I’ve been looking for ways to improve the promotion of this blog. So far I’ve been spending a bit of time going around commenting on other people’s blogs, but I was starting to get lost. I came across 3 Things to do for a New Blogger over at Daily Tech News. Although it’s only three things, the things were broken down into sub sections. The first thing of interest I saw was this:

Social Book Marking sites can get you a huge number of traffic. You ought to have a great content to hit the front page. If you hit the front page of Digg or Netscape, you will have a good time seeing visitors flow by your site. Stumble and Del.icio.us can get you traffic in long term.

Social bookmarking to boost your traffic

I hadn’t previously given much thought to social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking is a way of sharing sites or pages of a website/blog that you come across with the online community. I was a bit confused how I could use social bookmarking to market promote blog, but it was obvious really. Those Digg, Stumble and Del.icio.us links I have at the bottom of every post could drive huge amounts of traffic to this blog if people come across a post they like.

What this means is that I need to work on more original content that I think people will enjoy reading. To get links and icons for social bookmarking to add to your blog follow this link to 3Spots.

Bookmark yourself

Another side of social bookmarking is adding your own blog posts to the major online bookmarking services. I went over to Pro Blogger to see what Darren had to say:

While I don’t recommend spamming social bookmarking sites I would recommend being aware of them and submitting your best posts from time to time. In this way you put your posts out there for others to find. They may or may not take off so don’t think it’s a guarantee that you’ll get visitors - but you’re at least giving them a chance. If they do get popular the traffic doesn’t last long - but in the process you just might retain some extra new readers and perhaps just as importantly often after being ‘dugg’ you find that other bloggers link to you - giving you all important incoming links to your post which will help with Search Engine Optimization.

Sound advice and noted – I won’t be submitting all my posts. Over at John Chow’s blog, he was recently paid $400 to review a tool that costs $47 and takes care of all your submitting to social bookmarks in one go. The makers of Web 2 Submitter say that they can save you hours with their software, but think about it: Unless you’re submitting every single one of your posts, which you shouldn’t be, why pay $47?

One thing that immediately put me off Web 2 Submitter was the homepage, which is one of those really annoying websites that takes an eternity to scroll down, going past recommendations and testimonials and case studies – honestly, when I see a product marketed like that, it annoys the hell out of me.

Gerard over at Scribble Designs pointed out that Social Poster does all of what Web 2 Submitter does… for free. I tried it out, and sure enough, it’s a damn good utility. You can drag a link to your Firefox toolbar or bookmarks, and then whenever you’re on a page you want to bookmark, you hit the link and can submit it to all the usual bookmarking sites. You need to be registered with all the sites you submit to, but if you aren’t then you can register as you submit. Easy!

So that’s me clued up on social bookmarking. I haven’t reaped the benefits of implementing any of the above yet, but I hope in the near future that something will take off.

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Tags: Blog promotion //