February 23, 2011 by Daniel Sharkov|
The following article is a guest post, written by Sarah. She has an awesome blog, covering variety of blogging related topics. In this article Sarah is covering blog promotion and blogging communities more specifically… The successful bloggers know how important promotion is. Without it, no matter how good your content is, how much content you publish, and how frequentlyyou publish it, your blog will never reach its full potential. This is what I failed to realize when I clicked the “Publish Post” button for the first time, and many times afterward. It wasn’t until recently that I began to see that I was going about blogging the wrong way. It wasn’t the most pleasant realization.
If you’re a serious blogger, you better get serious about promotion. There are many ways to tell the world about your blog, and in this article, I’m going to discuss just one of them: communities. Besides the ever so popular Twitter and Facebook, there are many other communities on the internet that you should join, which will help you connect with both readers and bloggers from all over the planet.
Perhaps you’ve already heard about Blog Engage. It’s an immensely popular site. I think what makes it so good is that instead of being a place to promote individual blogs, it’s a place where you promote each post. If somebody likes your post, they vote it up. If not, they vote it down. The higher the number of votes, the higher the chance that it will appear on the front page. The voting system is similar to Digg’s, I suppose. If somebody really likes your post, maybe they’ll leave a comment or see what other posts you’ve submitted to Blog Engage.
BloggersBloggersis a huge community of I have no idea how many members. The site’s description is “Meet Millions of Bloggers”, and there’s no doubt that if you join, you will meet many, many bloggers from around the world who are interested in a huge array of topics. It’s definitely one of my favorite sites. Bloggers is a great community because everyone is there for the same purpose: to find new blogs to read, to direct some traffic to their blog, and perhaps help somebody else while they’re at it. With so many people looking to promote their blogs, you would expect Bloggers to be an overly spammy, not-much-real-content sort of place, but surprisingly, it’s not. There is also a Talks section on the site, which is basically a forum, where a lot of good conversations take place.
Now onto forums. While both sites mentioned above have forums, they are more focused on promoting blogs and content, and their forums (the Blog Engage forum in particular) don’t get as much attention. On the other hand, forums, which focus on being forums, usually concentrate on and discuss the blogging aspect of blogging. For example, they discuss how to create compelling content and getting more backlinks.
I’m very specific about the forums I join, and so I often have difficulty finding one I like. In the end, I usually choose the forum with the best design, the most friendly and informative people, and the least spam (and when I say spam, I don’t mean spam left by bots. In fact, a lot of spam is created by real people who want nothing more than you to click on a link to their blog). So, here are a couple forums I recommend, along with their pros and cons.
BloggeriesBloggeriesis an excellent place to give your blog some exposure and to learn about new techniques for making your blog a success. There are so many people, both beginners and advanced, sharing what they’ve learned. There are also many people asking questions, which will give you a chance to pitch in with your expertise. And because many members are interested in seeing something new, there is a section for promoting your blog.
The only problem I have with Bloggeries is the number of people interested only in self-promotion. They often create threads saying they will check out your blog in return for you checking out theirs. While there is nothing wrong with these types of threads, sometimes they seem to outnumber the threads containing real content. But if you can overlook this, Bloggeries is a great place for connecting with other bloggers.
Blog BoardsBlog Boards is a new forum, and as you would expect, it’s not extremely popular, so it probably won’t give you an enormous amount of traffic. But I like it simply because it’s new, the people are friendly, and the “look-at-my-blog-and-I’ll-look-at-yours” people haven’t had a chance to infect it with their spam yet. It’s also nice to be part of a newly-developed and growing community.
ConclusionEveryone benefits in a blogging community. Not only can you gain more readers, but with millions of bloggers constantly sharing their tips and stories on a huge variety of topics, you can learn too. And if you’re looking for an opportunity to guest post, you can probably find plenty of people who want to publish your kind of knowledge and experience on their blog. Keep in mind, however, that while blogging communities can be a great source of traffic, that’s not all they are for. If that’s all you use them for, I guarantee you’ll have little success. Blogging communities are mainly for sharing and learning, not spammy self-promotion.
Remember that the more sites you join and contribute to, the more difficult it will be to keep up with them. I suggest joining only a few, in addition to Twitter and Facebook, then prioritize them according to the ones you like best and will give you the most traffic.
So, what’s your favorite blogging community?
Sarah is the author of Template Faerie, the blog about blogging, and a place where you can find her opinions and criticism of blogging, blogging advice and add-ons, and reviews of her favorite or least favorite websites and services. You can also find her on Twitterand Facebook.
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