Promote Your Business Blog with Social Networking Sites: MyBlogLog
April 20, 2007
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We are going through some of the social networking sites that are out there and talking about how we can become active in them to help promote our businesses.
Yesterday we talked about StumbleUpon. In the comments of that post Tony Clark pointed out an article on DoshDosh that gives a very comprehensive introduction to StumbleUpon that is worth reading though. Head over to yesterday’s post and check out the link. Thanks Tony!
MyBlogLog History
Today let’s take a look at MyBlogLog.
MyBlogLog started out as a statics program specifically for blogs. I opened an account with them at the beginning of last summer because they were one of the few (free) programs that tracked where people clicked leaving your blog.
There are lots of metrics packages that tell you how people come into your blog. But at the time I was curious about the other side of the equation and MyBlogLog fit the bill nicely. They still do that well. Read more
Promote Your Business Blog with Social Networking Sites: StumbleUpon
April 19, 2007
Over the next several days we are going to be talking about some of the different social networking sites out there and how we might be able to effectively use them to promote our businesses.
Today we are going to be exploring one of my favorites
StumbleUpon
The first social networking site I’d recommend for just about any blogger is StumbleUpon.
The way this site works is that you open a free account with them and then download their tool bar for your browser. They’ve got versions for both FireFox and Internet Explorer. This tool bar has a “Stumble” button which will take you to a “random” site of interest.
I put random in quotes because the sites StumbleUpon will show you are based on your own interest. One critical step in the process is to fill out your profile as completely as possible. That way their system knows what kind of sites you’d like to see.
Then whenever you see a good web page (or a good blog post) you can click their thumbs up button to vote the page up. If you especially don’t like a site you can give it a thumbs down.
Over time StumbleUpon learns what you like and don’t like and shows you more of what you like.
StumbleUpon friends also play an important role in what you see and don’t see. By selecting someone as a friend you are saying that you’d like to see the web pages they think are good. When they select you as a friend they will see the pages you like.
The beauty of the system is that you can just be yourself, express your interests honestly. With over 2 million folks in their network Stumbling around the internet you are bound to find some who share your interests. Read more
Promote Your Business Blog with Social Networking Sites
April 18, 2007
Steve Bowman over at Coastal Uruguay asked me a great question yesterday about increasing blog traffic.
He said he’d been actively building relationships with other bloggers in his niche and seeing some good results from that approach. But now he is ready to step up the pace a bit.
What is a good next step?
My first suggestion was for him to start getting actively involved with some of the social networking sites out there.
The general idea behind social networking sites is that they make it easier for folks to find quality stuff on the web. The different sites go about it in different ways and use different criteria for their own definition of quality. But that gives you the gist of what most of them are trying to accomplish.
Social networking sites can be a great source of traffic for your business blog because so many people congregate at those sites. For example, people have been known to overload their servers by making the front page of Digg or Slashdot because of all the traffic that heads their way.
The way I see it that is a very good problem to have.
Probably the biggest trick is finding a social networking site that is at least somewhat oriented towards your niche. For example very little of what I write here would be at all applicable for Slashdot because that site is all tech all the time. SuccessCREEations isn’t a tech blog.
Over the next few days I’ll take a look at some of these sites in more detail. I’ll describe the pros and cons of the sites and explore some reasons why they might work for promoting your business blog.
Here are some sites that we’ll explore:
If there are any others that you’d like to explore, let me know and I’ll look at them more closely in this series.
In the mean time here are a couple of great resources to help get your creative juices flowing when it comes to promoting your business blog.
52 of the Best Ways to Promote Your Blog and Your Business by Mark White of Better Business Blogging.
23 Ideas for Finding New Readers for Your Blog by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net.
Enjoy!
