Using Social Bookmarking Sites
Social Bookmarking sites are extremely easy and free to use, there are so many out there that it may be hard to choose from so I've made a list with the best ones to do the job.
The more your a part of the better your chances for traffic and success, but you should know how to use them correctly. To use them to your advantage you have to build a large and healthy community within the site, you have to add people, not spam them, and be active with the readers in your community. If you plan to just sign up and add 500 people a day you might as well try to find a needle in a hay stack because you'll just be wasting your time. Don't get me wrong when starting out you have to add people to your community and keep adding them to maintain and grow it but there's a big difference between adding and spaming, and no one likes a spammer.
Once you start to get some friends/followers/readers, whatever the case is with the site, you always want to be adding your latest blog posts or updates to ensure that your page is always up to date. Some Social Bookmarking Sites like Delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon let you add your latest blog post to their archive, this is a no brainer that you always need to be adding to these archives to ensure more readers and traffic. Start off with just a few of these sites to ensure that you can handle commenting, adding people and keeping it constantly updated because being a part of too many communities can sometimes be overwhelming.
Another must is to make comments all around your community but make them more personal than "hey thanks for the add visit my blog" and don't make the same post on 100's of peoples pages, this is another case of spamming. If you complement your followers blogs/sites/articles than they tend to be a lot more likely to give your site a chance and comment back on your page, which is what a Social Bookmarking Site is all about... interacting with others in the community.
Adding Social Bookmark Buttons to your Site
One great way to gain credit and readers/followers/friends in your Social Bookmarking Community is to add Social Bookmark buttons to your site like the one at the top of this post. It's free and actually extremely easy to do.
- Go to www.addthis.com
- Choose the Service, Style and if you want analytics (if you want to track how many people are using your button)
- Get your code
- Past it in your post or in the HTML code of your blog if you want it to automatically be in every post
So get to it, sign up and build your own community, get traffic and blog away. If you want you can start with adding me to your communities at Digg, Stumbleupon, BlogCatalog, MyBlogLog or Blogged.
-FBI
Besides being a great source of traffic on its own, the value of social media in search engine results will only increase over time. Social media and social networking are here to stay, so indeed, a very good idea to start well with it!
I found this page most stimulating after many months of neglecting my rather inferior blogs -- well, I think they are a bit special in places but I did not know how to attract comments and got a bit discouraged. I am a very serious person with way too intense a sense of humour - see the problem?! I should have settled on a niche and worked harder, this is what you have taught me so far. I only bought a computer about 5 years ago, started to learn Photoshop, and became very attracted to the sound of my own keyboard a year ago or so. I have a question. Is it possible to rant and joke and offer pictures in the same Blog?
How can I help you? (sorry, that was 2 questions}
Go well and take care, Bob.
@Corfubob Blogging is all about what you want to accomplish, it is very important to have a niche for your blog so that A) it's easier for your blog to rank in search engines and B) your readers will generally like the majority of your articles. BUT the thing I love most about blogging is that there are no limitations or guidelines, you can pretty much do what you want, so to answer your question YES you can rant and joke and offer pictures in the same blog, its just harder to gain consistent readers if every post is completely different from the last but that's not to say you can't do it. There are plenty of ways to get traffic to your blog so I say go for it Bob!