The 8th Way

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Yesterday, I posted my 7 Detailed Ways To Improve Your Blog. However, I forgot to mention one very important point: Take Advantage of Social Media.

The Importance of Social Networks

Social networks such as Digg and StumbleUpon have a great deal of importance as far as bloggers are concerned. How? Let me explain.

Why were sites like StumbleUpon and Digg created? They were created to enable people to save stuff they find good, on the internet, for future and to let others view it also. This whole concept of saving and sharing is what caused the explosion in the popularity of such sites. They enable socialization between people.

How’s My Blog Related To All That?

What’s the main thing that makes a blog different from a regular website ? Answer: The interaction of people. People leave their comments on your blog thus start up a discussion. They therefore are socially interacting with you and others. Isn’t that very similar to what social media networks do?

You have to find the critical thing here. In order to promote your blog and make it grow rapidly, you have to leverage the power of social media sites such as StumbleUpon.

Optimizing only for search engines is good, but it is very limited. It is limited to only those who are searching for a

particular term. You’re missing out on people who are just browsing or don’t have any particular terms to search. Or what if your blog isn’t included in the search engine’s database? Now you’re missing out on both search engine traffic and social media traffic. Bad, eh?

On the other hand, social media networks give you a lot more than what search engines can. Search engines don’t provide reviews and/or criticism by other people of a particular blog , which can be used to measure the credibility of that particular blog. Social media networks enable people to rate and review things liked by other people and this makes the job of judging the authority/credibility of a particular blog easier.

Look at Technorati, a blog aggregating service. Why is its ‘blog rank’ considered so important? Because it is a measure of how many people link back to the blog, therefore acknowledging

Optimizing only for search engines is good but it is limited to only those who are searching for a particular term.

it as an authority on the subject. Wouldn’t you link to a authoritative and useful blog(like this one )? That is the point.

You’ve Changed Me. How do I get started?

Great! To get started, register(if you haven’t already done so) with as many social media sites as possible. Here are my favourites(in order of popularity):

• StumbleUpon - The greatest source of traffic to this blog.
• Digg - One of the best.
• Del.icio.us - Possible the oldest and the simplest out there
• Reddit - Simple and no nonsense.
• Ma.gnolia - Growing rapidly
• Propeller - Another popular social media site, owned by Netscape
• …

There are literally thousands of such websites out there on the internet. You should at least register for the above, since they are the most popular with netizens.

Apart from the above, there are also some specific single niche social media sites. You might also want to submit to these:

• Sphinn - Technology and Internet Marketing related
• BloggingZoom - Mainly for ‘blogs about blogging’ kind of bloggers
• DesignFloat - For the web designers out there.

After registering for the above and more services, all you gotta do is submit your blog posts to them and wait for the traffic!

In a later post I will discuss how to more powerfully leverage the power of social media sites. So keep checking for that.

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