How to Increase Blog Traffic with Social Communities

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Social communities, like BlogCatalog or Twitter, are great resources to help you increase traffic to your blog and get more eyeballs on your content. While social bookmarking sites allow you to mark and share content you like, social communities are more, well… they are more social. Social communities allow for users to interact with each other. To me, this social aspect of internet marketing makes this great big internet seem a bit smaller and a little less over-whelming.

When it Comes to Twitter – I’m a Twit

I’ll have to be honest about all this social community stuff tho – I am so far behind regarding what it out there and available that it’s not even funny. Put me in a room with 100 people and I can ‘twit’ like crazy. In fact, my husband would call me a Super Twit – I LOVE talking to people. However, when it comes to Twitter, I am just about completely lost.

The toughest part for ME regarding Twitter, and all these other social communities, is simply keeping up. I don’t like to ‘use’ social communities for my own needs. To me, that feels like a form of abuse and I do not want to offend the users. On the other hand, knowing myself, I could get lost in a social community (or ten) and not get the work done that I need to be doing. I am interested in participating in social communities that further my work – not blur my focus.

Learning Twitter

I’ve been doing some research on Twitter as I try and learn and get comfortable, and I’ve found some good reading about the Twitter service.

ProBlogger has a great post about 9 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers that has helped me a lot. He mentioned a service called TwitterFeed which interested me enough to sign up and learn how to use. TwitterFeed is a service that allows you to have your RSS feed announce any new posts you make directly and automatically to your Twitter account. In my past post, we learned that your RSS feed has great potential to increase blog traffic. TwitterFeed is one more way to use your RSS feed and social communities in one application.

Twitter has gained an amazing amount of publicity and popularity lately. Seems EVERYONE is Twittering (Tweeting?). The official blog for Squidoo posted about using Twitter for your Squidoo lens promotion recently. This blog post also leads to a SquidU forum post where Fluffanutta gave some great tips for using Twitter.

I am PotPieGirl on Twitter – please feel free to follow me. However, lately there is not much to follow…lol!! I’m sure there are other great guides and blog posts out there regarding Twitter. If anyone knows of on, PLEASE share!

BlogCatalog

Ever since Jackies guest post here about BlogCatalog, I’ve been back in the social community trying to learn all about it. I have to admit, BlogCatalog is pretty darn cool. On my profile page at BlogCatalog, you can see a short description of me, a list of my blogs and latest posts, the other blogs I read and a bit about those that read my blog. There is also a place where other users can leave me a message and an area that shows my latest activity online (things I bookmark, Friends I’ve added, discussions I participated in, etc). Also, BlogCatalog lets you add a snazzy widget on your blog showcasing other BlogCatalog users that have visited this blog.

I’ve seen additional traffic from BlogCatalog and love the extra exposure. I also really like the exposure it gives to other blogs that I normally may not have found. While I don’t sign in near as often as I should, BlogCatalog is one social community that is on my list to pay more attention to and make part of my daily routine.

Online Social Communities – Summary

I have only listed two of many, many, MANY social communities online that you can participate in and increase not only exposure of your blog, but also increase your traffic, too. Social communities also allow fellow bloggers to form working relationships that can benefit both bloggers and increase traffic to both blogs.

All social communities are good and offer many benefits when used properly. However, I don’t think using ALL of the available social communities is good for any one blogger. I am trying to pick two or three that I participate in actively – and that’s it. As with business in REAL life, networking is good…..too much socialization is bad. I can see myself getting too distracted with each social community I become involved in.

Try and pick social communities that enhance your business. Surround yourself with people that you not only enjoy, but also have similar interests and blog topics that you have. You can feel comfortable that you are not only sharing information that the community will find useful, but you can also learn from fellow bloggers and enjoy their topics, too.