Bring It All Together With Blog Catalog

A site that seems to be gaining popularity and users everyday is Blog Catalog. Like most other blog directories you can submit your blogs and have them commented on and rated. Much like MyBlogLog this site also keeps track of recent visitors and people who subscribe to your site. The real difference is that Blog Catalog breaks down ever site into two categories that you get to choose. This makes it so readers can easily find the exact kind of subjects that your site covers. You can also check out similar blogs to see how they compare to your own.

Blog Catalog is also a place where people can keep track of your activity on sites like Digg, Flickr, Stumbled Upon, Delicious, Reddit, Technorati, Magnolia and MyBlogLog through an "Activity Feed". This is a great way for all your fans to keep track of your activity on multiple sites! Just add in your user names into your profile and Blog Catalog takes care of the rest.

Unlike MyBlogLog, Blog Catalog is completely independent, MyBlogLog is now owned by Yahoo. This tends to make the site a bit more community oriented with a lot less spam. Personally, I like it a lot more than MyBlogLog, but that is just my personal opinion. Not too mention, I have seen a lot more traffic in Google Analytics coming in through Blog Catalog!



Blog Catalog also has widgets that you can embed on your website to keep track of recent visitors, new members of your neighborhood (website), and even a recent discussions widget which will help you keep track of all that is going on in the Blog Catalog community. You can see an example on the sidebar of this page under "Blog Catalog Fans".

So if you are looking for more traffic to your site and a feeling of community look no further that Blog Catalog! You can sign up here or check out my profile here, don't forget to sign up for all my communities when you get a chance. I know there is a lot, but what can I say : )

Looking for more ways to Promote Your Site? First thing is first, you need to submit your websites to all the major search engines, click here to learn how!

The Importance Of Tags

A simple, but sometimes overlooked way to promote your site is to use tags. Most blogs like blogger let you add tags to each of your posts. Tags are general terms that help describe your post. For instance, if you have a post all about photography you could have tags like photos, photography, pictures, tips, ect.

When you use these tags over and over again you can click on the tag, and it will bring up every post that had that particular tag in it. This can also be useful if you want to submit multiple posts to a place like digg, netscape and corank.

Plus, all kinds of other sites let you add tags to your submissions. Tags not only allow people and search engines to find your content easier, but they can also help you organize your site. I don't know how many times I have been looking for a certain post and had to click on a tag to even find it!

This is one of the basics, but it is very, very important if you are looking to drive more traffic to your site. So don't forget to add your tags to all your posts...

Sorry for the big delay in between posting... I have been quite busy with my other sites!

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...

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!

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!

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.

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 : )

Reddit And Netscape Better Than Digg?

So I am sure you heard about how I made it big on digg.com, so I decided to search out sites that were similar to digg. The two sites that I see that have the most promise are reddit and netscape, yes I said netscape. I was surprise to find out the old netscape is rising from the dead and is looking quite a bit like digg. In fact the only real difference I see between the two of them is that netscape has a lot less users. Reddit on the other hand is a very primitive site, but still has the potential to draw traffic to your site. In Reddit you simply submit the url of the page and nothing else, not even a description. Since there is no description at all your headline becomes very very important. So got out into the brave new world and submit your stories/article to digg, reddit, and netscape and watch the traffic pour in... By the way, I had even more success with digg when I submitted this story, watch out though it appears to be a very dangerous topic, but it did get over 2000 diggs...

Using Digg.com To Generate Traffic

So I finally hit it big on digg.com, I have been posting there for a while and I would get a few diggs, but nothing like this. First let me give you a little background of what digg is. Basically, digg.com is a site where users can submit their articles/videos about anything from politics to comedy. Once it is submitted users can "digg" them or bury them if they so choose. The site keeps track of all the diggs that you get on your article/video. The more diggs you have the more chance you have of making it on the main "popular stories" part of digg. You see when you first submit the story it goes into a "upcoming stories" section of digg, then once you receive many diggs they upgrade you to the "popular stories" part of digg. Once you make it there you can sit back and watch the traffic jump, it was really amazing.

When my story made it I had over 12,000 hits in one day alone, which is pretty impressive for sites like mine that are still in their infancy and don't have any real page rank. You can see all of my stories that I submitted to digg here and you can see the story that gave me the 12,000 hits here.

The beauty of digg is that the stories are chosen by the viewers and not some editor so everyone has a chance of making it big. So what are you waiting for go sign up and starting digging, it is a great way to promote your site. Who knows maybe this article will be the next to make it big... hmmm diggers digging a site about digg, I guess it makes sense.