Getting Traffic to your Blog through Social Network Commenting

Anyone who maintains a blog site wants a large readership. There are obvious things that you need to do. Like blog often, and blog consistently. And of course content needs to be informative, interesting, and a bit spicy. But what can you do to bring even more followers to your little slice of the internet? One way is to broadcast your newest and latest posts through the maze of new social networks. The more you or others bookmark, review, digg, recommend, or share your post on various networks, the more people are going to find you. These people may not become rabid enthusiasts of your blog, but if even some of them decide to stick around and come back, it’s worth it. And these days the name of the game is to get people to subscribe to your RSS feed. Many if not most people who follow blogs closely are using some kind of RSS reader these days (like Google Reader or Bloglines) to keep up with new posts. And once they’ve subscribed to your blog, you have a better chance of them at least seeing the title of your blogs regularly, even if they don’t always remember to come back. I first discovered this when reviewing my traffic through Google Analytics (which is a great way to monitor your blog activity) I found bumps in my traffic after every StumbleUpon submission.

Now, the point of StumbleUpon is not to promote your own blog, but if you tag and review a number of sites, then submitting your own occasionally is okay. Even better is to get your blog readers to submit on a regular basis.There are a growing number of social bookmarking sites where bloggers and readers are frequenting to find new and interesting sites. Getting involved in these can make a huge difference in getting you and your blog noticed. Just about everyone on the internet knows the power of MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube these days. But here are a few rising stars in the social network commentating world that can help you promote your blog and you should be participating in.

- StumbleUpon is one of my favorite sharing sites. To use this one correctly you’ll need to install a toolbar on your browser. Some people have reported problems with the Internet Explorer Add-on, but I haven’t had any problem with the Firefox version. When you need a break and you have a few minutes during the day it’s fun to stumble through the recommended websites. You can set preferences to avoid topics you’re not interested in and thumbs up or down to sites you like or dislike. I think submitting sites and adding comments various sites gives you credibility when you submit blogs form your own site.

- Delicious (formerly called del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking service that started out as a site where you would store and sync your browsers bookmarks on different computers and then share them if you wish. I never really got into that because I use Foxmarks with Firefox. It just seems more secure to me. Delicious still does this but they have grown since acquired by Yahoo to be more of a tagging, saving, and sharing source. If your friends use Delicious, you can send them interesting bookmarks that they can check out the next time they log in. Of course, they can do the same for you. With a five million + user base this is one site you want to be part of.

- Digg is pretty well known now. But for those of you who don’t follow, this is a user-defined rating system of stories and blogs across the internet. One of the co-founders, Kevin Rose, also co-hosts a weekly vodcast with Alex Albrecht called Diggnation, which reviews the weekly top stories and blogs from Digg over beer and banter. This has a hard-core following of 20-something techies with deep roots in gaming. It’s become so big it’s a little hard to get noticed here. And real estate related topics are not what they are known for. Yahoo recently released Yahoo Buzz, which is trying to compete and may end up with a more mainstream following.

- Mashable is one of the largest blogs on the Internet. Mashable regularly writes about large networks like MySpace, YouTube,etc. But it also reports on less high-profile social networking sites. The website also features its own social network and is a great source of widget code and layouts.

- FriendFeed is a great way to aggregate your friends from numerous websites into one feed. You can see RSS feeds, Twitter posts, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, etc. from everyone all in chronological order. Friendfeed has a “create a room” feature, which I have not mastered yet. Dustin has been the only so kind as to invite me to his “front porch”. to share posts among friends.

- Twitter is my favorite. I have to admit I’m hooked on it. It’s the closest thing to digital crack I have ever seen. I keep telling Facebook and other friends if you really want to keep in touch, let’s Twitter. This is the fastest growing micro-blogging platform right now. I make sure and post a note about any blogs I do there. I know it brings traffic. When I post pics via TwitPic I can see how many views I get. This one is easy to use from your cell phone too. The iPhone has a great app for this called Twitterrific that you can get at the iTunes App store.

- Pownce is sort for the whos-who of micro-blogging and social networking. This was started up by Kevin Rose of Digg.com fame and has a following of his fan base. They are trying to compete head-to-head with Twitter. While they do offer some threading abilities, I prefer the fluid open nature of Twitter. If you already have friends here, you’ll like it though.

Sharing your profiles to these sites so people can find you is also critical. MyBlogLog by Yahoo is one of the most popular and you may have seen there widgets on other blogs. But I like retaggr. It makes my profiles accessible at the top of my blog posts next to the byline. It offers lots of other options too, like IM or Facebook widgets and embedding your profile on your website.

There are new sites springing up daily as social networking on the internet mushrooms. There is no way to keep up with and be a part of all of them. It’s important that you give people a way to easily share, submit, or add your blog posts to these through some kind of tagging mechanism with your blogs. I use a plug-in for Wordpress that puts network icons at the end of the post called ShareThis.

One thing is for sure. The number of options to get your blogs noticed is skyrocketing.