After a brief and informative argument with some entrenched users at Plime about blogging, self-promotion and rehashing (and plagiarism), I determined that they weren't really against bloggers at all. Even bloggers that self-promote. What they're really against is something I totally agree with them on: Posting solely to attract traffic and make money with Google Adsense (and other advertisers) without participating in any other way.While I'm very new to Plime, I enjoy reading, commenting and voting there much more than digg, reddit or any other social news sites. The users there don't vote you down just because they don't like what you post unless all you ever post is the stuff I mentioned above. If you're guilty, be prepared to be down-voted on a regular basis, if not blocked or banned altogether.
The advice I'm giving you here applies to Plime to be sure, but it also applies to the rest of the social news sites:
- Your content must be original and informative. The exception is when the original material is no longer easily found by standard searches. Still, you're much better off pointing to the original website instead of your own blog.
- Your content needs to be more than two paragraphs long. When there's more advertising in your blog post than there is content, it's really not worthy of submission. Why don't you save those words for another posting so that when you do submit, you have a lot more material?
- Do not submit plagiarized content or content copied directly from another blog, with or without attribution. Submit the original blog post instead, if it's that good. Plagiarizing and copying can get you in serious trouble, and your status on Plime will be the least of your problems.
Just so you know, I'm not picking on bloggers (I'm a blogger!). Rather, I'm picking on everyone who doesn't do what they should because other, non-bloggers are also guilty. They're just not as visible as we are and don't stand out so much.
I recommend you read Social Bookmarking Traffic Results. The part really stands out and applies to all of us is that social bookmarking to generate traffic does work as long as you are providing genuine, useful, good quality material. If you post self promotional spam no one will read it and it will disappear into the ether where all spam belongs.
Even if you follow all of my advice, you're still going to run into those users who hate blogs, for whatever reason, and absolutely abhor self-promoting bloggers. They are the minority, I assure you. In fact, I'm posting this on Plime and I'm absolutely positive I'll get flak over it. It will be a miracle if I do not. I'll add the link on Plime to this post, after it's posted, so that you can follow along in the comments.
The Plime link is here: http://www.plime.com/l/12122/1/
