Using Social Networking Websites to Promote Your Blog

A blog is the perfect tool for integrating your Web 2.0 and Social Marketing strategy. The whole purpose of a blog is to document your thoughts, views, and opinions on a particular topic, issue, or subject, and to solicit comments from your readers and drive traffic to your other sites.

 

Plus a good blog will put more money into your pocket! Blogs are really the pioneer tools of the current Web 2.0 craze; they are dynamic social websites that allow user interaction (comments and ping backs).

 

In general people who like social sites will also like reading and posting to blogs.

 

A couple of obvious ways to promote your blog via Web 2.0 are simply placing links to your blog on your profile pages and lenses, and plugging your RSS feeds into your social networking portals.

 

But there are also some really good social sites that are geared exclusively for bloggers. There are two in particular that I use and highly recommend.

 

In fact if you do nothing else discussed in this report you should at least start a blog on your own domain and start using these two blog networking sites right away!

 

Technorati is an RSS directory at its most basic level, but it is without a doubt one of themost powerful sites on the Web for driving targeted traffic back to your blog. Many, many Internet users search Technorati for blogs on specific subjects, and a lot of people who come here are bloggers themselves.

 

When another user comes across your blog they can add it to their favorites, link to it, or subscribe to your RSS feed. This alone will generate a substantial amount of free, highly targeted traffic for your blog.

 

Once you register your free account with this service, you should immediately claim your blogs. This is Technorati talk for adding your blogs to their search and RSS directory.

 

You’ll be able to give your blog a title and description, and enter the tags (or categories) you post about on your blog. The great thing about this is each time you make a post on your blog from here forward a keyword optimized link to your post will appear on the Technarati site!

 

It’s no mystery why I love this site. If you own a blog and don’t use Technorati you are missing out BIG TIME.

 

And if you don’t own a blog… I’m speechless to be honest. You need to get that squared away immediately.

 

You can get a search engine friendly blog installed and hosted on your own domain at a great rate through this service.

 

MyBlogLog is an awesome blog directory that allows you to list your blog and personal profile, and to build a network of friends, rate other users’ blogs, etc.

 

So it has all the bells and whistles you want form a social networking site, but it’s only for blogs. And it’s an active community of smart characters who know what they are looking for!

 

Your profile page contains some basic stats to show how much traffic you are getting, how many people in your network, and more. But the best thing about this program is the ‘Recent Readers’ widget.

 

You can place a small piece of code in your sidebar to show the world how many people from MyBlogLog have recently viewed your blog. This will display as a small box full of the pictures of all the recent visitors who have come to your site from MYBlogLog.

 

When used on your blog this acts as the kind of social proof the herd mentality responds well too… “Hey a lot of people read this blog so the author must know their stuff.”

 

But the real beauty of this widget is how you can use it when it is placed on other people’s blogs. As you browse the MyBlogLog directory and visit sites from your seach results or friends network, you will note that most of the blog owners have the Recent Readers widget installed somewhere on their blog.

 

Which means every time you visit one of these blogs your picture will appear in that Recent Readers box, and your picture will link directly back to your profile page which of course links directly back to your blog (cue evil laughter here). So you can actually generate traffic for your blog by the simple act of surfing and reading other people’s blogs!

 

Is that awesome or what?

 

I want to stress a final time that if you take nothing else from this report please, please, please go out right now and register for Technorati and MyBlogLog. And if you don’t already have your own blog, hosted on your own domain drop everything at once and make this priority number one!