogLog is a good fit. The most obvious thing it does based on the widget you can place on your blog is to show the most recent visitors to your blog. I use this to gauge interest in my blog and get gut-instinct demographics based on who the visitors are and what they blog about. I also discover new blogs and bloggers this way.

The next thing MyBlogLog does is allow me to promote my blogs on their site and build both a fan base of family, friends and contacts as well as form communities around my blogs. I have to admit, I’m pretty hands off with these tools, but I appreciate the way they can still build my audience with minimal involvement on my part.

How are you using these tools? And what others do you use for promoting your Web work?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks