Leave Your Mark In This World With Trailfire

A great way to promote your site and organize your favorite websites is to use the site Trailfire. Basically, this site allows you to leave comments on any webpage out there in cyberspace. It also lets you see what other Trailfire users thought of that page by viewing their marks on the page. You can create as many trails as you like, but the idea is to try and keep your trails relevant to a certain subject like photography, videos, politics, games, current events or whatever else you can think of!



You can also use Trailfire as a way to show the world all of your favorite sites or blogs. This way when an individual discovers your trail they can follow your marks from one to the next. As you can imagine this is a great way to not only promote your sites, but it can also be another way to get feedback from other users. An added bonus is that it keeps people on your network of sites longer as they follow your trail.

Trailfire allows you to install a toolbar so you can easily add marks to any page with just one click. So go check it out today and start discovering new trails and marks on your favorite pages that you never even knew existed. You can check out my trails here. Don't forget to add me as a contact if you like and let me know if you have any questions...

Discover Amazing Photos And Get Traffic At The Same Time!

I just started up a site called PhotoRater where you can submit, vote and comment on photos from your websites or blogs. Although the site is just getting started, it is still yet another way to get a bit of traffic to your site and check out some amazing photos at the same time. There are several different categories of photos to choose from including black & white, nature, plants, sun, water, amateur, people, buildings, professional and vanishing points!
It runs through the site corank which if you are not aware of is a lot like digg only you can design and create your own pages to vote on... very cool! You can even build your own site like mine as well and share it if you like.

You can check out PhotoRater and the following address...

http://photorater.corank.com

Feel free to sign up if you like and start submitting your photos! Let me know if you have any questions or problems signing up...

How To Have Users Subscribe To Your Site

Another tip for all you die-hard bloggers is to make it possible for your readers to subscribe to your blog through a RSS feed. Now if you are using blogger you already have an RSS feed, you just need to make it more accessible for your readers. It should be at the bottom of you last post and say something like "Subscribe to: Posts (atom)" The "Posts (atom)" is a link, just right click on this link and hit "copy link location".

Now go to you blogger layout and add a page element like you normally would. Select a text page element and simply type in what you want to call your subscription. For instance "Subscribe To Promoting Your Site Here!" you can see mine at the top right hand corner of this blog. Then you just make the text a link and bamm your users can now subscribe to your posts!

This way not only do you keep more users, but it allows all your subscribers to know when you have updated your page! Let me know if you have any questions or problems...

How To Submit Your Website

The first and one of the most important steps in promoting your site is simply submitting your website address to the big three of search engines, MSN, Yahoo and of course Google. It is actually quite easy and all but Yahoo don't even require any kind of registration!

To submit your website or blog to Google just click here, for Yahoo click here and for MSN or Bing click here! Once you have submitted your site it may take a couple weeks before these search engines will crawl your site, but trust me it is worth the wait.

Once you are indexed you will begin to see traffic trickling in from these three search engines. If you are familiar with our site then you know you can track this through Google Analytics. It shows up in the traffic sources section of Analytics. They will show up as Google Organic, Yahoo Organic and MSN Organic. You can even take it a step further and find out what people are typing into these search engines to find your site!

Some of the other search engines including ask.com do not offer site submissions and are a bit more secretive about how they crawl their sites. Your best bet on that is to follow their sitemap protocol which you can find here.

So what are you waiting for go submit your sites today and watch the traffic flow! As always here at Promoting Your Site let me know if you have any questions.

Did My Sites Deserve To Get Banned From Digg?

Well this kinda happened all at once.... I am not sure if it was just the case of a few people ganging up on all my sites or if I actually deserved to be banned from the social phenomenon that is digg.com. As some of you may know I do operate quite a few different blogs and each one of them made it to the front page at least once if not a bunch of times in certain cases. Now I know a lot of people on digg are anti-blog, but really it is no different than any other site out there on the Internet. Check out the list of banned sites and tell me what you think...

World's Funniest Videos
Human Element
Nothing But Videos
Growing Growing Gone
Are We Overheating?

I e-mailed digg and ask when these sites would be re-instated and they told me they would never be. Is this fair? If people didn't like these sites then why would they make it to the front page time after time? Just look at this long list of articles that made it here!

As you may know I have been a big advocate of digg and I would include a digg button in most of my posts. I guess I just don't understand... what are your thoughts?

Is CoRank The Next Social Phenomenon?

Corank is a site that I have run across lately that seems to be yet another great way to promote your website it will get at least a few more eyes on your hard work. For all of you familiar with the site Digg you will get the hang of this real quick!

It essentially works the same way as users get to submit and vote on stories/articles. The only real difference is that you get to choose your sources for the articles. This way you filter out a lot of the junk on sites like Digg and you get your own personalized spam free front page. Another slight difference from the mighty Digg is that you simply vote if the story is interesting or just "not for me", they also give you the feature to save stories. Of course, no social news site would be complete without the comment feature and Corank is no exception to the rule.

It is on a much smaller scale then digg, but it seems to be growing at a nice clip and every link to your site counts so what are you waiting for? You can go sign up here or you can view my Corank profile here. Don't forget to add me as a source if you like... enjoy!

Spicypage Takes Another Step Towards Becoming The Next Digg

For those of you who haven't heard of Spicypage you will be soon. Just recently they released a feature to submit individual articles on the site in addition to the entire website or blog. The major difference is that the articles that you submit are not voted on like digg, but are just sorted by the number of views. You can still vote for the site that the article came from though, so it seems to be a win-win for the author of the site/article!

Spicypage has also added a group feature to the site. This can be another way to promote your website or blog. All you need to do is start a group that revolves around your site. People can join your group and give you feedback on your content, design, ect.

While the site is nowhere near Digg just yet, it is gaining popularity and has a much better layout and more options then Digg gives you. So if you haven't signed up already now is the time... you can learn more about Spicypage here! You can sign up here or view my profile here!

Stumbling Through The Internet

A fun way to promote your website or blog is to submit your content to the website Stumbled Upon. This site is a bit different from any of the other social networking sites out there and seems to be snowballing around the Internet. Basically, as with all other sites the first thing to do is to sign up. Once you do that you should begin to edit your profile, avatar picture, interests, personal info ect. Stumbled upon will download a toolbar that works with Firefox or Internet Explorer which is great for submitting sites, seeing what your friends are stumbling, keeping track of your favorites and for finding new and interesting sites.

Now is also a good time to tell stumbled upon what kind of topics you would like to see. This way you filter out most of the junk that you just don't care about! That is the real beauty of Stumbled Upon! If you are a fan of the next blog button on blogger you will certainly love this as the content tends to be of a higher quality and less spam. For example if you are interested in photography and science then you can choose only to view photography and science sites. Very, very useful as it narrows down the sites you are looking for quite well.

Like other social networking sites it also has groups, friends, networks, forums, and it also saves all of your favorites much like delicious. It acts like a one stop shop for all your social networking needs.

The website Stumbled Upon is also a great way to try and target your exact audience for your website or blog. For instance if you have a site all about poetry you can submit it to Stumbled Upon under the poetry section and watch the targeted traffic roll in. It blew my mind when I saw all the different topics to choose from on the site! Like most other social networking sites, the more people that like the site the more it will be shown.

The site is growing everyday and I have seen the traffic results myself in Analytics. So go sign up and start Stumbling today. You can view my profile here or you can get started here.

Drive Traffic To Your Site With Photos

Do you enjoy taking photos? Do you want to showcase your work and drive traffic to your site? The Nature's Wallpaper network of sites can help... Just send us an e-mail with the picture you would like to have displayed along with a link to the site of your choice. We will take care of the rest!

Soon you will see your picture displayed on one of the sites and the link to the site you requested directly under the pic. We will then e-mail you to see if you would like any changes to be made. Here are the three different sites your work could be displayed on...

The Blog

The Page

The Original

Now sit back and relax your job is done! You can now track the traffic coming in through Analytics or any other tracking program.

Here are some of the sites that are already participating...

A New Day
Norpas
Amazing Stuff
Photoholics Anonymous
Brownies For Breakfast
Better Than MTV
Lynda Walldez

As you can see your site doesn't need to be a photography site, it is all up to you. So what are you waiting for... send Nature's Wallpaper your photos and start driving traffic to your site!

Return The Favor With Technorati

Technorati is a site I have been using for quite some time now... It is somewhat like Mybloglog as you can submit all of your blogs and other individuals can "favorite" your blogs. This allows your fans to track your newer posts, each time they login to Technorati it displays to them all of the recent posts from the sites that they have made there "favorites." This makes for a great way to keep an eye on all of the blogs that interest you or your readers. You can skim through the latest titles of all your favorite blogs all in one place till you find something that catches your eye.

The part that I really like about Technorati though is that once you have submitted all of your blogs, Technorati tracks all of the people that have linked to your blog automatically! This is very useful tool because this allows you to see who took the time to link to your sites, and it helps you to return the favor if you so choose by linking back to their blog. Not only that, but you can sort these links by date or by "authority", which allows you to see the most "powerful/important" links to your site as well. This site also gives you your blog rank which can be a good thing to keep an eye on and will increase with each link to your site.

There are many, many other tools that Technorati offers like Tags, Blog Search, and WTF as well. What is your favorite part of Technorati? Did I miss any useful tools? Let me know, and if you still haven't signed up for Technorati you can here or you can check out my profile here!

Time To Say Thanks Again

Well I figured it was about that time again... I just want to tell everyone that has commented, visited or linked to my sites a big THANKS!!!!

And in no particular order

My View Of It who actually just link to Are We Overheating about 5 minutes ago... I do appreciate you helping to spread the word : )

Serenity Quest who has link to this very blog, and certainly has a way with words... Thanks for all your help and keep on entertaining and informing us all!

My View On The News this individual just linked to three of my blogs... unfortunately I cannot speak German if that is in fact what this sites language is... none the less they obviously have great tastes...

Photoholics Anonymous this is a project that I am working on with another photographer and I just want to give props...

My Quest To Make Money On The Internet sounds very tempting doesn't it... go ahead and take a look... They have linked to this blog and google power and I certainly appreciate it!

Talk Vids who is another recent linker to my nothing but videos site... Thanks and I wish your site the best of luck!

Brownies For Breakfast good old Texas Dave check out his growing number of blogs... I believe this one was the first!

I am sure I forgot a TON of people and for that I do apologize... Let me know in a comment and I will be happy to feature you in the next post.

THANKS AGAIN TO EVERYONE!!!!

Simply Del.icio.us

Another great way to help promote your site is to use the site del.icio.us, especially if you have multiple sites/blogs. This is one of the original sites that started to use "social bookmarking." This simply means you post your bookmarks/articles and share them with people in your network on del.icio.us. This might not seem like much, but it is a great way to get a few eyes on your work.

Delicious also keeps track of all the people that bookmark your posts, so you can check out their work/bookmarks as well, and best of all you can access these bookmarks anywhere in the world from any computer. Like a lot of other sites nowadays Delicious uses tags, so you can easily sort your bookmarks. For example, "blog" or "photography" or "funny" or "scary" could all be useful tags. They are a great way to help organize your website/blog and these bookmarks as well.

My favorite part of Delicious though is the "linkrolls." This is a very useful tool if you have multiple blogs like me. Basically, it is a list of the most recent posts to Delicious from any blog/site. You can add these linkrolls to any of your sites, Delicious writes the HTML for you all you need to do is cut and paste it into your template. You can see an example here below this post on this blog or here very near the bottom. This is a great way to promote all of your posts from different sites in one handy dandy list that is automatically updated every time you post another bookmark. Pretty cool! Plus you can also direct people to other sites besides your own that you think will interest your viewers. This is a great way to keep your links looking fresh and new and help cross promote your sites. So go check it out and start keeping viewers on your network of sites longer. Sign-up here or you can check out my delicious profile here.

Track Visitors To Your Website Or Blog With Analytics

Now that we have explored a few ways to promote your website or blog, you might be wondering if all of your hard work is really paying off. Well, if you aren't using any tracking software yet, my recommendation would be to use Google Analytics. It is very easy to use, and has more information about your visitors then you would ever dream. To get started you need to sign up for this FREE service. If you already have a google account you can use this to sign in or if not all you need is an e-mail address to get your Analytics account.


Once you have signed up you need to "create a website profile." Analytics will ask you for the URL (website address) of the site. For example, this site would be promotingyoursite.blogspot.com yours could be www.yoursite.com Once you have entered the address you will need to choose your location and time zone. Then you would click the "finish" button and wham, Google produces a little piece of HTML (website code) near the bottom of the screen. All you need to do now is copy and paste this HTML into your site.

If you are using blogger you need to go to your template and hit the edit HTML button. Then scroll down all the way to the bottom of the code... you should see < /body>. You want to paste the code directly before this < /body> and save the template.

Now back in Analytics hit the done button, this will bring you back to the main page. You should see your site listed here followed by "Tracking Not Install" and "Check Status." You want to click on the "check status" link. If you installed your HTML correctly Analytics will tell you that "Tracking has been installed" and "Waiting For Data." Congratulations, you will now be able to track every visitor to your site.

Please note you need to wait a couple hours before you will see results. So when you log back in just hit the view reports link and this will take you to all the information that has been collected from your visitors. This includes, but is not limited to the number of visitors, page views, new/returning, geo location (city/state/country), length and depth of visit, top entry/exit points, referring sources, what people are typing into search engines to find your site... I could go on and on, but that sounds like another post.

You can track up to 50 sites for free!!! What are you waiting for go sign-up here or you can read even more about Google Analytics here.

Is That A Spicy Page?

Ok, so you have heard of Digg, Netscape and Reddit but have you ever heard of Spicypage.com? Chances are you haven't just yet, but the site is really starting to gain traction. Spicypage works in a lot of the same ways that digg does. Users vote on content whether it is a thumbs up or thumbs down and can comment on the sites as well. The part that I really like about Spicypage is that it is the entire website or blogs that is voted on, not just an article from a site. Users of this site can also submit websites that they do not own or operate like google, yahoo, or youtube, all three are all ready in the top 100 list on the site. Spicypage also has the social aspect to it like mybloglog! You can send messages to one another and gain "friends" through the site as well. Now like I said in the beginning, this place is just getting started so now is the best time to submit your content (less competition.) So what is it that you are waiting for go sign up and start voting... you can sign up here or you can view my profile here. Tell them the 1greenthumb sent you : )

Mybloglog The Social Traffic Exchange

Mybloglog.com is another useful way to promote your sites with a nice social twist to it. Basically, you sign up first, then I would suggest adding your different blogs/sites to your profile. Once you hit the "Add site" button Mybloglog will take a snap shot of your site, you then add in a description and you are all set. Your site is now called a community according to mybloglog.



People then can sign up for your "community" and become readers/fans of your site. They track all of the people that sign up for your sites so you can also visit their blogs and check out who is in fact looking at your website or blog. You can also post messages to users or just to their communities, this is were the social aspect of it comes in. You can actually put a face to these blogs that you are reading. They also have widgets available that you can add into your sites to track stats on your sites including links in and out and the number of readers on your site!

As you may know though it was just bought by Yahoo so I hope they don't mess up a good thing... while I am still relatively new to Mybloglog I can already see serious results in Google Analytics! So what are you waiting for you can sign up here or you can check out my profile here.